2016

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Venture Capital is About Human Capital

Both Sides of the Table

Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca For the first 5 years or so after I became a VC I didn’t talk much about what I thought a VC should be excellent at since frankly I wasn’t sure. I was mostly doing my job and trying to figure out how to be better every day. After a decade on the job I’ve started to speak more openly when newer industry colleagues now ask me what I’ve learned.

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Why Tim Cook is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

Steve Blank

What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why. Microsoft entered the 21st century as the dominant software provider for anyone who interacted with a computing device. 16 years later it’s just another software company.

Azure 264
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How to Find and Close Angel Investors from a Standing Start

View from Seed

Whether an entrepreneur is raising a smaller (pre-)seed round entirely from individuals or she has a seed-stage or larger VC firm involved in (leading) the seed syndicate, it’s somewhere between necessary and optimal to have multiple individual angel investors involved. First and foremost, angels can provide capital. But secondly, the can play a strategic role in everything from optics (signaling “smart money” is involved to connections to tangible, operational help.

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10 Easy Ways To Create A Healthy Workplace

YoungUpstarts

by Leigh Stringer, author of “ The Healthy Workplace: How to Improve the Well-Being of Your Employees – and Boost Your Company’s Bottom Line “ Over the years, we have developed work styles that are not good for our physical, mental or emotional health. . It’s not that we’re bad people, or that we aren’t working hard. The problem is that what our minds and bodies need at a basic level is in conflict with our work style.

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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 Future of Government: Hayward & the Lean Startup

Startup Lessons Learned

Guest post by Jennifer Maerz, contributing editor of Lean Startup Co. It’s been exciting to watch the Lean Startup movement grow from a practice utilized in the tech world to one implemented in a wide variety of sectors ranging from enterprise to education, religious organizations, nonprofits, and government groups. When we talk about government, we mean both the macro outfits whose work affects the entire country (perhaps you’ve heard of the IRS ) and regionally-focused groups alike.

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The Best Free Email Marketing Tool for Startups and Small Businesses

Up and Running

Bplans and Palo Alto Software are strong supporters of entrepreneurs and small business owners. We work with like-minded partners who also want to help your businesses succeed by providing the best tools and content for the job. If our readers choose to learn more or purchase from links to our partners, sometimes we earn affiliate commissions that support Bplans’ mission.

Email 114

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A Quick Primer on B2B Conversion Optimization

ConversionXL

Conversion optimization is a little different if you’re in B2B. Some of the same underlying principles apply, but because of the inherent differences in buying decisions and sales cycles, pulling B2C optimization practices straight from the book might be a bad idea. You’ll still need to do the same types of conversion research, persona building, and experimentation that is common across conversion optimization, but let’s talk a bit about how and why B2B is different.

B2B 89
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Don’t go dark

David Cohen

I’ve had a couple of situations lately where a portfolio company founder or CEO went dark on me. They just stopped communicating. Sometimes takes me a while to notice it. When I do, I usually check in with the person and just ask something like “Hey – I haven’t heard from you in a while, how’s it going?” Sometimes the response is benign, and all is more or less ok with the company and people in question.

Portfolio 125
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Stop Hoping For Referrals – Build Your Referral Teams and Start Getting A Referral A Day

Duct Tape Marketing

Stop Hoping For Referrals – Build Your Referral Teams and Start Getting A Referral A Day written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Most people believe that getting referrals is something that just happens, that all you need to do is just turn up to networking events, do a good job with your clients or customers and be part of a referral group.

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As a product manager, you need to do just two things

Street Smart Product Manager

One of the biggest lies in product management is agile. That may sound like heresy, but hear me out… I actually love agile. It’s a great approach to reducing the risk of developing and shipping software. It’s a better software development methodology. But on its own it doesn’t solve the problem of providing a capital […]. The post As a product manager, you need to do just two things appeared first on Street Smart Product Manager.

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How I Promise You One of the Most Meaningful Days of Your Life

Both Sides of the Table

I know the title “I promise you one of the most meaningful days of your life” sounds grandiose but I mean it and I hope you’ll read through to the end and choose to take one small, totally free action, that will change your life and likely those of others. On September 10th of this year I spent an entire day in California State Prison with people who had committed felonies and worked with them on business plans to help them create legal enterprise upon their release as part of Defy Ventures 6-mo

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Why Tim Cook is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

Steve Blank

What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why. Microsoft entered the 21st century as the dominant software provider for anyone who interacted with a computing device. 16 years later it’s just another software company.

Azure 264
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Introducing the Hitchhiker’s Guide to New York City Tech

View from Seed

New York City is a dream but can also be a navigational nightmare, equal parts crammed circus and rat race mixed at warp speed. This holds for the city’s tech sector. NYC Tech is bursting at the seams with nightly networking events at floors and floors of co-working spaces. We do not suffer a lack of tech activities. At the same time, the perception of our ecosystem as an insider’s game can often be self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating – creating a walled garden that can’t be breached.

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InventHelp Inventions Are Everywhere And The Reviews Are Phenomenal

YoungUpstarts

You may have one or more ideas about how to make life easier or how to improve upon an already existing technology. Yet, you may have found that moving forward with that idea takes more than wishful thinking. Many entrepreneurs have used InventHelp to turn their imagined opportunities into real businesses. InventHelp allows you to discover and nurture the entrepreneur inside you.

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The Future of Corporate Agility

Startup Lessons Learned

Guest post by by Jennifer Maerz, contributing editor of Lean Startup Co. The solution to long-term innovation in companies obviously isn’t having one person come up with all the bright ideas and then translating those ideas to teams that execute them. We’re looking at huge shifts in workplace structures that involve reimagining things like who holds the power to make decisions and how we judge performance, all the way down to how we run meetings to encourage constructive disagreement and a diver

Agile 131
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YouTube Marketing: A Small Business Guide

Up and Running

As my series on using social media marketing platforms to market your small business comes to a close (check out past installments on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn ), we arrive at what is possibly the most niche platform in terms of content: YouTube. If you want to use YouTube to market your small business, you’ll be creating videos, plain and simple.

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A Year in Review: 2016

Version One Ventures

This has been an important year for us as a firm, as well as the market in general. We couldn’t begin any recap of 2016 without focusing on the bubble we hear so much about. The industry entered the year bracing for an apocalypse. Every announcement – whether it was a funding round, exit or layoffs – was analyzed within the context that the tech bubble has definitely burst or that we’re still in the bubble.

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How CRO Experts Build and Maintain Testing Roadmaps

ConversionXL

It will come as no surprise, but like most things in life, conversion optimization will benefit from a strong strategic approach. This generally includes aligning your goals and resources to build out a roadmap, or at least a framework/process, for your experiments. Much like in other disciplines, while experts agree that strategy is important, they can sometimes differ in their approach to such a strategy.

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Worrying is self-fulfilling; what to do instead

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Worrying is a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Worry” causes the very thing you’re worried about, to actually happen. When you’re backstage getting more and more anxious that your performance won’t be good, you’re implanting thoughts of second-guessing and fear that will arise during the performance. Instead, you should realize you’ve already done all the practice required, and mistakes don’t actually matter anyway.

Metrics 254
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Live Video is King: How To Use It Without Going Broke

Duct Tape Marketing

Live Video is King: How To Use It Without Going Broke written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing. As you may have heard from industry events like NABShow and Social Media Marketing World , marketing dollars are switching from broadcast TV to live video streaming for more creative and targeted visual advertising. What makes a live video so effective and attractive to brands?

Video 60
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8 Keys To Getting Real Value From Business Networking

Startup Professionals Musings

There is no skill more vital to an entrepreneur than effective networking. You can’t build your business alone, and networking is the best way to open doors, professionally and personally. For introverts like me, it’s not easy to step out of your comfort zone and meet new people, but if you approach the challenge correctly, I have found that it can actually be fun as well as productive.

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Venture Deals – Third Edition

Feld Thoughts

The third edition of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist is going to print and pre-orders are up on Amazon. For everyone who has purchased, read, or reviewed our previous editions, thank you! While it’s difficult to know exactly how many copies have been sold (the joy of publisher metrics), it’s around 100,000 to date, which blows our mind since we had no expectations around this when we wrote the book in 2011.

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There are 145 Entrepreneurship Courses at Stanford

Steve Blank

Stanford is an incubator with dorms. Download the full text file with links to the courses here. [link]. Filed under: Hacking For Defense , Hacking for Diplomacy , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching.

Incubator 332
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New York City Tech Podcast: Eli Bronner, Growth at AngelList

View from Seed

New tech ecosystems often benefit from entrepreneurs who will dive in blind and figure out their direction along the way. This profile of founder tends to be younger, obsessively driven, and inclined towards making big, bold, necessary mistakes early and often on the path towards product-market fit. In 2010, Eli Bronner and his Lua Technologies co-founders were this exact profile of entrepreneurs, and New York City was an exuberant tech ecosystem without much structure or identity.

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5 Steps To Align Your Core Values With Your Daily Practices

YoungUpstarts

by Michael Manning , chief relationship officer at Rocksauce Studios. No matter your age, just about everybody loves the Beatles. But can your company learn from the Fab Four’s success? Of course, John, Paul, George, and Ringo had the swinging outfits and the screaming fans. But up until the very end, they also shared a key element that helped them stay together as a collective.

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Co-founder Equity Split: A New Framework to Objectively Divide Startup Ownership and Get Back to Building a Business

Gust

We’ve just released our free Co-founder Equity Split tool. It’ll give you a fair and objective recommendation about how to divide your startup’s ownership, so you and your co-founders will have a sensible, real starting point for this notoriously hard, crucially important conversation. Many startup founders find themselves lacking clarity and direction when it comes time to divide their.

Cofounder 142
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2016 SaaS Survey Infographic

For Entrepreneurs

The forEntrepreneurs 2016 SaaS Survey Infographic highlights key metrics from this year’s SaaS Survey and includes links to advice and insights on improving these metrics. You can find the full 2016 SaaS survey results here: Part 1 covers growth rates, go-to-market trends and cost structure.

Metrics 131
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How 5G will change the way we use the web

The Next Web

The promise of 5G includes faster internet, greater mobile connectivity for businesses, and the ability to take futuristic digital experiences like VR and AR mainstream. With such limitless potential, the question becomes just how 5G will change the way people use their devices. To find out what’s coming, I asked a group of entrepreneurs from YEC the following question: How do you see 5G changing the way consumers or businesses use the internet in the next five years?

Web 131
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10 Product Recommendation Techniques to Improve UX and Conversions

ConversionXL

Nowadays nearly every online shop utilizes some sort of product recommendation engine, which is no wonder, as these systems, if set up and configured properly can significantly boost revenues, CTRs, conversions, and other important metrics. Moreover, they can have considerable positive effects on the user experience as well, which translates into metrics that are harder to measure, but are nonetheless of paramount importance to online businesses, such as customer satisfaction and retention.

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Being in the Minority

This is going to be BIG.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been to a couple of tech events that were sparsely populated by straight white men. Yeah, can you believe it? One was a careers panel aimed at women in tech held at Flatiron School and the other was Alterconf. The goal of Alterconf is to provide safe opportunities and spaces for marginalized people in tech and those who support them by highlighting positive initiatives of local community members.

Community 162
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Page One on Google Is Your New Business Card

Duct Tape Marketing

Page One on Google Is Your New Business Card written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Do a search for your name, your company name, your product or service names. Whatever you find on page one in the Google SERPs amounts to a significant collage of how your brand is seen in the wild today. See, it doesn’t matter if your best client tells their best friend you are the most awesome thing since people started using the word awesome – Google you they will and what they find is all p

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How to Calculate Social Media Marketing ROI for Your Small Business

Up and Running

Gone are the days where social media marketing was merely an experimental marketing tactic. It has become a core part of any business’s marketing strategy, and it needs to support your business goals, and prove its value in comparison to other channels for resources, budget, and executive buy-in. If you’re struggling to measure ROI for social media, you’re not alone.

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Understanding Privilege – My Experience in Prison

Feld Thoughts

A month ago Mark Suster (Upfront) and I hosted 75 colleagues for a full day at the California State Prison, Los Angeles County – also known as Lancaster. We did this as part of Defy Ventures , an entrepreneurship, employment, and character development training program for currently and formerly incarcerated men, women, and youth. It was a top 10 peak life experience for me – easily one of the most profound things I’ve experienced to date.

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There are 145 Entrepreneurship Courses at Stanford

Steve Blank

Stanford is an incubator with dorms. Download the full text file with links to the courses here. Filed under: Hacking For Defense , Hacking for Diplomacy , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching.

Incubator 332
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How to Build a Startup Marketing Team from Zero [Traction #33: Mike Volpe, Cybereason]

View from Seed

So much of digital innovation has changed the way people communicate and create or access content. As a result, few departments in business have changed how they work quite like marketing, and few functions look so fundamentally different today than a decade ago. So hiring your first marketer as a startup founder can be a daunting task. What’s the profile of the candidate?

Marketing 242
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How To Manage Cash Flow When Starting An E-commerce Company

YoungUpstarts

Starting your very own e-commerce company can be an exciting proposition. In many ways, getting an e-commerce company off of the ground is easier than a standard business; depending on your business model, you may not have to keep as much physical inventory, hire as many workers or deal with as many tax considerations. However, there are numerous concerns that are identical to brick and mortar businesses.