Sat.Feb 19, 2011 - Fri.Feb 25, 2011

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Startup CTO Salary and Equity Data

SoCal CTO

Todd Gitlin of Safire Partners was nice enough to compile some data on Start CTO Salary and Equity at Venture Backed Companies for the LA CTO Forum and present last year. He agreed to make this data public which is awesome. Todd is a go to resource for people looking for talent in startups. He was a great presenter to our group. I highly recommend getting to know him.

CTO Hire 301
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A Growing Startup Should Only Hire Entrepreneurs

Startup Professionals Musings

Every startup lucky enough to get some traction gets to the point where they decide to hire some “regular employees” for sales, marketing, and administrative tasks. Then they are surprised to see productivity and creativity take a big dip. What they should be doing is hiring only “entrepreneurs,” meaning people who think and act as if this is their own business.

Hiring 250
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Twitter Link Roundup #75 – 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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Cracking The Code: SaaS Multiples: Recovery or Bubble?

Cracking the Code

Cracking The Code. Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Wednesday, February 23, 2011. SaaS Multiples: Recovery or Bubble? With companies like Saleforce and SuccessFactors trading north of 8 times 2011 revenues, SaaS valuations are just back to the 2007 peak, but what is remarkable however, is that, after a period of strong correlation in 2008/2009, SaaS companies (represented by the SaaS 13 Index) have massively outperf

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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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CTO Equity and Compensation at Venture Backed Companies

SoCal CTO

Todd Gitlin of Safire Partners was nice enough to compile some data on CTO Equity and Compensation at Venture Backed Companies for the LA CTO Forum and present last year. He agreed to make this data public which is awesome. Todd is a go to resource for people looking for talent in startups. He was a great presenter to our group. I highly recommend getting to know him.

CTO Hire 273
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Linking Around On A Sunday Morning

Feld Thoughts

Periodically I get backlogged with “stuff I want to blog&# that I never get to along with a handful of “links from today that are great.&# So – today you get a bunch of things that I’m involved in and turn me out. Click through to whatever interests you. Jilted in the U.S., a Site Finds Love in India : Ignighter was in the TechStars Boulder 2008 class.

More Trending

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How To Get The Best Merchant Account For Your Small Business

crowdSPRING Blog

A few years ago, one Saturday afternoon, my car broke down in the middle of Chicago. Stranded—and unwilling to leave my car parked on an expressway overnight—I had the car towed to the only shop still open for the day. The homemade sign hanging on for dear life above the front door as I walked in told me the place was shady—I knew I was about to be taken.

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How To Launch Your Book Online Through Your Author Platform

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

In my last article, How To Turn Your Life Experience Into A Business , I looked at opportunities to create a business from life experience with Mark “Hammer&# Dixon and his book, Bash for Cash , as the example. Once you have a book, you need to have a successful launch to get the word out there. Creating an author platform provides those opportunities.

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Open Positions at the ATI

Austin Startup

Interested in being part of the entrepreneurial and startup ecosystem in Austin? Here are two awesome-sounding jobs that will remain posted till Wednesday, so please check them out promptly. The Austin Technology Incubator is hiring for these positions, so make sure to apply now. ATI has served the entrepreneur community for over twenty years and focuses on the IT, Wireless, Clean Energy and Bioscience verticals.

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TinyCo‘s Big Opportunity

Ben's Blog

Let me put you on the game. —The Game, Put You On The Game. Today we announced a new investment in TinyCo, a new mobile games company. We further announced that my partner Marc would be joining their board of directors. Here are the three reasons: 1. A Big Frackin’ Market. IDC estimates that there will be 1 billion mobile Internet users by 2013 and that estimate may very well be low.

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Why I Invested in Gogii (textPlus) – My First Ever Later Stage Deal

Both Sides of the Table

This is a post I’ve been dying to write for 18 months. I invested in LA-based Gogii , one of the fastest growing, most exciting mobile social networking companies you’ve never heard of and maker of a product called textPlus. I know this because you’re not a young teenager. And if you are – what on earth are you reading such a boring blog as this?!?

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How to think about cash vs. equity compensation

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

It’s among the most-asked questions on startup forums, and an issue we’re dealing with right now at WPEngine as we bring on new employees: How do you decide how much equity (shares) to give a new employee or partner? Especially when the company is young and according to typical financial assessment the shares are “worth nothing?&#.

Equity 276
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Wi-Fi Alliance Moves Up and Out

Austin Startup

How does a globally-influential trade organization that counts 400 companies in its roster and is charged with driving the evolution of an entire industry get its start? Sometimes with the help of start-up incubators, like the University of Texas’ Austin Technology Incubator (ATI). At the end of 2010, the Wi-Fi Alliance moved into new, expanded office space in Austin.

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7 Keys to the Ideal Mental Age for an Entrepreneur

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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The more than thousand points of influence

deal architect

I have been invited to a session where a multinational rethinks the mission and next moves for its technology innovation team. They are conducting such sessions around the world and inviting small teams of outsiders to help them in their.

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Dear Google, I Have More Than 10,000 Contacts

Feld Thoughts

I just received the “amusing email of the day&# from Google. I feel like I’m in one step forward / one step back with Google Enterprise Support. If you read my two recent posts on this, you saw that I started by saying that it’s Time For Google To Get Serious About Enterprise Tech Support and I followed up with My Increasing Love Affair With Google Apps.

Database 164
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Will your 2011 Plan stand up to investor scrutiny?

For Entrepreneurs

How to make sure your sales forecast has been properly validated so it will stand up to test of time (and investor scrutiny). This blog post looks at the process that I would use as a board member or investor to validate a bookings forecast, checking to see if the key elements that are needed to support that forecast have been thought through properly.

Forecast 163
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Start With Innovation, Then Make it a Revolution

Startup Professionals Musings

Great startups these days start with innovation, and then take it up a few notches to make it a revolution. An example is Google, who turned a new search technology into a tool that most of us couldn’t live without. As an entrepreneur, how do you know if you have the potential to innovate, and what are the steps to get from innovation to revolution?

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Wall Street and industrialization of technology

deal architect

Evan Schuman is besides himself as Wall Street expresses dislike with amazon’s continued high capex investment in its AWS unit. Frankly, he would be better off patting amazon management on the back like I did Microsoft when the Street similarly.

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Why A New Startup Shouldn’t Have a Marketing Budget

Feld Thoughts

As my partners at Foundry Group know, every time I hear the word “marketing&# I throw up a little in my mouth. I hate traditional marketing and have always resisted it early in the life of a new company. Fred Wilson has a phenomenal blog post up this morning titled Marketing. Among other things he demonstrates his mastery of marketing by sending me an email this morning pointing me to the post and saying that he’s channeling me knowing that it’ll likely inspire me to blog somet

Marketing 139
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New "Halo Report" Aims to Track Angel Investment Trends

ReadWriteStart

Quarterly reports about venture capital investment are fairly commonplace. But information about early stage investment can be more difficult to come by. To help investigate some of the investment trends, the Angel Capital Education Foundation (ACEF), Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and CB Insights are announcing a partnership that will produce a quarterly research report.

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When, Where, and How to Raise Venture Capital

Startup Professionals Musings

By Dave Lavinsky, President and Co-Founder of Growthink At one point or another, most entrepreneurs find themselves in a place where they could use money. And oftentimes, they could use a lot of money. These entrepreneurs often dream about how much they could accomplish if they had millions in the bank. All the people they could hire. All the products they could develop.

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Meet the new guard, same as the old guard

deal architect

It is fitting that a new age CEO, Zach Nelson of NetSuite will kick off this evening’s event at the Churchill Club where Scott McNealy and Ed Zander are featured. Scott and Ed will undoubtedly talk about how Sun and.

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TechStars Boulder Applications Are Open

Feld Thoughts

It’s TechStars Boulder application time again. If you apply by Thursday (February 24th) you will be considered for TechStars for a Day , a great way to get introduced to the TechStars program as well as increase your chance of getting selected for the program. When TechStars first started in Boulder, most of the applicants were what we like to call “pre-seed&#.

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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: VCs, Angels, Incubators, Accelerators - What Are You Doing With Your Rejects?

ReadWriteStart

I recently wrote a blog post that I believe is worth pointing out in the context of the strategy roundtables: VCs, Angels, Incubators, Accelerators - What Are You Doing With Your Rejects? It makes the following observation: When I first talked about the 1M/1M program, I had observed the need to contain the immense infant entrepreneur mortality prevalent in the startup ecosystem.

Incubator 116
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Selling the Future: Create your sales pitch ahead of time

This is going to be BIG.

Here's an exercise. It's a little bit lean startup, but it's a little more involved than a customer call. For anyone who is building something to be monetized in the future--a content site, a community for brands to interact in, etc--write up your sales deck for monetization now as if it was six months to a year in the future. So, instead of pitching VCs for money now, assume that everything you tell investors about the future is going to happen.

Sales 108
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Are You Using Mythology in Your Marketing?

Growthink Blog

I love reading great stories in business books. I just came across this one from Exploiting Chaos by Jeremy Gutsche. It refers to the fact that Proctor & Gamble was failing miserably in Japan and had lost hundreds of millions of dollars. But then things turned around when it launched an incredibly profitable advertising campaign for SK-II, a premium skin cream. read more.

Japan 103
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Distribution – A New Foundry Group Theme

Feld Thoughts

We’ve put up a post on the Foundry Group site about a new theme of ours we are calling Distribution. We’ve been investing in this theme for a while but have continued to formulate exactly how we think about it. I’ve talked about our thematic approach to investing many times in the past. Every now and then it feels like it’s worth a quick post on our current themes.

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How To Enhance Creativity: Why Lady Gaga Works & Brainstorming Doesn’t

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Greetings fellow Entrepreneurs, this week’s article is all about techniques , one thing I’m not usually very focused on. I love exploring and understanding why we do things and how we work, but my articles have been somewhat lacking in techniques. One of the reasons for the way I write is that if we don’t have a deep understanding of how we work and why something is important, it doesn’t matter how many techniques we learn, we won’t apply them anyway.

Green 103
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Don't bite the hook

This is going to be BIG.

We all have things that get under our skin--and when they turn up, they get us going from zero to sixty in a heartbeat. Every frustration, every bit of negativity cumulated over every previous encounter--it all just sits there waiting to get turned on like some big machine. Often times, they're things we can do nothing about or they're things we probably shouldn't let get to us, but in the moment, that doesn't matter.

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Is The American Dream Really Just a Mirage?

Growthink Blog

In spite of the so-called business media’s fixation on tales of America’s demise, U.S. entrepreneurial activity is at its highest point in 15 years, with over 550,000 new businesses created each month in this country! Never have so many owed so much to so few. America’s entrepreneurs are ambitious leaders – courageously pursuing growth opportunities, and assuming accountability for the inherent risks and outcomes.

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Nine Ways of Being for Amplified Creativity

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

Heads-up! There’s a great creativity post on Mike Brown’s excellent blog, Brainzooming. It’s a listing of 37 articles on ways to be more creative. I’m kicking myself because I’m not on the list! I realize that even though I’ve written about 300 posts related to creativity, and a book — I haven’t written a piece that explicitly [.].

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Useful Buzzwords: What’s “Affordable Loss”

Up and Running

Tweet I got an email overnight asking me about “affordable loss,&# which is one of the four factors in my Wednesday post on Planning Startups Stories, A Seasoned Angel Investor Highlights These 4 Factors. I can see why that phrase, affordable loss, seems contradictory or paradoxical. Wade Brooks, who used it in the Monday talk I took Wednesday’s post from, made it pretty clear to me and others; but then I was left with my notes summarizing it.

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Small business and startup issues: net neutrality and H.R. 1

crowdSPRING Blog

Small businesses which are built on the Internet and dependent on it for their livelihoods are threatened by an amendment to the spending bill passed by the House last week. The amendment introduced by Oregon Representative Greg Walden, specifically prohibits the FCC from enforcing its Net Neutrality rules , passed late last year. These rules would effectively maintain a level playing field for small companies, startups, and entrepreneurs.

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Mission statements are terrible

Start Up Blog

I once worked for an incredibly successful company called Kimberly Clark. A paper goods company that sells nappies and tissues. They dominated pretty much every category they sold products in. In my first year working there (it was my first job out of University) they had a conference to write a new mission statement for Australia. They invited people from all levels to participate.

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The birth of a new Foundry theme – Distribution

VC Adventure

Today on the Foundry blog we detailed a new theme in which we’ve been investing for a while, but which only really came together as a coherent thematic concept in the past year or so. This theme – distribution – involves companies leveraging the inherent scalability of the Internet and it’s key platforms in targeted, but extremely large markets.