Sat.Aug 04, 2018 - Fri.Aug 10, 2018

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A Rule of 40 walkthrough

David Cohen

For SaaS businesses, I’ve found the rule of 40 to be a useful management tool. The basic idea is that as a SaaS business, you want your growth percentage plus your EBITDA percentage to be 40 (or better). So if you’re growing at 50% per year, you can “invest” in growth by having a 10% burn (expense as compared to revenue). If you’re breakeven at 40% growth, that’s also great.

Video 68
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6 Guidelines For Proper Responses To Investor Queries

Startup Professionals Musings

Entrepreneurs looking for investor funding often fail to realize that all money comes with strings. For example, if you have watched the Shark Tank TV series, you probably noticed that the Sharks always ask the entrepreneurs for their intended “use of funds.” Those who respond with one of the wrong answers, such as “I want to pay myself a salary,” usually go home empty-handed.

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How To Choose The Best Forex Platform

YoungUpstarts

The Forex Market is the largest financial market with a turnover of over 3 trillion dollars in any given day. Going with the best forex platform, for forex trading, is of utmost importance if one is to have a precise balance between the high risks and rewards on offer, in the trillion-dollar marketplace. A forex platform is a software suite that allows one to access and interact with the market.

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24 Entrepreneurs Explain What They Love About Being An Entrepreneur

Hearpreneur

Being in love is great. Being in love with your business, when you’re an entrepreneur, is even better. Waking up each morning knowing you are getting to do exactly what you love is more than most people could ever say about any “job” they have had. Although there are days when tossing in your hat seems like a viable option, remembering how much you love your “job” can quickly snap an entrepreneur out of that mentality.

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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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5 Best Indicators That It’s Time to Scale Your Business

Up and Running

If it were possible to stay a small business forever to cut significant costs from hiring new employees and equipment, everyone would be doing it. However, enterprises with teams of hundreds and thousands of people exist. At some point, they realized the workloads were increasing due to increased demand, and so they adjusted accordingly. Regardless of the size of your business, there is a right and wrong time to scale.

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10 Tips To Strategic Decisions Made Without A Crisis

Startup Professionals Musings

Strategic decisions set the overall direction for your business, whereas operational decisions set day-to-day operations. Unfortunately, most of the entrepreneurs who contact me for guidance only seem to work on strategic issues when they are in a crisis, such as losing a major distributor or being swamped with customer complaints. It’s a bit late when strategy becomes operational.

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7 Compelling Reasons Why You Should Redesign Your Small Business Website

crowdSPRING Blog

Is your small business website helping or hindering your business? If you’re like most small businesses, your website is outdated, and not helping you to increase revenues and sales. Even worse, your website might be completely disconnected from the brand you’ve been building. Here are 7 key reasons why you should consider redesigning your website.

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How to Run a Productive Monthly Business Plan Review Meeting

Up and Running

This article, which originally appeared on our LivePlan Blog , is part of our “Business Planning Guide” —a curated list of our articles that will help you with the planning process! Most people think that meetings are a waste of time. They’re right. Too many meetings are run poorly, have no real objective, and waste employees’ time—which kills productivity.

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The Story Behind My Investment In Downstream

Haystack

Earlier this summer, my friend Michael told me about a small investment his team made up in Seattle in the Amazon ecosystem. We were about to move houses and with all the impending details that process was generating, I initially didn’t give it a proper look. As we were reviewing new deals, we flagged this one for being different in nature. And as we dug in more, we began to uncover how little we know about a new potential business line for Amazon.

Seattle 69
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4 Reasons Why You Should Have An Accounting Process In Your Business

YoungUpstarts

by Krystal Russell, CPA at LYFE Accounting. Apart of being a successful entrepreneur is wearing many different hats. In the beginning stages of most startups, the founder is the manager, marketer, salesman, among other titles. Included in this list is the role of accountant. Unfortunately, most small business owners are not accountants and find themselves neglecting this function completely.

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Seven Compelling Reasons Why You Should Redesign Your Website

crowdSPRING Blog

It’s a given by this point that your business should have a website. Establishing a presence on the web was probably one of the first things you set up, after your logo and branding strategy. But is your website as effective as it could be? And is it helping or hindering your business? As we wrote recently , If your website isn’t well-designed, quick-to-load, and easy-to-navigate, you’re sabotaging your brand’s valuable online presence.

Mobile 48
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Have you experienced your “Every Three-Million Dollar Crisis?”

Berkonomics

Here is a phenomenon I discovered over time when dealing with many small start-ups in their early revenue period. A very predictable series of rotating crises seemed to befall most every one of these young companies. These became so predictable that I could accurately label them as occurring about every $3 million in gross profit (or revenue for service companies).

Revenue 48
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10 Venture Realities Will Position Your Business Plan

Startup Professionals Musings

If you are one of the new age of entrepreneurs who hates the thought of doing a business plan as a first step in starting your new venture you will love this message. More and more professionals agree that a better strategy is to explore and fine tune your assumptions before declaring a specific plan with financial projections based only on your dream and passion.

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Productivity Progress – 5 Ways To Get More Out Of Your Workforce

YoungUpstarts

It’s no secret that happy employees mean a happy and prosperous business. Companies that have employee-friendly policies provide a better work-life balance, create a less pressurized workplace have higher employee retention rate, and get more out of their workforce. On the other hand, businesses that don’t appreciate their employees have a tough time holding on to them.

Product 100
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Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Duct Tape Marketing

Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Marketing Podcast with Dolly Chugh. Podcast Transcript. My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Dolly Chugh. Chugh is a psychologist and associate professor of management and organizations at the Stern School of Business at NYU.

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Timing: When to raise seed funding.

Scalable Startup

Raising seed capital is a tricky business. I get approached often by tech startups looking for their first outside funding. They come in lots of different flavors and stages of fundability. Most are making major mistakes in their approach when seeking capital. Remember, this is a professional process you are conducting with legal and financial processes.

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7 Ways To Demonstrate Leadership In A Business Crisis

Startup Professionals Musings

When the business is struggling, most business owners I know feel like anything but a leader. They start second-guessing their own vision, and are prone to making snap decisions suggested by someone else, in lieu of their carefully crafted processes and metrics. Entrepreneurs who can keep their cool under fire are the long-term winners I look for as an experienced angel investor.

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The 5 Tools I Use To Stay On Top Of Everything

YoungUpstarts

by Yiannis Gavrielides, CEO of Covve. I have always been organised and I don’t like to let anything drop; I am an 80:20 person and I look for efficiency in everything I do; I love gadgets and technology and I am an early adopter. I need all the help I can get to manage the combination of: (i) running a startup, (ii) being a board member in a few young and fast-growing companies, (iii) remaining close with my family consisting of a demanding wife and 3 kids, and still having time to spend with my

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How to Use Cornerstone Content to Kick-start Automatic-SEO?

ReadWriteStart

Businesses today have no time when it comes to creating a website and putting in the right effort to rank in local search. It is perfectly normal since you all know that cost of retaining a customer is way cheaper than acquiring a new one. Similarly a business would rather pay for a lead that […]. The post How to Use Cornerstone Content to Kick-start Automatic-SEO?

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Updated Israeli startup landscape maps – 2018

VC Cafe

Startup landscape maps remain, in my opinion, one of the best ways to quickly scan an industry vertical and understand how it breaks down into sub sectors. In this post I collected the Israeli. This is a content summary only. Click on the post title to continue reading this post, share your comments, browse the website and more!

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8 Ways To Ensure That Your Website Is Winning For You

Startup Professionals Musings

It’s hard to be successful in any business when your customers can’t find you, or they find you and still can’t figure out whether your solution works for them. Thus I was surprised to see in a recent CNBC survey that 45 percent of small businesses still don’t have a website. These are missing a major opportunity to be found instantly via the Internet, locally and around the world.

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5 Ways To Put Power Into Your Presentations

YoungUpstarts

by Chris Westfall, author of “ Leadership Language: Using Authentic Communication to Drive Results “ Did you know that two-thirds of managers are uncomfortable talking to employees for any reason at all? That’s a troubling statistic. Being able to share your story with others is central to your impact as a leader. If this is an area you need to brush up on — and even if it’s not — we need to look at your delivery to make sure your message will matter.

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16-49-81

Feld Thoughts

What do these numbers mean to you? At a recent offsite, during our conversation about evolving our communication patterns (which I refer to, in my head, as “the Matrix”), Ryan said “16-49-81.” Everyone stared at him and I responded “4-squared, 7-squared, 9-squared.” Then, everyone nodded their heads but were probably thinking “these guys are numerology goofballs.” But then Ryan said, “ Metcalfe’s Law ” and everyone immediately und

Channel 92
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A Clockwork 4 Week Vacation – Case Study of Cyndi Thomason of bookskeep

Mike Michalowicz

What does this picture remind you of? I think it looks a lot like that still from Gone With the Wind, the one taken just after Scarlett O’Hara says, “As God as my witness, I’ll never go hungry again!”. That’s not Scarlett in the picture. That’s Cyndi Thomason, founder and president of Bookskeep, standing in front of Pyrocumulus clouds at the Kileaua eruption in Hawaii.

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Finding the Right Space to Grow your Start Up

The Startup Magazine

We have spent the last few months developing a Start-Up Guide for Moving Offices to provide useful information and help companies avoid the many pitfalls associated with relocation. Finding and moving office is one of the many challenges a start-up will face. If not handled properly, the process can result in expensive mistakes which may be detrimental to the future of the business.

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3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Ignore Blockchain Technology

YoungUpstarts

Terminology such as blockchain technology and cryptocurrency have found their way into the mainstream media in recent years, with the phrase “bitcoin price” becoming one of the most popular searches on Google in 2017. Despite such exposure – and huge financial investment from big businesses such as of JP Morgan Chase and Microsoft – the majority of the general public still aren’t aware of how exactly blockchain technology works.

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Where Does Foundry Group Invest?

Feld Thoughts

Semil Shah recently wrote a post titled Investing Outside The Bay Area. In it, he talked about his own experience expanding his investment horizons beyond the bay area, but also mentioned some other folks, including us and USV, where he did a quick analysis of the location of our partner funds. From Semil’s post: “Another firm linked closely to USV — Foundry Group in Boulder — has also been investing with an eye for geographic diversity.

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Technology Is Reshaping Real Estate: What You Need To Know

YFS Magazine

Technological advancements have a tendency to rapidly change industries. Tech is not just reshaping real estate; it’s revolutionizing it. In real time.

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Entrepreneur Benefits of Cryptocurrency in 2018

The Startup Magazine

Cryptocurrency has changed the way we invest our savings, raise capital, and perform transactions with decentralized digital cash. It is a once-in-a-lifetime creation that presented our lives with such a breakthrough, especially in financial technology. After several years since the existence of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, entrepreneurs are seeing the benefits of adopting blockchain technology in their dealings this 2018, as the use of cryptocurrency can give entrepreneurs advantages in

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Mobile Payments: Say Hello To Google Pay “Smart Tap”

YoungUpstarts

by Mark Sands, Co-Founder and CEO of High Risk Merchant Account LLC. Google has just launched the new Google Pay redesign, with a new interface and overhauled on the payment app. Google Pay will replace the older Android Pay platform. Google Pay will allow user across multiple devices, this includes I-Phone IOS users and will surely take market share from competing Apple Pay customers.

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June Launches their Second Generation Oven for $499

Feld Thoughts

When Amy and I cook, we want it to be as hassle-free as possible. That’s where the June Oven comes in. I first learned about the June Oven in 2014 and was impressed with how the June Oven was using technology to make cooking easier and more time efficient. Not only did we invest in June, but I’ve owned a June Oven for over two years. Now four years later since I first spoke to June co-founders Matt Van Horn and Nikhil Bhogal, June has launched their second generation oven and it’s better than ev

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Improve And Monitor Your Small Business Credit Score

YFS Magazine

A good business credit score can be a cornerstone in the success of your small business. Here are three things you can do to improve it.

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Improve Marketing Impact with Efficient Promotional Products

The Startup Magazine

Each company tries its best to look for a profitable market for making larger profits. Business owners can’t just expect that people will come and buy their services without thinking about them. The idea of the worldwide market has expanded the odds of achieving the entire world market which can be exceptionally useful for any person who is running any type of business.

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Why Now Is A Good Time For Young Entrepreneurs

YoungUpstarts

The world of business regularly undergoes a changing of the guard, which is only natural given that only the most enterprising and innovative individuals can succeed in the choppy waters of entrepreneurship. That being said, the world is undergoing significant changes and advances in technology at an unprecedented speed. The young entrepreneurs who grew up in the midst of this technological boom have been slowly but surely changing the face of businesses, and will continue to do so for some time

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When to be lean

The Equity Kicker

Ben Horowitz, founder of leading venture firm Andreessen Horowitz and a successful entrepreneur prior to that published a post over the weekend: The Case for the Fat Start-Up. In it he argues that lean thinking has been overdone and that startup CEOs should be more aggressive raising capital and investing in building value in their companies. His reasoning is that being number one in a market is the only thing that counts, and that it therefore makes sense to go all out to achieve that goal.

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So, You Want to be a Professor

The Entrepreneurial Mind

President Calvin Coolidge once said, “Teaching is one of the noblest of professions.” It’s also a great gig! I have had many conversations over the years with people who feel drawn to becoming a professor. I used to have a pretty standard spiel. After all, higher education in the Western world remained relatively unchanged for […]. The post So, You Want to be a Professor appeared first on Dr Jeff Cornwall.