Sat.Mar 05, 2011 - Fri.Mar 11, 2011

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Eight Key Problems Every Startup Should Anticipate

Startup Professionals Musings

Starting a business is a lot like starting a marriage. At first, all parties are in dreamland, with a vision of changing the world, having lots of fun, and raking in the profits. But all too soon, reality sets in. Product development is stuck at that 90% mark, a key person leaves, and customers are talking but not buying. In his book Reality Check , Guy Kawasaki summarizes some of the key issues.

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A New Way to Teach Entrepreneurship – The Lean LaunchPad at Stanford: Class 1

Steve Blank

For the past three months, we’ve run an experiment in teaching entrepreneurship. In January, we introduced a new graduate course at Stanford called the " target="_blank">Lean LaunchPad. It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots.

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Does Moore’s Law Suddenly Matter Less?

Feld Thoughts

A post in the New York Times this morning asserted that Software Progress Beats Moore’s Law. It’s a short post, but the money quote is from Ed Lazowska at the University of Washington: “The rate of change in hardware captured by Moore’s Law, experts agree, is an extraordinary achievement. “But the ingenuity that computer scientists have put into algorithms have yielded performance improvements that make even the exponential gains of Moore’s Law look trivial,” said Edward Lazows

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Twitter Link Roundup #77 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

crowdSPRING Blog

Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

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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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The Difference Between Mo Ibrahim and Mo Gaddafi

Growthink Blog

Last week I flagged the shocking and even depressing statistics that most entrepreneurs - holding constant for socioeconomic factors - make less money, work more hours and suffer more work-related stress - than their employed counterparts. And when we combine these statistics with those that show a very incredibly low percentage of startups and small businesses ever attaining meaningful profitability, it is remarkable that people ever dream to be entrepreneurs and start businesses at all.

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How should I finance my new venture? - Startups and angels: Along.

Tim Keane

'Startups and angels: Along the way to success. By Tim Keane, Angel Investor, Golden Angels Investors, LLC. Home. Archives. Profile. Subscribe. « Leaving a Trail | Main. | How to prepare a sales forecast for a business plan » March 09, 2011. How should I finance my new venture? It’s a deceptively simple question:  what is the optimal way to finance a new startup?

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I Quit My Job And Lived To Tell

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

I’d like to introduce you to Nacie Carson , who a few years ago took the leap, leaving the perceived safety of full time employment to become an entrepreneur. She has since built up a client base and worked hard to establish an online brand that has paid dividends. Like many of us, Nacie has strived to establish online income streams as close to passive when possible, derived from her abilities as a writer.

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A Quick, Practical, Business Plan for a Blog

Up and Running

Tweet I caught a guest post on Problogger the other day, where Kelly Watson of onewomanmarketing.com explains How to Make a Blogging Business Plan … Whether or Not it’s a Business Blog. Kelly takes good principles of business planning and breaks out of the business plan recipe mold, aiming instead for the kind of planning that becomes management, and steering the business.

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Four New Types of CIO for the Future

www.readwriteweb.com

ReadWriteEnterprise ReadWriteWeb Channels ReadWriteStart ReadWriteBiz ReadWriteEnterprise ReadWriteCloud ReadWriteHack ReadWriteMobile International ReadWriteBrazil ReadWriteChina ReadWriteFrance ReadWriteSpain ReadWriteEnterprise All Posts Archives Featured Resource Center RSS Twitter Facebook Four New Types of CIO for the Future By Klint Finley / March 3, 2011 5:15 PM / 1 Comments Tweet Hacker News Share & Save Find solutions specific to your industry or business needs at the Qwest Busines

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I’m sticking with Disqus. Here’s Why

Both Sides of the Table

I’ve written before about my love for Disqus. I’m not an investor – I just love the product. So now Facebook has a new commenting system. They’ve been around for a while and when they first announced this initiative I knew the day would come when people would start saying, “should I replace Disqus?&# I started telling people privately that I thought Google should buy Disqus for the same reasons Facebook wants to own commenting in the first place.

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Reengineering Work: Obliterate AND Automate

deal architect

I have been invited to moderate a customer panel on next-gen BPO at the Cognizant Community event next week. The theme of the conference is “The Future of Work”. When I look at the wide range of industries represented on.

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Entrepreneurs Need Fewer Hot Ideas and More Plans

Startup Professionals Musings

Based on my own experience and feedback from friends, every investor is approached by at least ten entrepreneurs with a “hot idea” for a new business, for every one who has a real “plan” for a new business. That’s why I often say that ideas are worth nothing, until they are put in the context of a business plan and real people committed to executing the plan.

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Ways to bootstrap a startup: “working in waves”

joel.is

joel.is Lessons shared by Joel Gascoigne , a fledgling entrepreneur and contract web developer currently based in Birmingham, UK. my creations dev experience recommended videos my card Ways to bootstrap a startup: “working in waves&# 5th December 2010 • Comments I’ve spent the last year and a half after graduating from the University of Warwick juggling working on startups and working as a contract web developer.

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Ten Predictions for 2030

Seeing Both Sides

I spent this weekend with my two sons in Ft Myers, Florida as part of our annual pilgrimmage to the Red Sox spring training camp. While not chasing after foul balls (thanks, Youk!) and autographs, we spent some time talking about what the future might look like. We ended up making a provocative list of what we called “10, 2030” – ten predictions for the year 2030.

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Enterprise Deja Vu

deal architect

I am enjoying In-Memory Data Management- An Inflexion Point for Enterprise Applications – SAP kindly sent me an advance copy of the book by Dr. Hasso Plattner and Alexander Zeier. I am also watching Vishal Sikka, SAP’s CTO present this.

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Entrepreneurs, Manage Yourself, Then Your Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

People who can’t manage their own lives don’t make good entrepreneurs. Small businesses require multi-tasking, work prioritization, and decision-making, with no entourage of assistants and specialists. That’s why Fortune 500 executives usually don’t survive as startup CEOs. First you have to learn to accept total responsibility for things that happen to your business, just like you are responsible for everything in your personal life.

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6 critical tips for launching a startup while holding a day job | VentureBeat

venturebeat.com

VentureBeat Interpreting Innovation VentureBeat Profiles Events Jobs Videos Newsletters Entrepreneur Corner Mobile App Spotlight Main MobileBeat Android iPhone smartphones iPad tablets GreenBeat electric cars Solar electric vehicles biofuels Smart Grid GamesBeat social games Android CityVille iPhone Farmville DealsBeat cloud computing enterprise Venture Capital Social Media CRM DemoBeat DEMO DEMO Spring 2011 Android social iPad SocialBeat iPhone Android DEMO Social Media DEMO Spring 2011 MediaBe

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How To Score 30 Minutes With Me

Feld Thoughts

Long ago I concluded that life is just a video game. We fly on airplanes to get mileage points so we can get free stuff and or level up to get more priority. We used to get green stamps (when I was a kid) whenever we bought stuff so we could get free stuff (most of it shitty, but free). Our credit cards have points programs (and lots of free miles), we get credit (implicit and explicit) eating at the same restaurants over and over ago, and when you buy a dozen cups of coffee at the coffee shop d

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Your Product Needs to be 10x Better than the Competition to Win. Here’s Why:

Both Sides of the Table

Last night I had the great privilege to interview Bill Gross , one of the Internet’s true pioneers. To say he has had an impact on the web would be an understatement. His impact has even helped a small country gain admission to the United Nations. All of that are in this week’s episode of This Week in VC. Summary notes, as always, provide below.

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Entrepreneurial Funding is Not an Entitlement

Startup Professionals Musings

Where did this pervasive sense of entitlement in our culture come from? I’ve written about this before, but I was surprised again recently at a conference for startups when a couple of entrepreneurs started berating investors for their low rate of funding for early-stage startups. It sounded a bit like other special interest groups crying for their entitled government programs.

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What the AngelList Debate Means for the Future of Startup Investing

www.readwriteweb.com

ReadWriteStart ReadWriteWeb Channels ReadWriteStart ReadWriteBiz ReadWriteEnterprise ReadWriteCloud ReadWriteHack ReadWriteMobile International ReadWriteBrazil ReadWriteChina ReadWriteFrance ReadWriteSpain ReadWriteStart All Posts Archives Featured RSS Twitter Facebook What the AngelList Debate Means for the Future of Startup Investing By Guest Author / March 1, 2011 1:30 PM / 5 Comments Tweet Hacker News Share & Save Over the weekend there has been some controversy surrounding AngelList , t

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The Lean Startup SXSW + bundle + tournament

Startup Lessons Learned

Today's theme is "with a little help from my friends." You all know I am busy writing The Lean Startup Book. So none of what I am about to announce would have been possible without a tremendous amount of help. A few months ago, I began planning an event at SXSW with my friends at 500 Startups (their glamorous frontman is Dave McClure but everyone knows Christen O'Brien does the real work).

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Should Your Startup Offer Virtual Internships?

ReadWriteStart

We've written several times here at ReadWriteStart about the benefits - for students and for startups - of offering internship opportunities. Almost 70% of college students say they plan to pursue an internship while in school, a smart move considering that recent figures show that 90% of direct-from-college jobs will go to students who've had internship experience.

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Ten Principles Which Spell Continuous Innovation

Startup Professionals Musings

Continuous innovation is required to survive in all businesses, beginning with your startup, and increasing in importance as your business matures. Technologists often insist that new things can’t be invented on a schedule, but successful companies seem to be able to do it on a regular basis. Many people have tried to define a process for innovation, but most are too abstract for me.

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Nature’s Way Of Reminding Us Who Is Really In Charge

Feld Thoughts

When I was brushing my teeth this morning at 5am I was thinking about a post I was going to write today. By 5:15 I was in front of my computer with my cup of coffee totally obsessed by watching video of the 8.9 earthquake that hit Japan today. I’m now trying to pry myself away from the live videos of the coast of Hawaii waiting for the tsunami to hit.

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Use Local, Small Business Public Relations to Boost Buzz

Rembrandt Communications

If you are a new entrepreneur, one of the best ways to start building buzz is with small business public relations and contacting local media-members. This way, you can practice your pitching skills with a smaller venue and begin creating media relationships to help your business grow. But how do you start your small business [.].

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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Spotlight On India

ReadWriteStart

For this week's One Million by One Million roundtable, we teamed up with the Indian Angel Network (IAN). First up, Nimesh Khiara from Mumbai, India, discussed StopWaitin , a restaurant reservation system that includes managing waiting lists and is similar in concept to OpenTable. Nimesh has a couple of corporations that are interested in beta testing his solution to offer corporate discounts to their workforces, and a few restaurants are also interested.

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Most Startups Still Treat Customers Like Outsiders

Startup Professionals Musings

I deal often with early-stage startups, and many of these don’t have any customers yet (but wish they did), so it’s not surprising they still don’t think of customers as their friends. More disturbingly, others do have customers, but the customer service program consists of an informal focus on “problems,” rather than a proactive effort to establish a positive relationship with friends.

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Update on Feld Gelt

Feld Thoughts

Wow – that was cool. Thanks for the help with the experiment in the post How To Score 30 Minutes With Me. Tons of great feedback – both in the comments, by tweets, and by email. In case you missed the post, I decided to offer one 30 minute session with me per week for the next four weeks in exchange for 10,000 Feld Gelt. At least one person found the “Purchase Feld Gelt&# option (which I’ve since disabled, at least for now) and bought 9,995 Feld Gelt’s for $10 valui

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SXSW updates

Startup Lessons Learned

First of all, I want to start on a somber note. As everyone here at SXSW is waking up, an eight foot tsunami wave is about to hit my hometown of San Francisco. All signs point to a minor event, but our friends and colleagues in Japan have not been so fortunate. The earthquake and tsunami have caused untold devastation , destabilized nuclear power plants , and who knows what else.

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LaunchRock Wants to Give A Boost to Startups Launching at SXSW

ReadWriteStart

The anticipation in the tech world is palpable, as SXSW Interactive kicks off at the end of the week. We expect to see lots of startups launch over the course of the event, and LaunchRock , the creator of viral launch pages for startups is putting the pieces in place to make its own, newly launched service even more useful. We covered LaunchRock here last month , following the startup's creation over Philly Startup Weekend.

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How to deal with bad PR

Lightspeed Venture Partners

'The Economist has published a couple of interesting articles about how to deal with bad PR recently. The first suggests that it is better to ignore bad PR than to fight it : …rebuttals are unwise, argue Derek Rucker and David Dubois, of the Kellogg School of Management, and Zakary Tormala, of Stanford business school, three psychologists. By restating the rumours, Coke helps to propagate them.

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Business cards are dead: Send me your card via Hashable at #SXSW

This is going to be BIG.

When I was down at Startup Riot in Atlanta, someone handed me their business card. I didn’t even have any on me. He asked, “So, are you guys over business cards in New York?” Funny thing is, we kind of are. It’s rare when anyone hands me a business card these days. Nine times out of ten, I’m meeting someone in person because we already got each other’s contact info somehow.

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Invest 5 minutes in glass

Start Up Blog

This is an amazing piece from Dow Corning on the future of glass in our lives. It really sets the tone on how they will through their products make our lives better. It makes me wonder why more startups and large brands are not creating films about the future, and how they will shape it in a positive sense.

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From Video Games To Netbooks: How Chris Guthrie Made $150,000 Online After Losing His Job

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Press play to begin streaming the audio or right click the text link and choose save as or save link. Download the MP3 [ 47 Minutes - 11 MB ] Chris Guthrie is like your every day guy. He’s into video games, he likes computers, he studied marketing at Western Washington University , worked a full time job first as a game tester with Microsoft, and later in sales selling IT equipment.

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Flash Foresight – Your stepping stone to a better future

Life Beyond Code

Dan started his tour over at Principled Innovation with Jeff De Cagna ( @pinnovation ) on Monday, then moved on to The Fresh Peel with Chris Wilson ( @FreshPeel ) on Tuesday, then to BrandMix with Martin Bishop ( @martinjbishop ) on Wednesday, then on to Make it Great from Phil Gerbyshak and finally he is here. It was a normal day in February, well until 3.30pm which is when I had the most amazing phone call with Daniel Burrus, author of Flash Foresight, a brilliant book that should be on your r

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