Sat.Feb 06, 2016 - Fri.Feb 12, 2016

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The One Video Every Silicon Valley Investor Should Watch

Both Sides of the Table

There was so much great content at the Upfront Summit but I think one held a special place in minds of most people I talked to – our panel on diversity led by my partner Hamet Watt (<– what? you’re not following him?). The message of the panel was very clear – “We don’t need your help. We want to partner with you to make money.” And I’ll elaborate on this but I wanted to start first with an important quote from Magic, said with a very positive

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10 Survival Strategies From Winning Team Leaders

Startup Professionals Musings

Did you ever wonder why some entrepreneurs always seem to have all the luck and success, while others never seem to catch a break? As an angel investor, I quickly learned that luck has very little to do with it, and I now look for some personal characteristics and leadership styles that separate the potential winners from the losers. These differences are the reason that investors say that they invest in people, rather than ideas.

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Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Show No. 20: Nayeem Hussain and Will Zell

Steve Blank

Your product and company vision needs to match your appetite for funding. And know that just because a venture failed doesn’t mean that you’re a failure. Funding challenges and other issues founders face in the early days of starting up were the focus of interviews with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on SiriusXM Channel 111 (airing weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern).

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What Small Business Opportunities Does the Future Hold?

Up and Running

If you’re still trying to figure out what business to start, or what industry to start up in, you have so many great small business opportunities to choose from. You could choose to start an already-popular business; o r, you could choose an industry based on experience, or a skill you already have. If doing the tried-and-tested doesn’t sound appealing, why not think bigger?

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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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The Four Necessary Components To Becoming A Successful Entrepreneur

YoungUpstarts

By Danielle Tate, CEO of MissNowMrs.com. It seems that America has hit the tipping point of curiosity about entrepreneurs. Television shows like ABC’s “Shark Tank” and CNBC’s “The Profit” are raking in huge viewer numbers and fueling the nation’s infatuation with entrepreneurs and startups. This naturally leads most Americans to wonder, “Do I have what it takes to be an entrepreneur?”.

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Entrepreneurs Need More Relationships And Fewer Friends

Startup Professionals Musings

Successful entrepreneurs understand the difference between a good business relationship with more people and having more friends. In fact, the focus on social networking platforms, starting with Facebook, has destroyed the meaning of the word friend and even changed it from a noun to a verb. It’s now common to have hundreds or thousands of friends online -- but no relationships.

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Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make on Day 1

Up and Running

The decisions you make on day one of your business have a ripple effect that can impact your business for years to come. How you structure your business in the beginning has a permanent impact on how efficiently your business will grow in the future. It is highly likely that in years four, five, and six, you’ll face issues that have their root causes in the decisions you made on day one.

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Building Strong Customer Relationships In Online Trading

YoungUpstarts

Image credit: Stock market graph from Shutterstock. Over the last years, there has been an explosion of online trading platforms that offer the option to trade online with the best technology and the lowest-priced account that maximizes the premium features your customers can actually use. There are all sorts of online brokers for every kind of trader and in such a competitive field you have to come up with the proper approach to building strong customer relationships.

Customer 100
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How To Increase Perceived Value (and Charge More)

ConversionXL

Perception isn’t always the same thing as reality, even when it comes to something as supposedly objective as your product’s value. In fact, the perceived value of your product is fairly malleable. There are countless studies as well as anecdotes that support the notion that you can tweak small things to increase your product’s value perception. First, what is perceived value?

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15 Entrepreneurs Reveal What Entrepreneurship Means to Them

Hearpreneur

Being an entrepreneur is a source of pride. It also evidences an individual with a huge amount of discipline and focus to be able to build a business a lot of times from just an idea. It is the ambition of an entrepreneur that built the most profitable and successful companies. The only issue is that the word entrepreneurship can often vary from person to person. #1 – Big Dreams.

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Important Reasons to Leverage Case Studies for Your SEO in 2016

Duct Tape Marketing

Important Reasons to Leverage Case Studies for Your SEO in 2016 written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing. You have come across it. In fact, you have been told this is the only way out for your website to rake in a high return on investment (ROI). Yes, that is how important search engine optimization (SEO) has become in online marketing.

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Resolving Buyer - Seller Tensions to Get Deals Done

Growthink Blog

For conversations around business financings and sales, there are natural tensions, of time , credibility , and trust , between entrepreneurs seeking to be financed/sold (“Sellers”) and the investors/acquirers that approached for $$ (“Buyers”). And if these tensions are not resolved, a deal cannot get done. Time Tension is the idea that our entrepreneur seller almost always seeks to have their business valued based on its future potential, while our investor / acquirer buyer seeks to price it ba

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No, the cloud model is not dead

deal architect

The meltdown of stocks like LinkedIn, Tableau and Splunk is leading some people to say “cloud is the new dot.com”. To start with, the term dot.com brings painful memories. 2003 was by the far the worst financial year for our.

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Why Uber Should Go Public

Both Sides of the Table

“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all those others that have been tried” – Winston Churchill. At the Upfront Summit this past week there was an electric interview of Fred Wilson led by well-researched and artful Dan Primack of Fortune Magazine that ended up making news. The newsworthy moment was when Fred expressed his view that companies like Uber should go public.

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Think about Performance Before Building a Web Application

TechEmpower

“It was running fine.” In our performance consulting work, we often hear variations of the following: “Our web application was running fine with a few hundred users. Now when we run a promotion with our new partner and get a thousand users coming in at one time, it grinds to a halt.”. We’ve heard this from startup founders, product managers, development team leads, CTOs, and others who see their product gaining traction, but simultaneously see performance falling off a cliff.

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10 Steps To Becoming A Thought Leader In Business

Startup Professionals Musings

Successful entrepreneurs often start with a “random” idea, but they quickly focus their efforts and follow a “system” to organize their startup and maximize the clout of their activities. Too many entrepreneur “wannabes” never get past the idea stage, or strike out randomly in many directions, hoping that their passion will convince people to follow them and make their business grow.

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IT: Not a single issue function

deal architect

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recently said “I am not a single-issue candidate, and I do not believe we live in a single-issue country.” It’s actually a tag line her competitors will increasingly adopt as we move from personalities to policies.

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5 Necessary E-Commerce Tips For Entrepreneurs Who Want Sales

Brandanew

Americans spent more on e-commerce sites than they did in brick-and-mortar stores for the first time in history in 2015 , when online sales exceeded the $300 billion mark. Sounds familiar in your countries too? Do you see yourself and the millennials flocking online stores instead of driving down to the neighborhood store? It is indeed time to internalize all the e-Commerce tips for entrepreneurs you’ve been hearing and apply them for your own businesses!

Sales 130
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Angel Investors Spotlight: An Inside Look at Hudson Valley Startup Fund’s Investment Process & Advice for Founders

Gust

Hudson Valley Startup Fund brings together a network of the region’s successful business and community leaders to give back, supporting the launch of the next Hudson Valley visionaries. We sat down with fund managers Chad Gomes, Johnny LeHane and Paul Hakim as they shared insights into their investment process, what they look for in both group members and startups, and.

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6 Critical Steps To A Winning Company Culture

Startup Professionals Musings

Creating the right company culture must be a top priority of every entrepreneur and business leader. Simply speaking, culture-driven businesses put their people first, and people make the business, rather than the other way around. Today’s business mantra must be “Take care of your people and they will take care of your customers.” Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done.

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The never-ending technology hype cycle

deal architect

Quicken Loans says it has 30 years of lending experience and closed more than $140 billion in mortgage loans in 2013-2014. They say they have streamlined the mortgage loan process and it is “engineered to amaze”.

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10 Things I Wished I Knew Before I Started Blogging

Brandanew

Everyone blogs these days. It is no longer something to get shocked with… well at least that is what most people think. Before I started blogging everything seemed easy. Soon I realized, a lot of people blog just for the sake of blogging. Very few actually make any money ever and even fewer can make it a sustainable profession. So, what is the difference here?

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A Beginner’s Guide to Programmatic Advertising & RTB

YoungUpstarts

by Andrew Fischer, Co-Founder and CEO, Choozle. Programmatic media buying is the new wave of buying digital advertising. With a recent MediaPost report stating that “66% of marketers are planning to raise programmatic advertising budgets” in 2016, there is no indication that is going anywhere. So what exactly is programmatic? “Programmatic” ad buying typically refers to the use of software or automation to purchase digital advertising, as opposed to the traditional and timely processes.

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6 Steps To Refocus Your Business On Customer Delight

Startup Professionals Musings

Having the best solution is a good start these days, but a solution alone is no longer enough to keep customer attention and loyalty. They expect to be surprised and delighted as well by their pre-purchase experience and post-purchase interactions. The most memorable businesses, like Starbucks and Apple, no longer sell products, they sell ‘experiences’ with a product at the center.

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One Microsoftin vendor world

deal architect

In the last couple of years I have written about the One Microsoft strategy – its ability to leverage a wide range of assets. In a demo at last year’s Convergence event it brought together its CRM, Office365, Skype for.

Software 163
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How to Write For Amazing Sales: Don’t Be Sorry!

Brandanew

As a girl, I’ve struggled with this situation for a long time. Although, to be clear, this is far beyond gender stereotypes and more about cultural influences and your own writing styles. I have to look out for weak words in my writing and don the sales person’s hat. How to write for amazing sales involves a lot more than your ability to deliver the best goods and services, as I have found out.

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3 Of The Best: Business Insights From Leading UK Entrepreneurs

YoungUpstarts

Branson, Sugar, and Singh. These names thrown together sound like the title of a high-end law firm, but of course they are the names of the three most well-known modern entrepreneurs in the UK. What we’ll try to discover in this article is what makes these men special. More importantly, many people are entrepreneurial, so what has allowed these three to rise so far above the average entrepreneur and amass such incredible fortunes?

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The Complete Guide to Starting an Online Boutique

Up and Running

Searching for the perfect products, finding a color scheme that speaks to you, building a brand that embodies the style and look you love—if starting an online boutique sounds like heaven to you, I’m not surprised. But, before you jump headfirst into hand-picking items and deciding on website fonts, let’s start at the beginning. Here is my guide to starting your own online boutique; we’ll cover everything from business plan resources to using brand ambassadors to help you build a social me

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Got Local PR? Think Bigger for Better Results!

Rembrandt Communications

It’s time to set large, PR (public relations) goals and exceed expectations! Do you love your current public relations (PR) plan? Do you even have one in place? If not, you are losing out on third-party credibility you simply cannot obtain in any other way. And if you are just concentrating on local media, it’s […]. The post Got Local PR? Think Bigger for Better Results!

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Founders – Use Your Down Round To Clean Up Your Cap Table

Feld Thoughts

Mark Suster wrote a great post yesterday titled The Resetting of the Startup Industry. Go read it now – I’ll wait. Once again, as we find ourselves in the middle of a significant public market correction, especially around technology stocks, there’s an enormous amount of noise in the system, as there always is. Much of it is very short term focused and, like a giant tractor beam, draws the conversation into a very short time horizon (as in days or weeks).

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5 Tips On How To Use The Cloud Effectively For Your Startup

YoungUpstarts

by Mauricio Prinzlau, CEO of Cloudwards.net. According to a Rackspace survey, it was reported that through cloud computing, small and medium businesses have increased their profits by at least 25 percent and up to 75 percent. While there are still data security issues lingering, organizations are very hopeful about cloud computing. And why shouldn’t they be?

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The Key Drivers for SaaS Success

For Entrepreneurs

SaaS/subscription businesses are much more complex than traditional businesses, and SaaS performance cannot be measured in the same way as traditional businesses are measured. Based on a talk given at the SaaStr Annual Conference in San Francisco, this slide deck offers a comprehensive and detailed look at the key metrics that are needed to understand and.

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Our (refocused) investment thesis

Version One Ventures

Over the years, we have invested in almost every category out there: from ad tech and content, to gaming, hardware, marketplaces, e-commerce, and SaaS. We’re constantly revisiting the types of businesses we should be investing in and refining our investment thesis driven by three key questions: Which markets/business types do we understand the best?

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Book: When Breath Becomes Air

Feld Thoughts

Paul Kalanithi’s book When Breath Becomes Air is one of the best books I’ve ever read. I stayed up late the past two nights reading it while in bed. As I put my Kindle on the bedside table last night I had tears in my eyes. Paul passed away on March 9, 2015 at age 37. He was a Stanford-trained neurosurgeon and writer. He was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in 2013, though he never smoked.

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Overcoming Business Challenges: 5 Ways To Get Back Your Business

YoungUpstarts

by Diana Ennen, President of Virtual Word Publishing and author of “ Virtual Assistant, The Series: Become a Highly Successful, Sought After VA “. Running your business definitely has its challenges. It’s how you deal with them that makes the difference. Here are a few tips to overcome your business challenges: Letting others know your value. So many business owners just don’t understand fully what all you do because they aren’t doing the work.

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Be helpful, not right

The Equity Kicker

I’m very excited about our FP50 mentor network which we launched last night with a dinner for mentors and a couple of our portfolio companies. Startups.co.uk wrote about it under the headline Tech leaders unite to support UK’s fledgling e-commerce start-ups , and that’s about right. I was humbled by the quality of our guests. We put a great deal of thought into making sure FP50 will be really helpful to our startups.