A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
OCTOBER 11, 2010
This is Part 5 of the 5-part series: 5 lessons from 150 startup pitches. Ask a technical founder about his startup, and he'll proudly describe his stunning software — simple, compelling, useful, fun. Then he'll describe his cutting-edge platform — cloud-based, scalable, distributed version control, continuous integration, one-click-deploy.
Both Sides of the Table
OCTOBER 12, 2010
A while back I wrote a bunch of posts on Sales & Marketing and have been meaning to get back to that theme for a while. Even if you don’t have “direct&# sales I would tell you that “everything is a sale&# including fund raising, hiring, getting press and doing business development. So I hope these posts will be useful to all and not just those who need road warriors.
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SoCal CTO
OCTOBER 11, 2010
This month’s big question is Examples of Big Impact from Technology and I’ve taken it as an opportunity to go back and look at the elements of different projects that I’ve worked on over the years that have had a big impact. In this post, I’m going to focus on a common model that has been part of several of the highest impact projects. At it’s core, the model is pretty simple: Guide through setting meaningful personal goals Teach how you can hold yourself accountable to those goals Help the user
This is going to be BIG.
OCTOBER 10, 2010
Every business person with a dollar and a dream these days thinks they’re a technical co-founder away from interweb stardom. It’s great if you can find one—but even if you can, I’m not sure it’s always the best move. That’s counter to what I used to think before, but I’ve done some more thinking about it. The reality is, a lot of the stuff being built now isn’t rocket science.
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
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak
OCTOBER 14, 2010
I spent an entire hour watching the sales video for a new product you probably have heard of, it’s called… Kajabi You can watch the video for yourself right here – What Is Kajabi? – and then sign up for a 14 day trial (the trial option may be over depending when you read this blog post). I wrote previously about Kajabi and some of the competing content marketing systems available to us who sell information online in this blog post – Which Content Management System I
Ben's Blog
OCTOBER 14, 2010
“Concrete shoes won’t help in the river. I don’t care if you is Michael Phelps my n*&#a”. —Lil’ Wayne. The biggest difference between being a great functional manager and being a great general manager—and particularly a great CEO—is that as a general manager, you must hire and manage people who are far more competent at their jobs than you would be at their jobs.
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 13, 2010
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible – and achieve it, generation after generation. Pearl S. Buck. Ask people what makes entrepreneurs successful and you’ll hear a familiar list of adjectives; agile, tenacious, resilient, opportunistic, etc. What you don’t hear is that often they didn’t know any better.
Software By Rob
OCTOBER 12, 2010
Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← Your Market is Smaller Than You Think Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding → The #1 Goal of Your Website – Slides from my Business of Software Talk Startups If youre trying grow your startup youve come to the right place.
Startup Professionals Musings
OCTOBER 13, 2010
If you are looking for an outside investor, you need to know how they see you. Different types of investors look for startups at different levels of maturity. If your startup is at the wrong stage for the investor you are approaching, the courting is a waste of time for both of you. For instance, if your company is only a few weeks old and you have zero customers and your product offering is still in design, don’t expect someone to hand over $10 million to fund your efforts.
Campus Entrepreneurship
OCTOBER 11, 2010
One of my student teams is working on a business plan for a campus mapping application company. Their ideas are fascinating and I look forward to seeing their output at the end of the semester. The Wired Campus blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting piece on various location driven applications and how they are being used in and around campuses.
Feld Thoughts
OCTOBER 11, 2010
At a talk I gave recently to a room full of first year graduate business school students, I was asked “what motivates me.&# Before I answered, I felt compelled to explain what intrinsic motivation is and used the following example to describe it. “Tonight, I’ll spend about 90 minutes talking to y’all. I’m doing it because I enjoy it and I learn from it.
Rembrandt Communications
OCTOBER 12, 2010
I’m swamped with new client work, optimizing Web sites and SEO copywriting this week, so I’ll keep it short. But I wanted to share a question with you that I’m asked often: How often do I need to update my website? Well, the answer is, if you have not updated your website in the last [.].
Startup Professionals Musings
OCTOBER 9, 2010
By Roger S. Robinson, Ph.D. Can an intangible like a company’s culture make a difference in your business? That is a tough question. After all what is culture? And can it impact your bottom line? The concept of culture really entered the world of business through Peters and Waterman’s “ In Search of Excellence.” They defined it in terms of successful organizations permeated with strong and sustaining systems of beliefs.
ReadWriteStart
OCTOBER 14, 2010
At today's roundtable we had some intensive discussions around market sizing and its impact on financing. You have heard, I am sure, that venture capitalists only invest in very large market opportunities - $500 million to $1 billion. But you have, perhaps, heard less specific discussions on what angel investors are looking for. Well, some angel investors are looking for exactly the same thing as what VCs are looking for.
Feld Thoughts
OCTOBER 9, 2010
Now that Do More Faster is out and I appreciate how hard it is to write and publish a book, I read every book through a different (more appreciative) lens. This morning, I spent three hours on the coach and plowed through Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry.
This is going to be BIG.
OCTOBER 15, 2010
Consumer web services rarely win on features. In fact, it hardly even makes sense to think about them in that way. Did any of Facebook's 500 million users do a side by side feature comparison of Facebook and MySpace to decide where they were going to spend their social time online? I doubt it. Yet, the product that is Facebook is an amalgamation of a set of feature implementations that clearly amounted to more than the sum of its parts.
Startup Professionals Musings
OCTOBER 12, 2010
By Akira Hirai We can measure success in many ways. In business, one important measure is the value of the company. That’s because a company’s value is a composite of all of the quantitative and qualitative factors that comprise a company: revenues, expenses, risks, growth prospects, quality of the management team, competitive advantages, strength of the intellectual property, and so forth.
ReadWriteStart
OCTOBER 12, 2010
Investment research firm CB Insights has released its report on the third quarter of 2010. And the report is very much a mixed bag: overall funding dollars are down, but the number of deals is up. And seed funding in particular, according the report, is strong. VC funding dipped to $5.4 billion in the third quarter of this year, a five quarter low. But deal activity recorded its second highest tally in 8 quarters.
Feld Thoughts
OCTOBER 14, 2010
Simplification and iteration are two key themes that repeatedly show up in the stories from Do More Faster. Today I’ve been watching a real-time case study of those two themes unfold from our portfolio company BigDoor. The guys at BigDoor are trying to build a platform that powers game mechanics for any site or app, and they recognized early on that this isn’t as simple as just adding badges to your site and calling it good.
VC Cafe
OCTOBER 14, 2010
I sraeli startup MySupermarket , UK’s independent grocery shopping and comparison site, has completed a new round of investment of $7.4 million, led by Greylock and Pitango. The company has raised $22 million to date. Along with the announcement of the founding Mysupermarket has also made some significant changes in its managament team, by adding Alon Bloch as CEO, replacing the founder Amir Ofer.
Startup Professionals Musings
OCTOBER 11, 2010
If you are an entrepreneur these days, or trying to grow an existing business, everyone is telling you that you need to use social media. There are many ‘experts’ out there telling you how to do it, or even offering their services. But very few are talking about how to measure your results, and the right metrics for optimizing your marketing environment.
onstartups.com
OCTOBER 15, 2010
Naming a startup is hard. Very hard. On the one hand, the pragmatic entrepreneur thinks: “I shouldn’t be wasting time on this — for every successful company with a great name, there’s one with a crappy name that did just fine. It doesn’t seem like a name has much influence on the outcome at all. I’m going to get back to writing code.
Feld Thoughts
OCTOBER 11, 2010
Sunday morning I read The Power of Less by Leo Babauta. I’m a big fan of Leo’s Zen Habits blog (I was turned onto it a few months ago by Amy ) and I had high hopes for the book. It delivered. Several times a week I hear from a friend or colleague that he or she is overwhelmed with the amount of stuff going on in their world. Occasionally someone ends up in my office in tears as they struggle to make sense of the madness that has become their life.
VC Cafe
OCTOBER 13, 2010
T he latest IVC Online Report is out and Q3 results are in: 96 Israeli high-tech companies raised $341 million from venture capital funds and other venture investors – both local and foreign – in the third quarter of 2010. Koby Simana, CEO of IVC Research Center, said: “The data suggest a slow recovery in the local high-tech sector’s ability to raise capital.
Startup Professionals Musings
OCTOBER 10, 2010
For those of you looking for startup ideas that are hot today and recession proof, consider anything to do with saving energy, sustaining the environment, or solutions to the global warming problem. These are especially good for Gen-Y (millennials) who have the passion, or every Gen-Y “wanna-be” (over 25 but not yet fulfilled). Especially during a recovering economy, these will get you extra attention with investors, as long as basic business principles are not forgotten.
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak
OCTOBER 10, 2010
Today Leslie is talking about productivity, revealing to you what tasks he has stopped doing in his business and what three core tasks he is now focusing most of his time on so he gets rapid results. If you’re not getting things done, reading this article will help you prioritize. When it comes to growing an online business, it is easy to think that you should be able to do everything.
Feld Thoughts
OCTOBER 10, 2010
One of the events on our Do More Faste r book tour will be something we are calling Angels in the Architecture. Mike Platt from Cooley (one of our book tour sponsors) came up with the idea of doing an hour long session with a panel of entrepreneurs, angel investors, and VCs discussing the dynamics between angels and VCs. Having been all three, I find this a particularly important topic and it’s something we spend a lot of time discussing at TechStars in the third month as the teams gear
Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook
OCTOBER 14, 2010
I am often asked about how improv can be used in Idea Generation. I’m asked because I’ve done improv in Chicago at the schools there (IO and Players Workshop of Second City) and I do Idea Generation as a business. While I’m not a serious candidate for Whose Line Is It Anyway, I have learned, [.]. Tags: Creative Problem Solving (CPS) Creativity and Self-Expression Idea Generation Improvisation Innovation.
The Startup Lawyer
OCTOBER 9, 2010
With the success of Y Combinator and TechStars , several incubators (sometimes referred to as “accelerators&# ) have popped up everywhere. Some have done quite well. Here in Dallas, Tech Wildcatters had a strong class and is opening up applications for the Spring 2011 class later this month. But this morning I read a Dallas Business Journal article that I found amusing: A new accelerator is planning to invest $200,000 and provide up to 45,000 square feet of office space to about 10 mobile
VC Cafe
OCTOBER 15, 2010
I nterntial : co-founded by Geoffrey Mugliston (who previously guest-posted on VC Cafe), Interntial is developing serious technology using NLP technology. Self reported: Intential develops next-generation language processing technologies that enable businesses to derive greater value from their unstructured data assets. Its founding team includes pre-eminent experts in the domains of computational linguistics and web-scale data mining.
Feld Thoughts
OCTOBER 15, 2010
I periodically write the first column for PE Hub. Dan Primack, who is now writing a great column at Fortune called Term Sheet used to do this; there are now guest writers (including me) who do this column. Yesterday, I wrote a column about the book that David Cohen and I just wrote called Do More Faster. Enjoy! Writing a book is hard. Really hard.
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak
OCTOBER 11, 2010
Leigh Peele was one of the very first students to take part in both my Blog Mastermind and Membership Site Mastermind programs and follow through all the steps to launch her own blog and information products. Today she has created lifestyle freedom thanks to her online business helping other people lose fat. I’ve invited Leigh to share some of her experiences running her online business, and today she begins with this analysis of what it has taken for her to become an authority in her nich
Up and Running
OCTOBER 12, 2010
Startups getting easier? Yes, and I believe it too. But there’s a follow-up question required. First, there’s this from the trends summary of The Intuit 2020 Report – 20 Trends for the Next Decade : Starting a small business will be easier – and more affordable than ever. The cost of starting and running a small or personal business will continue to decline as smaller, lighter and smarter systems, components and manufacturing methods emerge.
VC Cafe
OCTOBER 15, 2010
I ntential : co-founded by Geoffrey Mugliston (who previously guest-posted on VC Cafe), Interntial is developing serious technology using NLP technology. Self reported: Intential develops next-generation language processing technologies that enable businesses to derive greater value from their unstructured data assets. Its founding team includes pre-eminent experts in the domains of computational linguistics and web-scale data mining.
Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook
OCTOBER 13, 2010
I don’t profess to be the foremost expert on all things UK Government budget. Still, I feel like I have to comment on yesterday’s announcements regarding support for higher education tuition in the UK. In a nutshell, tuition for higher education will be allowed to float free, and, loans to students will shift to a [.]. Tags: Innovation Politics & Government Trends, Futurism, and Research coalition government Conservative party David Cameron engineers higher education India UK tui
crowdSPRING Blog
OCTOBER 11, 2010
It’s tempting to count everything that can be counted. The current obsession with social media ROI is just one example – of many – showing how numbers influence our behavior. I had the opportunity to again think about this issue last week when I was on a panel at a Startup Bootcamp event in Boston. We discussed, among other things, data analysis and how some startups regularly look at the data to learn insights and help plan strategy.
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