Sat.Sep 07, 2019 - Fri.Sep 13, 2019

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Pitfalls To Avoid During Your Startup Phase

YoungUpstarts

Everyone has to start somewhere, and while some people’s luck is undoubtedly significantly better than others, for the majority of people, startups are usually as bootstrapped and painful as possible. In today’s post our mission is to help you minimize, or altogether avoid, the painful traps a lot of startups get sucked into on their endeavor of future business success.

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6 Founder Actions That Can Kill A Promising Business

Startup Professionals Musings

In my experience as an advisor to entrepreneurs, business startup founders most often point to a shortage of funds as the primary cause of their startup failure. Yet I often see evidence that points right back at the founder or business owner, attempting to maintain excessive power and influence over of the effort, leading to a wide range of problems and a dysfunctional team.

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Pitch Deck Month: The “Why Does It Matter?” Slide

View from Seed

*This post is part of our “pitch deck” series where we dissect the seed stage pitch deck and discuss the ideal flow for a pitch. You can read the rest of the posts in the series by clicking here *. Hopefully by this point in your deck, you have grabbed the investor’s attention based on your team, a crisp articulation of what you do, and some impressive proof points that things are working.

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25 Entrepreneurs Explain How They Came Up With Their Business Names

Hearpreneur

The idea of exactly what your business is going to usually come first. Secondly, most often, is giving a title to your idea. What exactly is going to be the name of your business? Some people turn to their childhood for inspiration or a beloved family pet. It could be a made up word you dream of one night and feel it has the right ring to it. Even still there are some people who study foreign words for the perfect meaning behind their chosen business.

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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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Rebranding Your Business? Key Things To Keep In Mind

YoungUpstarts

Rebranding a business is a marketing strategy wherein a new name, design, concept, term, symbol, and combination of these elements are created for a brand. The aim is to develop a differentiated and new identity in the minds of consumers, competitors, investors, and other stakeholders. If the execution of business rebranding is done poorly, you might end up suffering extreme consequences.

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Some Good Startups Don’t Qualify For Equity Investors

Startup Professionals Musings

Angel investors and venture capitalists don’t make equity investments in nonprofit good causes. The simple reason is that it’s impossible to make money for investors when the goal of the company is to not make money. Yet as an active angel investor, I still get this question on a regular basis, so I’ll try to outline the considerations in common-sense terms.

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3 Successful Strategies Used By a Reputable Reputation Management Agency

The Startup Magazine

Hiring a reputation management agency is a major step in growing your business. First of all, it means that you actually have the funds to outsource your reputation management tasks. Secondly, it means that you are developing some semblance of an online reputation for your brand. Hopefully, consumers are saying only positive things about your company, but one can only dream. .

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Comparium – A Cross-Browser Website Testing Application

YoungUpstarts

Why should you be looking for the best cross-browser testing tool? If you own a website, then a cross-browser testing tool is very important for you. Cross-browser testing is a technique used in evaluating the functionality of your web application on different browsers before you add changes in production. For a website where the users belong to a specific group and use the same browser, you can test the changes manually.

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Managing Director vs. Director: Key Differentiators

Board Effect

Companies develop their leadership structure based on several things, including the company’s size, type of industry, geographical location, regulations and other criteria. The leadership hierarchy should be arranged so that the company has strong direction and accountability. Titles and ranks can be confusing since there is so much variance among corporate structures.

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3 Good Reasons Why Nonprofits Need Better Budgets

Up and Running

I am a nonprofit board member, and I will tell you: For the most part, I pull my hair out at board meetings when we get to the budget. Usually, there is a series of QuickBooks reports, presented as PDFs, in a teeny-tiny font. . The line items don’t always make sense, and it is often very hard to tell if a particular initiative is actually financially healthy for a nonprofit. .

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Autonomous Cars: Driving towards a Better Future

The Startup Magazine

Imagine this – you are cruising down the Interstate-5. You see another car pull up by your side. The car looks strange, with a claw-like fixture on top. As it passes by your car, you see it has no driver! The passengers are looking down at something and the car moves ahead. Congrats, you just saw your first self-driving car, a truly autonomous vehicle!

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10 Academic Courses To Kickstart Your Business Career

Startup Professionals Musings

I’m sure that every one of us who has been out in the business world for a few years can look back with perfect hindsight and name a few college courses that we should have taken. What’s more disconcerting to me is that I can name a few that aren’t usually even offered, resulting in more than a few students graduating ill-prepared for the real business world!

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Nonprofit Board Report Template

Board Effect

Much of what happens in board meetings is routine. There simply isn’t time to commit to all the legwork that needs to be done in each committee. It’s not necessary for all board members to be involved in all the details of every task, but it is important that they be informed of what is happening in committees and be provided an opportunity to ask questions about it before their work proceeds too far.

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1995 called. Time to revisit your applications strategy. Now!

deal architect

I joined Gartner in 1995. I remember clients would call and say they were getting ready for next-gen applications, but that they felt they had "enough time". The deadline in their case was, of course, the Y2K "wall". By the.

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4 Technology Hacks To Keep Your Small Business On Top

Women Entrepreneurs Can

When you’re working hard to launch a business, one thing is for sure – you’ve undoubtedly got way too much on your plate. From preparing your latest pitch for funding , to improving your customer service , generating content for your website and even chasing up unpaid invoices, you’re likely to be doing a million different things yourself or with a very small team in place.

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3-Step Burnout Prevention Plan

YoungUpstarts

by Nicole Lapin, author of “ Becoming Super Woman: A Simple 12-Step Plan to Go from Burnout to Balance “ I thought I was Superwoman. I’d wrapped up shooting for the second season of my TV show and had just finished touring the country promoting my second book. I was a badass New York Times bestselling author who preached badassery to other women.

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Example Board Meeting Agenda

Board Effect

Well-organized companies and organizations begin planning board meetings as soon as the previous meeting ends. Other boards fly by the seat of their pants and throw an agenda together the week before the meeting. Board meetings are serious business. If it’s important enough to have a board meeting, it’s important enough to plan appropriately for it.

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Re: Oracle OpenWorld

deal architect

I am going to miss going to the event next week. My fault. I had a conflict that cleared up, but not in time for Oracle to register me. I have asked them for streaming info so will catch up.

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Streamlining Your Business In Order To Climb The Ladder Of Success

Women Entrepreneurs Can

When it comes to building a business, it can be easy to lose sight of your initial goals and objectives, and become a slave to the daily grind of simply running it. Things like payroll , recruitment, IT support, buildings maintenance, housekeeping, and general administration all take a considerable amount of time, and can consume most – if not all – of the time required to grow and scale.

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4 Reasons Why T-Shirt Printing Businesses Will Trend In 2019

YoungUpstarts

Printed t shirt’s have become such a staple part of the modern wardrobe that we rarely take a minute to appreciate what they really stand for. Be it a statement you stand for, a promotional piece, or your favourite band top that you just cannot part with. 2019 has been a big year for the growth of t-shirt printing and here is a rundown of what we believe to be some of the reasons why.

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Pitch Deck Month: “Is It Working?” (aka the “Traction” Slide)

View from Seed

*This post is part of our “pitch deck” series where we dissect the seed stage pitch deck and discuss the ideal flow for a pitch. You can read the rest of the posts in the series by clicking here *. By now, you’ve described your team and the high level overview of what your company does. Now it’s time to set the stage with the early traction you have.

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5 Financial Concepts Every Startup Founder Should Know

The Startup Magazine

So you’ve started a business: you’ve made a great product, achieved product-market fit and have an extraordinary road map laid out. But to build a scalable business you need more than just product-market fit. There’s more to your business’s success than how great your product is. How your company works operationally, and the financial concepts that help you measure performance, greatly impact the ultimate success of your business.

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Venture Capital Is Just One Funding Option, Reminds OnPay’s Mark McKee

ReadWriteStart

Virtually every startup has to find funding somewhere. Although some founders take venture capital in exchange for equity, that’s not the only way to do it. To learn more about the pros and cons of venture capital — and founders’ funding alternatives — I caught up with Mark McKee. Before being named president and COO of OnPay , a growing online payroll solution for small businesses, McKee worked as managing director of The Lenox Group, where he advised growing companies on how best to raise and

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How To Borrow Money Immediately For Startups

YoungUpstarts

We are living in a consumerist society. You will come across a variety of business startups selling different ideas. In this competitive stage, it has become difficult to start your own business. The main obstacle is capital. If there are problems having capital, there are many ways in which your startup can be funded. Money can be borrowed immediately from a number of sources in order to fund the business you are looking forward to start.

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Podcast on the future of VC and how mindfulness can help founders

The Equity Kicker

A couple of weeks back I did an interview with Abadesi Osunsade from Product Hunt. We discussed a number of themes close to my heart, including the future of venture, Forward Partners culture and the power of mindfulness practice. Embed here, and more detail of what we discussed below. (Originally published on Product Hunt last week.). In this episode they talk about….

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Becoming the CEO of Your Own Business with a Virtual Answering Service

The Startup Magazine

If you’ve always dreamed of becoming the Chief Executive Officer of your very own company, you might not be far off in making that dream a reality. It doesn’t matter how small or large your business operations are, the best way to successfully run your own business is by putting together a kick-ass team. This isn’t a one-man show unless of course, you have a very small business that requires very little outside support.

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Finally! The URL I Can Send To My Parents To Explain What I Do For A Living.

Hunter Walker

God bless Gené Teare for now I have something which explains what I do all day in a format my parents can grok. As part of Seed Series for Crunchbase News , Gené wrote up an extended interview with me and Satya. She told us we were the first time in the series that two partners were interviewed together. That’s really emblematic of what Homebrew is – not one of us plus the other, but the combination of us both – and hopefully in a “sum greater than its parts” type o

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How Remote Working Could Benefit Your Business

YoungUpstarts

Technology has the potential to change the entire way we do business. This isn’t a secret: for years, companies have been holding video-conferences instead of meeting in person or using online tools to improve productivity. One thing that’s failed to keep up, however, is the workplace itself; despite 50% of US employees having a job that could be done at least partially remotely, telecommuters make up just over 3% of the workforce.

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Leadership Is Hard And Messy, Here’s What To Do When You Feel Stuck

YFS Magazine

Successful founders and CEOs utilize a few essential practices to help them push forward in the most difficult of times.

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How We Designed Lean Startup Conference 2019

Startup Lessons Learned

Guest post by Lean Startup Co. Events Team ? This October marks the 10th anniversary of the Lean Startup Conference. We’ve come a long way over the last decade, but this year we also decided to go back to the fundamentals. This past spring, we used our own techniques to structure and plan a program that truly meets customer needs. Our team was deeply invested in the process and as Hisham Ibrahim , Senior Faculty at Lean Startup Co. described it, “The program you'll see at this year's conference

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Managerial Skills You Need to Run Your Business

The Startup Magazine

If you are planning to manage your own startup or business after being employed or working as part of a larger business, this can be a daunting process. Managerial skills take some study and practice. There are a number of different factors that you have to take into consideration such as finances and employees that you will not have had control of in the past.

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How Does An SSL Certificate Work And Why Do I Need One?

YoungUpstarts

When you visit a website, most of the time, the URL will begin with [link] Occasionally, however, it will begin with http s ://. This additional letter at the beginning of URLs is becoming more common, and that’s a good thing. The difference between the standard [link] and [link] is that the “s” stands for “secure”—this means the data sent between a browser and server is encrypted and thus safer.

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Carey Smith Launches Unorthodox Ventures in Austin to Invest in Startups with Great Products

SiliconHills

Carey Smith sold Big Ass Fans, the company he founded in Lexington, Kentucky, for $500 million in December of 2017 and then moved to Austin. He bought Lance Armstrong’s 8,800 square foot home near downtown in 2018 and launched Unorthodox Ventures, an Austin-based business incubator and VC firm that invests in innovative companies with great […].

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How To Interpret VC Twitter Reactions To Portfolio Company Acquisitions

Hunter Walker

In my 6+ years of Homebrew , I’ve become a student of VC social media. For the first time, I pull back the cover and share this with you, putting myself at risk by breaking the venture omerta. Here’s How to Interpret VC Reactions To a Portfolio Company Acquisition. Tweets congratulatory blog post, pics from closing dinner w open wine bottles, seven year old photo of VC w the founder = RETURNED THE FUND!!!

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Starting an Online Business from Your Own Home

The Startup Magazine

Many people these days would love to take the plunge and start their own business rather than working for someone else. However, some have no idea where to start or are under the impression you need loads of money to start a business. Fortunately, the digital revolution has made it easier and cheaper for people to set up an online business on their own.

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How To Build A Customer-First Culture In 4 Steps

YoungUpstarts

by Marie Rosecrans , Senior Vice President of Small and Medium Business Marketing at Salesforce. Small business owners know establishing personal connections with customers is critical for growth. But with limited resources, there’s often not enough time or money for reaching out and developing close relationships. In fact, the latest Small & Medium Business Trends Report from Salesforce Research shows that 58% of small business owners see meeting those expectations as a challenge.

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