Sat.Oct 23, 2010 - Fri.Oct 29, 2010

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Want to Work in VC? Here’s How

Both Sides of the Table

I’m often asked by people, “how do I get into VC?&# and I normally respond by saying, “there is no easy path. It’s often a combination of luck, relationships & timing. Often these jobs aren’t even publicized.&#. Well, I know 3-4 VC jobs that are publicly available. GRP Partners is looking to hire two analysts (maybe even three) to join our practice in Los Angeles.

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Six Entrepreneur Skills That Angel Investors Love

Startup Professionals Musings

I’ve noticed that some entrepreneurs seem to have no trouble attracting investors, while others with a great business plan struggle with it. The reality is that angel investors are humans, and personal traits often make or break the relationship, even before the investment is considered. On the top line, angel investors look to invest in entrepreneurs that have an almost unwavering passion and sense of urgency.

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Excerpt from "Do More Faster" - Avoid Co-Founder Conflict by Dharmesh Shah

ReadWriteStart

Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup is the new book by David Cohen , founder and CEO of TechStars, and Brad Feld , managing director of Foundry Group. Contributors include dozens of TechStars mentors and founder alumni, including Dharmesh Shah the founder and CEO of HubSpot and the curator of the OnStartups blog and community.

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HOW TO: Build an App for Your Small Business

mashable.com

Top Topics Twitter YouTube Facebook iPhone Google Video Google Buzz Social media Android MARKETING Advertise Network Blippr iPhone App Mashable France MashDeck Twitter App Mobile Site Social Media Events Twitter Guide Book Facebook Guide Book Partners App Development WordPress Experts MaxCDN Content Delivery Dynect Managed DNS Rackspace Hosting Intridea About Us Submit a Tip!

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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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Whurley on Augmented Reality at Innotech

Austin Startup

So, it’s been a year since you were named as the AI TP I nformation Technology of the Year. What is happening with the flux capacitor and the Whurley movement? It’s been an insane year. I left BMC Software in November of 2009 and took a few months off to be with my family. In January, I co-founded Chaotic Moon Studios (The Mobile Application Studio) and everything has been a blur since.

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Me and Sonia List 10 Lies of Entrepreneurship

Up and Running

This list started with 5 Lies of Entrepreneurship on Sonia Simone’s Remarkable Communications blog. She listed: That entrepreneurs are some kind of special breed of human being; that they’re different from you or me. That a business has to eat your life. That entrepreneurs have to be crazy risk-takers. That there’s a Right Way and a Wrong Way.

More Trending

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HOW TO: Connect with Other Entrepreneurs Online

mashable.com

Top Topics Twitter YouTube Facebook iPhone Google Video Google Buzz Social media Android MARKETING Advertise Network Blippr iPhone App Mashable France MashDeck Twitter App Mobile Site Social Media Events Twitter Guide Book Facebook Guide Book Partners App Development WordPress Experts MaxCDN Content Delivery Dynect Managed DNS Rackspace Hosting Intridea About Us Submit a Tip!

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Ninja Affiliate Plugin Review – Affiliate Marketing For Blogs Made Easy

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

I have a confession to make. I’m lazy. This has served me well in some instances, for example it has forced me to find elegant and simple solutions that require minimal effort and complexity to set up and function. I’ve also sought out 80/20 ratios in my life based on what I really want – not just what society says I should want – to build a lifestyle that most people would dream about.

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Austin-Based Riptano Can Haz Valley Monies

Austin Startup

We last reported on Riptano’s launch in April – and just a few months later the company has announced they already raised a tidy $2.7MM in a Series A. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, while Sequoia Capital and Jason Calacanis also got in on the action. John Vrionis of Lightspeed Venture Partners will join Riptano’s board. The company said they will use the cash to hire developers and further build out their business team to better serve their customers.

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Wall Street, Football, and The Great Deception

Growthink Blog

Watching my beloved New England Patriots barely escape with a victory this Sunday, I was both amused and appalled by the constant T.D. Ameritrade advertisements touting their “great selection of ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds).” Now while I have a very high regard for the intellectual capacity and market savvy of the typical football fan, these ads did beg the question – “Are football fans, between commercials on Sundays, really out there checking the opening of the Nikkei, gathering market intelli

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The Future of Startup Funding

www.paulgraham.com

Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. August 2010 Two years ago I wrote about what I called " a huge, unexploitedopportunity in startup funding :" the growing disconnect betweenVCs, whose current business model requires them to invest largeamounts, and a large class of startups that need less than theyused to. Increasingly, startups want a couple hundred thousanddollars, not a couple million. [ 1 ] The opportunity is a lot less unexploited now.

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How Launching A Free Product Doubled My Income

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

A few weeks ago, I decided to take on a new venture. I felt a bit stagnant with what I was doing, so I decided that it was time to release a new product. This decision was made after listening to a podcast about product development and realizing that I really didn’t have a product. After kicking myself in the butt for sitting on a bunch of knowledge and not doing anything about it, I decided to stop wasting time, and start taking more action.

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Entrepreneurship as a Science – The Business Model/Customer Development Stack

Steve Blank

Over the last 50 years engineers have moved from building computers out of individual transistors to building with prepackaged logic gates. Then they adopted standard microprocessors (e.g. x86 , ARM.) At the same time every computer company was writing its own operating system. Soon standard operating systems (e.g. Windows, Linux ) emerged. In the last decade open source software (e.g LAMP ) emerged for building web servers.

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Ten Top Rules of Successful Entrepreneurship

Startup Professionals Musings

In these tough economic times, more and more people are turning to entrepreneurship as an alternative to traditional employment. I applaud this trend, but caution all of you thinking this direction to approach entrepreneurship with your eyes wide open. It is not for everyone, as the entrepreneur’s path is fraught with challenges. Many experts have tried to clearly lay out the criteria for success in a way that allows you to judge your own situation and your own temperament, and make a rational d

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6 Things a Non-Engineer Should Know Before Founding a Web Startup

blog.wepay.com

« Greek Billing Services: Collecting Fraternity Dues WePay just got its first commercial! » 6 Things a Non-Engineer Should Know Before Founding a Web Startup By Rich Aberman Despite the obvious look of shock and panic on the faces of my WePay teammates, I recently committed my first lines of production code. Although It took over a year and a half for me to contribute to WePay’s code base, and it’s still not particularly substantive (a few lines of html on the exterior of our site),

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Reputation isn't as powerful as you imagine

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

The most common reaction to my recent announcement of starting a new WordPress hosting company was that this blog provides me with a ridiculous unfair advantage. But was it? Here's what people said: "[You're starting from nothing] except approximately 18,000 prospects. How convenient. ;) I wish I had that kind of mailing list starting out.". " You're doing this the easy way , publishing this post so that thousands of users see it.".

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Checklists for Chaos, The Path to Success

Steve Blank

In a startup the search for a business model is chaotic, unpredictable and uncertain. Yet the Customer Development process uses a series of checklists to ensure that you walk through the Customer Discovery and Validation steps. In addition it explicitly calls for synchronization and confirmation of the steps by the entire team. Surely a checklist and discussion gets in the way of progress in a fast moving startup?

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Which Social Networks are for Entrepreneurs?

Startup Professionals Musings

Social networking is indeed the new business networking. But you need to understand the different cultures to make it work. For example, my personal interest is entrepreneurs, and MySpace is for tweens. Me going to MySpace is sort of like your parents crashing your high school prom – everyone is uncomfortable and neither side has any fun. Since I’ve been lurking around the various social networks for the last year or so, I’ve learned a few things, so I thought it would be helpful to clue you in

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How to Build a Startup Team

techcocktail.com

Tech Cocktail Connecting, educating and amplifying the startup technology community and having fun doing it since 2006. Home About Local Ann Arbor Austin Barcelona Boston Boulder Champaign Chicago DC Detroit Indiana NYC Philadelphia San Diego San Francisco Mobile National Acquisition Amazon Aol Apple Facebook Foursquare Gadgets Google Intel Internet Microsoft Music Social Networking Startup News Technology Twitter VC Tips Bootstrapping Business Meetings Creativity Customer Service Design Enginee

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Winners Announced in Mass Challenge Business Plan Competition

Campus Entrepreneurship

Mass Challenge, a big money business plan competition, is coming up in the news quite a bit (saw a mention of it in a Harvard Business Review article recently). From NECN : Four startup companies with Boston connections are now $100,000 closer to success, thanks to winning top prizes from the Mass Challenge, a new entrepreneurship competition. Among them: Locately, a four-man startup (plus some part-timers), a technology company that makes an interesting offer: Give us some of your privacy, and

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Caution 2.0

SoCal CTO

Just saw this tweet fly by: Unfortunately, this CTO happens to be the CTO of a restaurant chain which was probably the reason that this was tweeted. But the point is pretty simple. As a CTO, you need to always remember that you are a bit on stage and people notice what you do even when you don’t realize it. It’s important to bring a bit of caution to things as simple as going to the bathroom.

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Real Sustainable Competitive Advantages are Rare

Startup Professionals Musings

One of the most important questions you will be asked by potential investors is how your solutions beats the competition, not just today, but over the three to five year life of their investment. There is no perfect answer to this question, but there are many wrong answers which will immediately jeopardize your credibility. The concept is called “sustainable competitive advantage.

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How To Find A Programmer To Build Your Startup Idea

socialmatchbox.com

Social Matchbox Home About Us Events Press Resources Newsletter Writers How To Find A Programmer To Build Your Startup Idea By SocialMatchbox Editor | Sep 11, 2010 If you have ever been serious about founding a startup company you are probably, like many other founders, most frustrated by the challenge of how to find a programmer to build your startup idea.

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The ABCs of Starting an Investor Pitch Meeting – Always Be Credible

Seeing Both Sides

Malcolm Gladwell made famous the natural human reaction of judging other people in the first few minutes of an encounter with his book, Blink. Like many other businesspeople, VCs and angel investors (“investors” going forward) blink and judge entrepreneurs very quickly in the first few minutes of an interaction. That’s why the way an entrepreneur starts an investor pitch meeting is a key determinant of their success in that meeting.

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My TEDxBoulder Presentation on The Quarterly Week Off The Grid

Feld Thoughts

My TEDxBoulder presentation on The Quarterly Week Off The Grid was recently posted on YouTube. I participated in TEDxBoulder on August 7th and it was an awesome Saturday evening in Boulder. Most of the talks were dynamite – the worst ones were merely good. If you are interested in work-life balance, this is one of my favorite algorithms for it.

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Penthouse Relationships Lead to Business Success

Startup Professionals Musings

In the world of entrepreneurs and startups, top floor relationships are everything. You can’t start a business alone. You need partners, team members, investors, vendors, and customers. But people don’t realize that all relationships are not the same. There are people you only recognize on the street, business friends, and then close friends whom you can always count on to help.

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Do You Need to Be a Developer to Found a Web Startup?

thenetsetter.com

The Netsetter Make Money Online Tuts+ Network Envato ActiveDen AudioJungle ThemeForest VideoHive GraphicRiver 3DOcean CodeCanyon Creattica AppBase Mac.Appstorm Web.Appstorm iPhone.Appstorm TheNetsetter Snipplr Plus Psdtuts+ Nettuts+ Vectortuts+ Audiotuts+ Aetuts+ Activetuts+ Cgtuts+ Phototuts+ Mobiletuts+ Webdesigntuts+ Rockable Press FreelanceSwitch WorkAwesome Creative Sessions Skip to content Blog Submit a Post What’s a Netsetter?

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Strategy Roundtable: Convert Potential Competitors to Partners

ReadWriteStart

At today's roundtable we saw three very nice businesses, each with pilot customers, and each working on real problems. At the end of the session, each left with specific action items. First up today was Antonio Lucena de Faria with ActionFlow from Portugal. Antonio has a portfolio of Web-based business process management applications for small businesses with 10-100 employees.

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Pitch More Faster Read Versus Listen

Feld Thoughts

As part of our Do More Faster book tour, we’ve been having a pitch session each day called “Pitch More Faster.&# During the hour, we hear four pitches that are five minute each and give direct feedback / suggestions on the pitch itself (not the content or the business, but the pitch.). In my experience, most people suck at the five minute pitch.

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Why the careers of MANY smart people are stalled in mid-life?

Life Beyond Code

Do you remember any “rising&# superstars that were the blue-eyed boys (and girls) of the Bosses when they started their careers? You knew that these people were pretty damn smart and you really thought they would go places in their life. When you looked at the careers of many of these people when they hit 40 and it seemed like their careers had stalled – as if their train had hit a brick wall of some sort.

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5 Startup Steps to finding & working with freelancers

nickpoint.co.uk

Nickpoint Social Media innovation and marketing for business « A Big THANK YOU :) Cloud Computing: ‘Old wine in new bottles’? » 5 Startup Steps to finding & working with freelancers By Nick Barker As there are just two of us ( Simon Oxley – my co-founder and I) in our startup we need outside help. We’d love to employ full time permanent staff but without external funding or product traction it’s too risky.

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Is crowdfunding an option for my business?

Growthink Blog

I received a great question from one of my subscribers the other day. It read as follows: Is crowdfunding an option for my business? It seems that most of the crowdfunding is for artsy, music or non-profit projects or companies. I have a [blanked out for confidentiality] that I want to [blanked out for confidentiality]. I need $250,000 to [blanked out for confidentiality].

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Deeply Held Beliefs

Feld Thoughts

I’m at Newark Airport waiting for my plane to take me to Quebec for the Quebec City Conference where I’m being interviewed at the end of the day by Rob Cox of Reuters Breakingviews. Yesterday Rob and I had a short call so he could get to know me a little better. As he was probing me about Foundry Group and what makes us tick, we started talking about what we refer to as “deeply held beliefs.&# In my first company (Feld Technologies) we referred to these as “precepts&#

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Small Business Marketing: Google Boost

crowdSPRING Blog

Google has released a new tool – Google Boost – that allows small businesses to connect with potential customers via Google Adwords. The program is still in beta and available to select local businesses in San Francisco, Houston and Chicago. Boost allows local businesses to create online search ads right from their Google Places account (In an earlier post, I discussed several free resources from Google available to small businesses, including Google Places – Free resources for

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How to find a technical cofounder

ryanwaggoner.com

illegitimi non carborundum. Home About Me My Work Hire Me Contact Subscribe How to find a technical cofounder 09.10.10 Posted in Development , Entrepreneurship , Posts , Technology by Ryan W. When I was doing freelance development, I had about one pitch per week for an equity-only opportunity. I fell for a couple, learned my lesson, but now I never accept these kinds of deals, even though a lot of the ideas and even teams seem solid.

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How Value Attribution Can Dramatically Help (Or Hurt) Your Chances of Raising Money

Growthink Blog

In 2007, the Washington Post conducted an incredible experiment. The Post had world renowned violinist Joshua Bell play music in a popular Washington DC subway station. What's cool was that Bell was dressed casually; in jeans and a baseball cap, like most other street performers might. But Bell was also playing a $3.5 MILLION violin. And he sounded incredible.