Sat.Nov 20, 2010 - Fri.Nov 26, 2010

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Embrace Losing – It Will Make You Stronger

Both Sides of the Table

This is an updated post from my ongoing series on Startup Advice that I learned from founding two companies. . I HATE LOSING. I hate it. I really, really, really hate it. It chaps my hide. It rips at my core. I don’t get over it easily. I lose sleep. I fucking hate losing. It’s not so much the actual outcome that I hate – it’s the process.

China 333
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Big-Company Executives Rarely Survive in a Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

Mid-level or even top executives who “grew up” in large companies often look with envy at startups, and dream of how easy it must be running a small organization, where you can see the whole picture and it appears you have total control. In reality, very few executives or professional stars from large corporations thrive in the early-stage startup environment.

Startup 238
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Twitter Link Roundup #62 – 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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Thanksgiving – THE Holiday for Entrepreneurs

Growthink Blog

I have always felt that Thanksgiving acknowledges the best American qualities – hard work, diversity as strength , and a focus on solutions not problems. And not coincidentally, these same qualities are the cornerstones of successful entrepreneurship. As every school boy and girl knows, Thanksgiving traces its origin from a 1621 Pilgrim harvest feast to celebrate surviving an extremely difficult first winter in the New World.

Harvest 85
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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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Embrace Losing – It Will Make You Stronger

Both Sides of the Table

This is an updated post from my ongoing series on Startup Advice that I learned from founding two companies. . I HATE LOSING. I hate it. I really, really, really hate it. It chaps my hide. It rips at my core. I don’t get over it easily. I lose sleep. I fucking hate losing. It’s not so much the actual outcome that I hate – it’s the process.

China 328
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Early Adopters Distract You From the Real Market

Startup Professionals Musings

The conventional wisdom is that “early adopters” are the ideal target for startups, to get business rolling. I see two pitfalls with any concerted focus on early adopters; first, the size of this group may not be as large as you think, and secondly, their feedback may lead you directly away from your real target market of mainstream customers. The term “early adopters” relates to the people who are eager to try almost any new technology products, and originates from Everett M.

Marketing 237

More Trending

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Why do we do this?

Startup Lessons Learned

On April 1, 2008, I was as nervous as I have ever been in my life. It was just minutes before I was supposed to go on stage for the very first time and present The Lean Startup to a large audience, at a big conference. To that point, I’d been talking about Lean Startup concepts only on a seldom-read blog and with people in my immediate network. I had advised startups and VC’s, guest lectured a few time, and met with some small groups of extremely early adopters, like Sean Murphy’s Bootstrapper’s

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Design for the Novice, Configure for the Pro

Both Sides of the Table

I recently wrote about my philosophy of minimalism that “ less is more &# with the mantra “when in doubt, leave it out.&#. I’ve had a long-standing rule of thumb in product design, which I call “design for the novice, configure for the pro.&# I started saying this back in 2001/02, long before the era of Web 2.0, lean startups or even the advent of AJAX.

Design 325
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Ten Keys to a Killer Name for Your Company

Startup Professionals Musings

First things first – your startup needs a name! This may seem a silly and frivolous task, but it may be the most important decision you make. The name of your business has a tremendous impact on how customers and investors view you, and in today’s small world, it’s a world-wide decision. Please don’t send me any more business plans with TBD or NewCo in the title position.

Naming 230
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The 5 to 1 Rule Applied to Relationships

Feld Thoughts

I heard a brilliant thing recently concerning making mistakes in a relationship. The person I heard it from described it as “the 5 to 1 rule.”. “When you screw up, recognize that you need to do five good things for every one bad thing. So, when I do something that makes my wife mad at me - or which she considers “wrong”, I consciously focus on making sure that I do the next five things right.”.

Developer 143
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Blekko and DuckDuckGo Partnership Shows How Startups Can Take on the Big Guys

ReadWriteStart

We seem to make a lot of predictions that new features and products launched by the likes of Facebook, Google, or Twitter are going to be "killers" of some sort. Facebook Places, for example, could be a "Foursquare killer." Facebook Messaging could be a "Gmail killer." A new analytics product from Twitter will be a "Klout killer." Often, as these examples indicate, these predictions come at the expense of startups.

Curation 115
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Product Design for Iterative Processes

Both Sides of the Table

Everybody has some portion of their life that is repetitive. For these cases we want software that is optimized for massive iteration. I recently wrote a post about design simplicity where I encouraged technology design teams to think about “designing for the novice, configuring for the pro&# users. I wrote this post because I feel that too many products let features creep sink into the design under the guise of making the product more powerful but in turn they make their products less u

Design 284
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Making the Transition from Entrepreneur to ‘Boss’

Startup Professionals Musings

By Mark F. Herbert Making the transition from individual contributor to manager, or entrepreneur to “corporate” executive, is one of the most difficult shifts most of us will face in our careers. A study conducted by a national management consulting firm a few years back indicated that more than 40% of newly appointed managers fail in their first 18 months on the job!

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Gnip Raises $2m and Becomes Twitter’s First Authorized Data Reseller

Feld Thoughts

I'm super proud of my friends at Gnip. Last week they announced that they had closed another $ 2m investment from Foundry Group and First Round Capital and signed a deal with Twitter to become Twitter's first authorized data reseller. Via Gnip, you can now get three new premium Twitter feeds in real time for non-display use: Twitter Halfhose (50% of the full firehose).

API 134
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Silicon Valley Venture Capital Survey Finds That, Yes, Valuations Are Up

ReadWriteStart

The law firm Fenwick & West LLP has released its Third Quarter 2010 Silicon Valley Venture Capital Survey. The survey looks at the valuations and the terms of financing for over 100 technology companies in Silicon Valley that reported raising capital in the third quarter of this year. And not surprisingly, perhaps, the survey found that valuations are up.

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11 Tips For Writing A 15 Minute Article

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Writers block can be a nasty bug to catch. An equally nasty bug can be wading hour after hour over material that just isn’t coming out of you. The next thing you know, you have spent an entire work day filled with worrying and nothing to show for it. The goal of this article is to not only help you snap out of writers block, but to help you hand yourself a completed article in 15 minutes. 1.

Affiliate 111
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There are Many R’s to Motivation in a Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

One of the keys to maximizing the productivity of your team, as well as yourself, is motivation. It has been estimated that the average team member at any given time works at less than 50% of his capacity. Thus mastering the art of employee motivation could double your chances of success over the average competitor. While there are many books written on this subject, most entrepreneurs I know simply assume that their own vision, motivation, and drive will be adopted and maintained by partners an

Cofounder 225
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The End of My Paid Subscription Content Experiment

Feld Thoughts

At the beginning of October, I wrote a post titled New Email Newsletter on Work-Life Balance where I decided to try a new email newsletter tool called Letter.ly to produce a paid email newsletter on work-life balance ($1.99 / month). I've decided to end this experiment and sent out the following letter to the email list tonight. Of course, because I didn't tune the settings on Letter.ly it tweeted out the post, which recursively forced you to subscribe to read it.

Email 132
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Workout Routine Hack

This is going to be BIG.

For years, I had a pretty standard workout routine. I basically only worked out in the mornings before work. However, the more and more I have breakfast meetings, conferences, two days of teaching a morning class, the more than is proving unsustainable. My workout schedule has gotten pretty borked in the meantime. Lately, I’ve been using a set of recurring calendar appointments to schedule my workouts week to week.

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Visual Orgy – Retail

Start Up Blog

This is an amazing piece of creative work from H&M at a new retail store launch in Amsterdam. Check it out below. The same theme shines through again. Creativity wins. The production costs are clearly much less that the creative input. I wonder what other startup brands could use the visual projection idea to make something worth sharing on the web?

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Count Your Blessings on This Thanksgiving Holiday

Startup Professionals Musings

If you live in the USA, today is the national Thanksgiving Holiday. But no matter where you live in the world, you should use the opportunity to give thanks for the positives in your life and your business. High on my list is the joy and satisfaction of having helped many entrepreneurs face-to-face this year, and hopefully many more by my blog reaching out over the Internet.

Merger 201
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Win a Copy of Do More Faster in the Next 36 Hours

Feld Thoughts

If you go to Feld Thoughts , TechStars , or David Cohen's web site , you'll notice a little red tab on the right side of the browser that says "Marginize". If you want a chance to win a copy of Do More Faster , click it! Marginize is one of the TechStars Boston 2010 companies. Since their soft launch at the end of the TechStars program a few months ago, their users of the Marginize browser add-on have used it on over 150,000 sites.

Widget 124
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Mitsui Ventures Invests $3 Million in MoMinis

VC Cafe

Israeli startup Mominis has announced a second investment round of $3 million, led by Mitsui Ventures, BRM and existing private investors headed by Baruch Lebanon. Mominis built a platform for developing, porting and distributing casual games for mobile phones, without requiring specialized development experience (see previous coverage on VC Cafe ).

Lebanon 87
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12 Questions: Meet Rod MacGregor (Spain)

crowdSPRING Blog

In our 12 Questions blog series, we feature interviews with someone from the crowdSPRING community. For these interviews, we pick people who add value to our community – in the blog, in the forums, in the projects. Plainly – activities that make crowdSPRING a better community. Be professional, treat others with respect, help us build something very special, and we’ll take notice.

Spain 86
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How To Get Backlinks To Increase Your Traffic – A Case Study

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Traffic is, and will always be, a hot topic in internet marketing. You can have an awesome website that solves the world’s problems, has the solutions to world hunger, in addition to helping men understand women fully (can you imagine that?), but if you don’t have traffic, I would venture to say that your website means NOTHING. Ok, I know that was harsh, but lets face it – If the people you are targeting aren’t getting to your website, your website might as well not exist

Email 82
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Death and Dying

Feld Thoughts

Two colleagues have died suddenly in the past two weeks - one was in his 60's and one was in his 50's. Both shook me up. A close friend's mother is very ill. And a close friend's father died earlier this year. I've had a physical challenging year. I ran a marathon in February and was geared up for a lot of running and then hurt my back. Seven months later I'm better, but I had five months of solid and consistent pain (never getting below a two on a 0 to 10 scale and often reaching eight or

Restful 122
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Mitsui Ventures Invests $3 Million in MoMinis

VC Cafe

I sraeli startup Mominis has announced a second investment round of $3 million, led by Mitsui Ventures, BRM and existing private investors headed by Baruch Lebanon. Mominis built a platform for developing, porting and distributing casual games for mobile phones, without requiring specialized development experience (see previous coverage on VC Cafe ).

Lebanon 87
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Business plans for entrepreneurs – Part II: research

crowdSPRING Blog

A couple of weeks ago, I started a series of video posts for entrepreneurs on creating a business plan. I very much believe that this part of the process is critical to building a strong company. The short video below contains my thoughts on the research process. I hope you enjoy and will look forward to your comments! Resources: 2007 Economic Census.

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Defining Product

SVPG

In the consumer packaged goods industry, most people have a pretty clear image in mind when you refer to the “product” that they manage or work on. You can hold the bar of soap or the razor in your hand. However, in the Internet world, when we refer to “product” it is much less clear. First of all, most of the time we’re not even referring to a physical item but rather to software.

Product 70
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Book: Future Shock

Feld Thoughts

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler was published 40 years ago. I must have read it around the time I turned 10. As a kid my parents fed me a steady diet of books that were more than I was ready for at the time, but I gobbled them down anyway. I vaguely recall Future Shock being one of them. A month ago I decided to read it again. Ironically, it's not available on the Kindle so I had to buy (and lug around) a paperback copy of it.

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Mitsui Ventures Invests $3 Million in MoMinis

VC Cafe

I sraeli startup Mominis has announced a second investment round of $3 million, led by Mitsui Ventures, BRM and existing private investors headed by Baruch Lebanon. Mominis built a platform for developing, porting and distributing casual games for mobile phones, without requiring specialized development experience (see previous coverage on VC Cafe ).

Lebanon 68
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Engage with Customers to Shape Business Model

The Entrepreneurial Mind

When launching a new business, relying too heavily on the details of your business plan can actually lead to failure. The research that goes into formulating the business plans that I typically see comes from sources such as industry reports, census data and other government-generated historical material, plus articles from business periodicals. What these plans lack is information gained from dealing with actual customers.

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The great price divide

Start Up Blog

We are currently seeing a massive shift in pricing in many consumer markets. Anecdotally it feels as though product and service categories which typically operated in the middle of the market are either being pushed either into a premium pricing space, or into heavy price competition. And so what is emerging are two larger markets of pricing extremes.

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StockTwits.TV Do More Faster Interview – Jeff Clavier

Feld Thoughts

Today Howard Lindzon takes on Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC in his Do More Faster interview series. Jeff has been an awesome TechStars mentor since the very first Boulder program in 2007, has made a number of investments in TechStars companies, and has co-invested with me and my partners at Foundry Group in several companies, including SendGrid , Gnip , and Next Big Sound.

Internet 114
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Mini Saga #68 – Comparison

Life Beyond Code

The plan seemed almost perfect. There was only one small glitch… Mini Saga #68 – Comparison. Joe was very excited to pitch his startup to Matt. Joe explained how his startup’s business model was very similar to the business model of one of Matt’s portfolio companies. Matt passed. Joe was heartbroken. Four weeks later, Joe read that the portfolio company he referred to was shutting down.

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Who Says You Can’t Do It All? I Do.

Up and Running

On reflection, I’m glad I can’t guess which company and I assume I don’t know who the CEO was. I ‘m very impressed by Rand Fishkin’s A Cautionary Tale from the Startup World posted on his blog over the weekend. First, because the story echoes one of my top 10 planning mistakes. Second, because because you rarely run into a post-mortem analysis so roundly blaming the CEO.