Sat.Jun 09, 2012 - Fri.Jun 15, 2012

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Entrepreneurs: Don’t Quit Your Real Job Too Early

Startup Professionals Musings

Many entrepreneurs I know feel guilty about not quitting their day job when initiating their startup, worrying about not giving their all to an employer, juggling the multiple roles, or even a legal conflict of interest. I’ll try to offer some guidelines to address these issues, but I generally recommend you keep the day job until your new company is producing real revenue.

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Why Native Apps May Not Be Our Mobile Future

YoungUpstarts

by Alex Kutsishin, President of FiddleFly, Inc. In the apps vs. mobile web debate, the answer is clear. In the tradition of all new technology, its application promises men and women more free time, higher levels of understanding, and an incredibly exciting new way to look at and listen to the world. I’ve always found the quote above fascinating, as it so well sums up the impact new technologies can have on how society interacts with new technology.

Mobile 154
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6 Skills Every Startup Team Needs

ReadWriteStart

So many tech startups begin the same way: One founder, one dream and a plan to make it happen. Most businesses stay that way - there are many more solo entrepreneurs than business owners with employees. But to succeed, most startups need a much broader set of skills and experience. If you intend to build a scalable business, you know you can’t do it alone.

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The Curse of Over-Capitalization

K9 Ventures

I’ve written before about how Capital Efficiency doesn’t exist and is an oxymoron. However, there is an important corollary to the non-existence of Capital Efficiency and that is The Curse of Over Capitalization. Some days in Silicon Valley it feels like there are more investors than there are entrepreneurs. And there absolutely are more investors than there are good deals.

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Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in

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Some more (refined) thoughts on focus

The Equity Kicker

Earlier this week I blogged Some thoughts on focus quoting from former Apple exec Adam Lashinsky to make the point that many startups would benefit by focusing more, and concluding that unless a team feels real pain from the potential lost opportunity of projects that haven’t made the cut then it probably isn’t focusing enough. Rait Ojasaar replied with a great comment which expanded my thinking on this point.

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100 Smart Ways To Invest Your Time When You’re Unemployed

YoungUpstarts

Unemployment can strike unexpectedly and leave you feeling frustrated, stressed out, and upset. Yet it doesn’t have to be an entirely bad experience. Aside from the financial woes it might create, unemployment can sometimes be a blessing in disguise, helping you take care of things you’ve been putting off, building career skills, or even pushing you in a totally new direction in life — that is, if you choose to use your time away from the workplace wisely.

More Trending

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The Curse of Over-Capitalization

K9 Ventures

I’ve written before about how Capital Efficiency doesn’t exist and is an oxymoron. However, there is an important corollary to the non-existence of Capital Efficiency and that is The Curse of Over Capitalization. Some days in Silicon Valley it feels like there are more investors than there are entrepreneurs. And there absolutely are more investors than there are good deals.

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How to Create a Total Online Presence When You Really Don’t Have the Time

Duct Tape Marketing

As marketing your business online continues to evolve it’s become essential to look at how you view your online presence in a global, integrated and strategic manner. Ernst Vikne via Flickr. From this view, I believe you can gain the greatest coverage with the least amount of chasing your tail. I believe there’s a bit of a hierarchy to what must be done first and by adhering to this loose order you’ll always know what comes next.

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What To Do If Your Site Needs Surgery

YoungUpstarts

By Joe Thomas, Left Brain Digital. … So the guy stands there with his mouth agape and says, “But Doc, why do you have to operate on my foot? The splinter is in my finger!” Why am I leading off with a punch line? Because it applies to about 80 percent of people who can’t figure out why their website doesn’t “work.”. Pretend your website is the patient in my half-a-joke.

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New San Diego VC Firm Emerges as ‘The Moneyball of Venture Capital’ | Xconomy

www.xconomy.com

Subscribe for Free. Xconomy San Diego. Our Cities ▾ Boston ›. Ministry of Supply Puts MIT Engineering Cred Into Dress Shirts. View More in Boston ›. Detroit ›. Sakti3 Founder Sastry to Step Down From U-M. View More in Detroit ›. New York ›. Q&A: Group Commerce Plans Hires, European Growth with $21M Funding. View More in New York › ›. San Diego ›.

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The new talent war

deal architect

As Apple convenes its developer conference in San Francisco, it is a good reminder on the new war for talent between Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, RIM and others. In my new book, I devoted a chapter to these new ecosystems.

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Even Startups Can’t Innovate Without a Process

Startup Professionals Musings

Most entrepreneurs I know are individually very innovative, but a successful startup can’t be a one-man show (for long). That means they need to build an innovative team, which is not a skill that most people are born with. In fact, some very innovative individuals, known as ‘idea people’ or inventors, often end up creating the most dysfunctional teams.

Startup 253
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Five Sites Reputation Management Experts Fear

YoungUpstarts

by Kent Campbell, SEO expert and founder of InternetReputationManagement. com. They’re here. The sites that even your genius SEO guy and tech savvy PR team are often powerless against. Unmanaged, these sites can sink your company online. Here’s my top five (actually eight) villainous sites for businesses looking to protect their precious online reputations.

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When do I *stop* doing customer interviews and start writing code?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Robert Graham of WhiteTail Software (and this awesome guest post on cold calling ) asks: @whitetailsoft When do you stop #custdev efforts and build the product? I’ve been wrestling with the details of #leanstartup. (from his blog post ) …some civil engineers think the world of project management in their field is ripe for revolution, but do I know enough of them?

Customer 252
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Making a Dent in the Universe – Results from the NSF I-Corps

Steve Blank

Our goal teaching for the National Science Foundation was to make a dent in the universe. Could we actually teach tenured faculty how to turn an idea into a company? And if we did, could it change their lives? We can now answer these questions. Hell yes. ———– The Lean LaunchPad class for the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Lean 248
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7 Attributes of a True Entrepreneur, Young or Old

Startup Professionals Musings

To be an entrepreneur, you have to be navigate lots of unknowns, and the path is fraught with risk. Once you are past a certain mental age, you know too many of the things that can go wrong, so you never start. Sort of like the old saying that if we didn’t have young men to fight our wars, we could achieve world peace in no time. People who are young, or young at heart, don’t know all the negatives, or don’t worry about them.

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Taking Service To The Stratosphere: 12 Keys To Creating Uplifting Service In Today’s Marketplace

YoungUpstarts

By Ron Kaufman, author of “ Uplifting Service: The Proven Path to Delighting Your Customers, Colleagues, and Everyone Else You Meet ”. You step off the plane, weary from a long flight. As you walk through the terminal, you can’t believe your eyes. The airport is immaculate with walkways as wide as roadways and not a speck of litter anywhere. As you move deeper into the terminal, you see a butterfly garden, an outdoor swimming pool, playground equipment, a four-story slide, napping rooms, spa tre

Singapore 147
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Can the enterprise keep a secret?

deal architect

Paul Sweeney has been tweeting a question I raised earlier this week. Can Enterprise Software (or enterprise technology in general) point to examples like the iPhone which apparently caught RIM, Microsoft and other competitors by surprise and took them years.

Software 231
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3 P’s to PR Success

Rembrandt Communications

While many new entrepreneurs still think “PR” means “press release” instead of “public relations,” or that public relations is all about sending out press releases, this is only a small part of the big picture. Today, public relations represents getting your message out to the right people at the right time in the right format… [.].

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10 Realities, Risks, and Rewards of a Startup Role

Startup Professionals Musings

Making the decision to become an entrepreneur is a major commitment, with huge implications for skills and lifestyle. Yet there is no standardized testing or certification required or available anywhere to help you decide if you are a good fit for entrepreneurship, or entrepreneurship is right for you. An MBA or other academic credentials just don’t do it.

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[Singapore][Event] Day 2 Of ad:tech Singapore 2012 Shows Mobile Promise

YoungUpstarts

The first day of ad:tech Singapore 2012 gave digital marketers and industry observers a glimpse of the continued growth of the role of technology and digital media in marketing and advertising in the Asia Pacific. The second day, however, seemed to hover over one particular aspect of that digital future – mobile. For sure, mobile adoption is growing by leaps and bounds – be it mobile commerce or mobile advertising (Yahoo!

Singapore 145
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Books aint music?

deal architect

In the 2005 parody of the music industry, Be Cool, the Harvey Keitel character indignantly points out he cannot lose one of his artists “A – she’s under contract B – she’s under contract” If the movie were made today.

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5+ Ways Entrepreneurs are Different from Everyone Else

ReadWriteStart

Successful entrepreneurs are really smart. Just look at Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, guys who could get a lobotomy and still do your math homework. But intelligence is not the defining characteristic of successful entrepreneurship. Instead, the secret is a more prosaic quality: good old-fashioned stick-to-itiveness. That’s the conclusion reached by Carol Tice , author of How They Started: How 25 Good Ideas Became Great Companies.

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5 Reasons a Startup Mentor Need Not Be Your Friend

Startup Professionals Musings

Friends tell you what you want to hear. Mentors tell you what you need to hear. When the message is the same from both, you don’t need the mentor anymore. In that sense, you should think of a mentor more like your advisor who has done all he can. You always need the friend. Also don’t confuse a business mentor with a business coach. A mentor’s aim is to teach you what to do and how, in specific situations, unlike a coach who helps you develop your generic skills for deciding what to do and how.

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10 Hidden Reasons Why You Might Hate Your Job

YoungUpstarts

Do you grudgingly roll out of bed each morning, downing cup after cup of coffee in an attempt to work up the motivation to head to work? While this might be the reality for many out there, it certainly doesn’t have to be, nor should it be. There are a variety of reasons why you might not be thrilled to go to work in the morning and most of them are pretty obvious, from a bad boss to grating coworkers to feeling like you’re at a dead end.

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Throwback analysis

deal architect

I loved this Curt Monash update on Workday. Fittingly I saw it courtesy of Naomi Bloom, another market watcher who can talk object models and multi-tenancy architectures all day long. They remind me of colleagues in the 90s at Gartner.

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It’s Hard To Tell Someone They Suck

Feld Thoughts

I discovered Josh Breinlinger’s blog this morning via a tweet from @stefanobernardi. I added it to the Ask the VC blogroll , read carefully through his post VCs are liars. And so am I , and declared it the VC post of the day. And – Josh is right – it’s super hard to say “you suck” or “your team sucks” as a reason for passing.

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Can we see the beginning of a post app era?

The Equity Kicker

I read in the Financial Times this morning that application downloads to iPhones have been falling for the past couple of months. I was surprised and excited by this data in equal measure which, if true and is the beginning of a trend, heralds an important shift in the way we use our mobile phones. I started by doing some digging on the web and it turns out that the data comes from a mobile app advertising business called Fiksu, who recently released a bunch of data on mobile app downloads and m

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[Video] TED Talk: Startups Aren’t Just For California

YoungUpstarts

Elizabeth Edwards, author of “ Startup: The Complete Handbook for Launching a Company for Less ” ( our review of the book here ), recently presented a talk at TEDxXavierUniversity about startups and venture funding. Without going too much into details of the talk – you should really just watch the video for yourself – Edwards share on the following: 1.

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Ive heard this life is overrated

deal architect

….But I hope that it gets better as we go…. 3 Doors Down is coming to town this weekend and I have always found their “Here with you” both depressing and inspiring about the lonely life on the road. Kudos.

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How to walk away from not-so-good people in your life

Life Beyond Code

Would your life be better if you were able to walk away from all the not-so-good people in your life? I have asked this question to many people and the answer is mostly, “Yes.” It seems like a rhetorical question. That seems to be the quest for many people and probably you too – to find ways of walking away from not-so-good people in your life.

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The Cost Equation for a Startup is Better Than Ever

Gust

I come from a high-tech software background, and only a few years ago, it would cost at least a million dollars ($1M) for a team of professionals to produce any commercial software product. Now, with open source software components, and low-cost development tools, the same job can be done by one good hacker for a few thousand dollars. Even for low-tech startups, the scope of information available on the Internet, and its global reach, has had a similar financial impact on the many other challeng

Cost 139
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Resumonk – Create, Beautify And Share Your CV In Minutes

YoungUpstarts

My wife works in Human Resources and she constantly complains of having to go through stacks of ugly resumes. Of course, she isn’t referring to the profile photos that sometimes accompanies those curriculum vitaes but how badly put together some of those resumes can be. Well, here’s a web application that may help some of those people - Resumonk ( www.resumonk.com ) is a simple and easy-to-use online resume builder that puts together a professional-looking resume in a matter of minu

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Workdays Customer Bill of Rights

deal architect

I like Workday’s 10 reasons to work with them. They don't call it a customer bill of rights but in many ways it is their commitment to their customers.

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What’s It Like To Be An Entrepreneur?

Feld Thoughts

I get asked some version of this question, often in the form of “I’m thinking about becoming an entrepreneur”, every day. It’s awesome to me that lots of people are asking this question but it’s really hard to answer with a simple, short response. I’ve been pointing people at a number of resources to help them get a feel for what being an entrepreneur is like and two that I’m involved in top the list.

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Startup Talent Wars: Why You Can’t Be Like Steve Jobs

ReadWriteStart

Steve Jobs was not a people person. When in a rotten mood - which apparently was often - he’d storm around Apple reducing employees to tears. But he was Steve Jobs. And you’re not. Today’s startup founders are learning that hiring and keeping the best talent may be the most important ingredient for success. That’s the eye-opening conclusion found in ReadWriteWeb’s exclusive new special report, “ The Talent Wars.”.