Sat.Aug 21, 2010 - Fri.Aug 27, 2010

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The Power of Quora & Why Benchmark was Right to Pay Up

Both Sides of the Table

I was an early user of Quora and like all new technologies they take a bit of playing with them for a while, discussing them with others and reflecting on them to let them sink in. I’m no wall flower so when something doesn’t resonate I’m usually pretty vocal about it. With Quora , it was the opposite – something has always felt right but it took me a while to. really understand it.

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The right way to position against competition

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

This is Part 4 of the series: 5 lessons from 150 startup pitches.?? After seeing hundreds of startup pitches for this year's Capital Factory program, I can tell you that the two most common errors in positioning a company against competition are, strangely, opposites: Claiming you have no competition. Defining your company's offering and positioning by combining "the best" traits of 6 competitors.

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Solving the Innovator’s Dilemma – Customer Development in a Big Company

Steve Blank

One of the ways I learn is to teach. My students ask questions I can’t answer and challenge me to solve problems I never considered. At times I’ll do what I consider an extension of teaching; a two-day Customer Discovery/Validation intensive session with a large corporation serious about Customer Development at my ranch on the California Coast.

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Strategy and Tactics Make Dreams A Reality

Startup Professionals Musings

By Ernst Gemassmer Some entrepreneurs are so caught up in their dream that they jump immediately into implementation, with no focus on strategy and tactics first. The result is that when they hit the first obstacle (and there will be many), it seems like the end of the road. They don't have any idea which way to turn. Based on my own experience, there is real value in spending time early on building the overall strategy and tactics for your business, before you charge ahead.

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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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Fight When it’s Time to Fight. Be Gracious When It’s Time to Give In.

Both Sides of the Table

There are times to fight. I must admit it’s part of my DNA to enjoy a good fight (not as much as does Jason Calacanis, mind you ahem: Facebook. Er: Comscore , Cough: Angel funding payola ). But there are times to given in and compromise. Don’t confuse the two. When you give in, do so graciously. Take the high road. Act and feel zen.

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Announcing First Round’s Investment in GroupMe

This is going to be BIG.

“Private Twitter for small groups” “BBM for every platform” “Reply-all for SMS” I could describe GroupMe in a lot of ways, but “really exciting” would have to be the most accurate one, and we’re very excited to announce it as one of our newest investments at First Round ( See the Techcrunch article here ).

More Trending

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Startups Need Focus To Cross All The Chasms

Startup Professionals Musings

Everyone in the business world has heard of the book by Geoffrey A. Moore titled “ Crossing the Chasm ” (1991), but most entrepreneurs have no idea how it relates to them. In fact, it’s all about the “focus” required to get early stage technology products across the deadly chasm from early adopters to mainstream customers. Most investors and startup professionals expand this concept of focus to apply to key issues of every aspect of strategic and tactical planning in a startup.

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The 1/9/90 Rule of UGC & Why It’s OK to Have Lurkers

Both Sides of the Table

Two days ago I wrote about Quora. I’ve been loving the product even if it sucks up some of my time. I prefer my time go into a very focused Q&A website than into a more generic Facebook. What Quora has done is wrap social networking around Q&A with the more clever next-gen UX I’ve seen. But my post today is not about Quora, it’s about an answer that I wrote on Quora.

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crowdSPRING’s Twitter Roundup For Entrepreneurs

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 about startups, entrepreneurship and leadership.

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How to Minimize Politics in Your Company

Ben's Blog

“Who the f@#k you think you f$&kin’ with. I’m the f%*kin’ boss.”. —Rick Ross. In all my years in business, I have yet to hear someone say: “I love corporate politics.” On the other hand, I meet plenty of people who complain bitterly about corporate politics—sometimes even in the companies they run. So, if nobody loves politics, why all the politics?

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Alarming IT data points

deal architect

I am grateful for plenty of positive coverage my book has received. The coverage, though, has focused mostly on all the innovators I profile in the book. That’s not surprising because the vast majority of the book focuses on innovations.

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Please Help My Friend Colin Recover His Kidnapped Children #noorramsay

Both Sides of the Table

I’ve never made a public appeal before. Then again, I’ve never had a friend in need like my dear friend Colin Bower who is trying to recover his two kidnapped boys Noor (8) and Ramway (6). The short story: Colin & I have been close friends for 13 years when we started our MBA program together. We then both lived in London and our children played together.

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$528 worth of Optimization Tools for $25

Software By Rob

Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← Why Free Plans Don’t Work What the Beatles Can Teach Us About Starting a Company → $528 Worth of Optimization Tools for $25 Micropreneurship , Startups If youre trying grow your startup youve come to the right place.

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Six Personality Traits of Serious Entrepreneurs

Startup Professionals Musings

A while back, when a startup founder mentioned to me that he wasn’t sure he had the personality to be an entrepreneur, I realized how important that insight was. My first thought is that if you are more annoyed than energized by expert advice, team suggestions, and customer input, then you should probably avoid this line of work. Actually, it’s more complicated than that, but that’s a good start.

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What an exhilarating Workday!

deal architect

We run into each other at various industry conferences - a group of industry analysts, consultants and bloggers focused on enterprise software. Rarely though 20 of us are we in a room for a whole day - many of us.

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The Non-Dummies Guide to Customer Discovery

Steve Blank

Customer Development is a stupidly simple idea. It’s one that you can describe in 30-seconds or less. But it took me 3 years and almost 300 pages of 10-point type to describe the concept in my book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Unlike a traditional business book, The Four Steps is more akin to a reference manual for how to “engineer&# a startup – from the initial search for a repeatable business model all the way through the management techniques to transition to a company.

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How to Avoid PR Rip-Offs

Rembrandt Communications

“I just paid a small fortune to a big, PR agency and have nothing to show for it!” “We hired a freelance copywriter, and he took our money and ran.” “I paid a lot of money for media placements. Isn’t that how it works?” Yes, folks. These are just some of the unhappy questions I [.].

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Ten Founder Success Factors – And a Few Surprises

Startup Professionals Musings

We can all dream about what it takes to make our startup a success. From recent survey feedback, it seems evident that the urban legends leading to success are wrong. The average entrepreneur is not the one who dumped a promising career, sketched his idea on the back of a napkin, and accepted millions from an investor to make millions of his own. I was just perusing a more realistic recent report from the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship , titled “ Making of a Successful Entrepreneur.

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Unlearning what I learned at Gartner

deal architect

The standard pitch at Gartner was 18 slides, 45 minutes. If you have seen Gartner slides, they compete in denseness with folks who put the whole encyclopedia on a grain of rice. Next you squeezed as many words as you.

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It’s Time To Reinvent The Signature Page

Feld Thoughts

Last night I printed, signed, scanned, and emailed two signature pages. As is my custom of not keeping anything around, I tore up and tossed the sig pages and then deleted the files. This morning I woke up to an email saying “We didn’t get your signature pages. Can you please send them.&# I just went through the same print, sign, scan, and email process again.

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SXSW

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, August 24, 2010 SXSW Next year will officially mark one-hundred years since scientific management , the first great management paradigm, burst into the national consciousness. It invented many concepts we now take for granted: efficiency, productivity, and the idea of management itself. We owe that movement an incalculable debt of gratitude.

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Where is Your Startup In the Gartner Hype Cycle?

Startup Professionals Musings

The Hype Cycle was a concept put forward by Gartner, Inc. back in 1995 meant to apply to technology product evolution and acceptance. As I was reading about it recently, it occurred to me that the concept relates directly to how investors see startup opportunities and potential success as well, at least those with technology in their offerings. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the Gartner Hype Cycle characterizes the over-enthusiasm or "hype" and subsequent disappointment

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More innovation

deal architect

On the New Florence blog Reverse Engineering the brain Senior-Friendly Robots "A Whale” The science behind fireworks. Tags: Innovative Business Uses of Technology.

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Entrepreneurial Density

Feld Thoughts

Last week I co-hosted a lunch for Jared Polis with Kyle Lefkoff at Boulder Ventures which Jud Valeski covered nicely in his post titled Luncheon with Jared Polis. Jared was one of the first people I met when I moved to Boulder (thanks to an introduction from my long time friend Dave Jilk) and we’ve been great friends and partners on a number of fronts ever since.

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Why Your IQ Doesn't Matter

Growthink Blog

Throughout my life I've met a lot of really smart people. People with really high IQs that excelled in school. And I've also met and worked with a lot of extremely successful entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs worth 7, 8 and even 9 figures (yes, that means they're worth over $100 million). And interestingly, the two groups are pretty much mutually exclusive.

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Funding Your Startup: Are You a Zero or a One?

Startup Professionals Musings

By Akira Hirai Startup funding is a binary event. In the binary language of computers, a zero represents the “off” state and a one represents the “on” state. When I say that funding is a binary event, I mean that there are only two possible outcomes: either you succeed in getting funding, or you don’t. You win or you lose – there is no second place.

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More New Florence

deal architect

from the innovation blog Required Navigation Performance and your flight Sustainability goes to school Thalysnet wi-fi Solar Highways. Tags: Innovative Business Uses of Technology.

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Your Platform Is Not In My Space

Feld Thoughts

In 2009, the word that finally got on my nerves was “space&# , as in “our product is in the X space&# or “the space we are going after is X.&# It seems like the word “space&# managed to find its way into every paragraph. The annoying word of 2010 appears to be “platform&# , as in “we are going to be a platform for X&# or “our platform for X will solve the following problems.&#.

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7 Tips To Help You Become A Millionaire

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Income Report: I’m A Million Dollar Blogger. Back during the early days of this blog I used to write income reports on a semi-regular basis. John Chow made the idea of reporting your blogging income popular, and before him guys like Darren Rowse and Shoemoney would show pictures of checks they had received from advertising programs like Google AdSense or affiliate programs.

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Lon Safko – Entrepreneur, Inventor, and Author

Startup Professionals Musings

A couple of weeks ago I was privileged to meet Lon Safko, probably most recognized as the author of his best-selling book " The Social Media Bible.” In reality, he is also a serial entrepreneur, inventor, and international speaker. Lon is the founder of 14 companies, 19 inventions, and he holds three patents. His "First Computer To Save A Human Life,” and more than 30,000 of Lon‘s papers are in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

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Last Chance Polymath Wow candidate contest

deal architect

Get your entries in by August 31 – details here. Could be a nice gift for a student – the Wiley catalog is full of pricey educational books.so it would cost you 100 words in an email to thenewpolymath@gmail.com, but.

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Desperately Seeking Amazing UX Gurus in Boulder

Feld Thoughts

There are two positions that I find difficult to fill in Boulder in the various companies we are investors in. The first is a real product manager (PM). We’ve got a bunch of great ones in Boulder, but there appears to be 100% employment for them and I don’t poach from myself as that seems counterproductive. The other difficult person to find is a UX design guru.

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The Importance of Being Native

This is going to be BIG.

This is me and my own opinions talking, not the firm that gives me money to eat. hopefully, that's pretty clear. In the past, I've heard lots of arguments about how New York City needs its own [insert something national]. "We need our own Techcrunch!". "We need our own SXSW!". "We need our own Google!". Honestly, I had never really put much stock in those ideas.

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The daily 2-minute progress checklist

Life Beyond Code

To-do lists are great for increasing efficiency but you may need other tools for increasing effectiveness. So if you had to take ONLY 2 minutes to check YOUR progress for the day, how would you spend that? Think about two questions: 1. Did you ensure that your contribution was higher than the consumption today? 2. Did you ensure that there was a measurable increase in your capacity to contribute meaningfully tomorrow?

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Discount to HR Tech conference

deal architect

Good friend Bill Kutik is again offering a nice discount to readers of this blog to the 13th annual HR Technology Conference in Chicago starting September 29 - easily the best HR software and best practices event in the industry.

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Using Open Source to Bootstrap Your Data Service

Feld Thoughts

Last week SimpleGeo and their partner ? Stamen Design jointly released a project they have been working on together called Polymaps. It’s absolutely beautiful and a stunning example of what you can do with the SimpleGeo API. They’ve released the Polymaps source code on GitHub so any developer can quickly see how the API is used, play around with real production code, and modify the base examples for their own use.