10 Ways Entrepreneurs Limit Their Creative Potential
Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 4, 2020
Every entrepreneur believes in their heart that their startup is more innovative and creative than their competitors. Yet none knows exactly.
Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 4, 2020
Every entrepreneur believes in their heart that their startup is more innovative and creative than their competitors. Yet none knows exactly.
Both Sides of the Table
DECEMBER 31, 2020
June 2019 (left) and November 2020 (right) I’ve been reluctant to write this blog post because historically I don’t like talking about weight. But I’ve been promising to publish how I lost 65 pounds in the past 18 months without any fad diets or gimmicks to try and be helpful to others. I have a plan, I know it works and for the friends and family who have followed what I’ve done they’ve equally lost a lot of weight.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
deal architect
SEPTEMBER 26, 2020
I was invited to an analyst summit on SAP's Data and Analytics portfolio of products. What a remarkable difference from last year! I had flown to a similar event in Vancouver - first to Seattle, then taken a bus across.
Steve Blank
JUNE 23, 2020
The pandemic has upended the business models of most startups and existing companies. As the economy reopens companies are finding that customers may have disappeared or that their spending behavior has changed. Suppliers are going out of business or requiring cash-up-front terms. Accounts receivables are stretching way out. Revenue models and forecasts are no longer valid.
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
View from Seed
APRIL 20, 2020
We at NextView Ventures are sensitive to the challenges which all startups face during these times brought upon us by the current Coronavirus crisis. As we have discussed elsewhere, the world of early stage investing is shifting from FOMO ( F ear O f M issing O ut) to FOLD (Fear Of Looking Dumb). Even though some of the most transformative tech companies are built during difficult economic periods, the aperture of VC funds tends to narrow during these times.
Feld Thoughts
MARCH 13, 2020
The following from C. S. Lewis. was on my fraternity email list this morning. It was written in 1948 after the dawn of the atomic age. In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Version One Ventures
OCTOBER 6, 2020
We’re thrilled to announce the third edition of “A Guide to Marketplaces.” We published our first edition five years ago and the second nearly three years ago. So much has changed since then – from the rise of B2B marketplaces to new crypto-native platforms. . Even as we explore emerging sectors like climate and crypto, we continue to be excited about marketplaces.
VC Cafe
JULY 26, 2020
“After the crash, venture capital was scarce to non-existent. (Most of the funds that started in the late part of the boom would be underwater). Angel investment, which was small to start with, disappeared, and most corporate VCs shut down. VC’s were no longer insisting that startups spend faster, and “swing for the fences”. In fact, they were screaming at them to dramatically reduce their burn rates.
ReadWriteStart
JUNE 25, 2020
Podcasts are one of my favorite content mediums, and I know I’m not alone. Podcasts are inexpensive, typically free, they’re incredibly diverse, they’re usually updated on a daily or weekly basis, and you can listen to them while doing other things—like driving, doing chores, or exercising. Here are ten entrepreneur podcasts every founder should listen to.
The Next Web
JULY 9, 2020
Germany has been a startup ecosystem on the rise for quite some time now. It’s produced a number of global success stories including SoundCloud, Zalando, Flixbus, and HelloFresh. In 2019, the country was ranked number one in Europe for startups by NimbleFins. EY reported that Germany’s top 100 startups received a total of $11.1 billion in funding in 2019, a significant increase from the $6.3 billion reached in 2018.
Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 21, 2020
Finding your sweet spot as an entrepreneur needs to start with a meaningful personal purpose that is also a business opportunity. Some people are so passionate about a cause that they forget to consider the lack of business potential, while others are so enamored with profit that they jeopardize their ethics. Both ends of this spectrum fail to bring long-term satisfaction or success.
For Entrepreneurs
FEBRUARY 18, 2020
I recently did a podcast interview with Harry Stebbings of “The Twenty Minute VC” where we talked about the 9 step model for how B2B startups need to get through product/market fit, and then how they should go about finding a repeatable, scalable, and profitable growth process. For those of who are interested in learning.
deal architect
FEBRUARY 4, 2020
Cognizant is a regular at the annual WEF event in Davos, Switzerland. I requested Alan Alper, VP Corporate Marketing, keep good notes on everything he observed during this year's event. Here's an excellent ground level report - you can feel.
Steve Blank
MARCH 17, 2020
“Winter is coming.”. This is the one blog post that I hope I’m completely wrong about. With the Covid-19 virus a worldwide pandemic, if you’re leading any startup or small business, you have to be asking yourself, “What’s Plan B? And what’s in my lifeboat?”. Here are a few thoughts about operating in uncertainty in a pandemic. Impact. Social isolation and a declared national emergency have had an immediate impact on industries that cluster people; conferences, trade shows, airlines/cruise ships
View from Seed
NOVEMBER 18, 2020
One important tactical decision when fundraising is determining the size of “the ask”. Sizing the ask incorrectly is one of the things I see founders get wrong most often, and it ends up having a meaningful impact to the fundraising process overall. Telling an investor how much money you are looking to raise seems like a simple and benign question, but it’s actually pretty complicated.
Feld Thoughts
MARCH 10, 2020
Most people don’t understand exponential growth. It can be counterintuitive and is easily misinterpreted. Understanding it is particularly important right now around Covid-19. The following eight-minute video is extremely well done and uses the historical Covid-19 data to help understand exponential growth. There’s a magic number in this that we should be focusing on, but gets lost in the fog of hysteria.
This is going to be BIG.
NOVEMBER 27, 2020
Not everyone’s career moves up and to the right from beginning to end. In fact, I don’t think that actually happens to anyone—but some people are just better at hiding the wrong turns, u-turns, and downturns than others. The key isn’t skipping over them—because a recruiter or potential employer can sniff out a story that doesn’t make sense from a mile away.
Version One Ventures
AUGUST 13, 2020
It’s been exciting to see so much renewed investor interest in climate tech and clean energy startups. As Peter Thiel documented in detail, the last wave of late 2000s cleantech VC excitement ended in a trough of despair as many of the more well-funded companies went bust (with the notable exception of a few big winners like Tesla, SunRun, and Opower).
VC Cafe
SEPTEMBER 9, 2020
“A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living” Kevin Kelly, 1,000 True Fans. At the heart of the creator economy (also dubbed the “Passion Economy” or “Hustle Economy”) is the ability of a creator to monetise attention and fandom.
ReadWriteStart
APRIL 27, 2020
Starting a tech company is exciting, but there are dozens of factors you’ll need to consider if you want your startup to succeed. Much of your time brainstorming will be spent considering things like how to reduce costs, how to expand efficiently, and how to build the right team—but you’ll also need to consider the nature of your brand, including your business’s name.
Startup Lessons Learned
FEBRUARY 26, 2020
No company can succeed long-term without a culture of continuous innovation and systems of entrepreneurial management that encourage and support change and the visionaries who make it happen. That's why I'm so pleased that from today through March 1st, the ebook of The Startup Way is on sale for $2.99. You can find it on Amazon , at Barnes & Noble , and on Apple Books.
Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 15, 2020
When entrepreneurs introduce new products to the market, their passion and conviction often leads them to assume that every potential customer will see the immediate need and value, and will quickly adopt the solution. They are devastated when their business growth never starts or stalls, and they have no idea how to get it moving again. As an advisor to many startups, I often spend hours with business owners helping them anticipate every possible obstacle to the adoption of their solution, and
For Entrepreneurs
SEPTEMBER 9, 2020
KBCM TECHNOLOGY GROUP SAAS SURVEY – COVID EDITION For the eighth year in a row, we’re proud to work with KBCM Technology Group (formerly Pacific Crest Securities) Thank you to the readers of forEntrepreneurs who participated in taking the survey! Thank you also to David Spitz (@dspitz) and the team at KBCM Technology Group for.
The Startup Magazine
NOVEMBER 4, 2020
Printing has become a necessity of every business today, therefore, it becomes necessary to have a good quality of printing as it makes the first impression on your business. Sometimes you have noticed that the print quality on documents is not the same as it appears in soft copy, because the document has some font problems, color issues, spacing, and alignment issues.
Steve Blank
APRIL 27, 2020
Over the last month billions of people have been unwilling participants in the largest unintentional social experiment ever run – testing how video conferencing replaced face-to-face communication. While we’ve discovered that in many cases it can, more importantly we’ve discovered that, regardless of bandwidth and video resolution, these apps are missing the cues humans use when they communicate.
View from Seed
JUNE 23, 2020
“Be formless, shapeless, like water.” – Bruce Lee. I was on a pitch video call the other day when the founder asked me what the guiding principle for product was at Blue Apron when I was leading the team there, and my response was that consumer product experience should be like water. At a first glance, that could sound pretty counterintuitive – isn’t the point of a product team to purposefully design and build?
Feld Thoughts
DECEMBER 14, 2020
January 3, 2020, seems like a very long time ago. That day, I wrote a post titled The Future Of Work Is Distributed. I had no idea that four months later, all office workers in the world would be working from home, and within six months, the idea of distributed and remote work would be a topic discussed daily. When the Federal tax laws were changed in 2018 to eliminate the deductibility of state income tax, I made the assertion, in the context of Startup Communities, that this would cause moveme
This is going to be BIG.
APRIL 13, 2020
Obviously, the fight against Coronavirus has not stopped, but it’s hard not to look ahead to what’s next. How will having the world on lockdown affect our society in the long run? Here are a few trends I think we’ll see going forward: 1) Work from home is here to stay—at least partially. Absent the additional, albeit temporary, task of having to educate your own kids while at home, many people have reported being a lot more focused and productive while out of the office—not to mention the two ho
Version One Ventures
SEPTEMBER 4, 2020
I’ve spent the majority of the last decade working in two fields: solar energy and cryptocurrency. At first blush, these may seem pretty different. In my mind, however, they have a lot in common and are converging by the day. Both are based on principles of decentralization. Both are disrupting antiquated, opaque industries with large societal externalities (energy and banking).
VC Cafe
FEBRUARY 17, 2020
“I do think that a significant portion of the population of developed countries, and eventually all countries, will have AR experiences every day, almost like eating three meals a day. It will become that much a part of you.” —Tim Cook , Apple CEO. One of the top reasons startups fail is timing. No matter how brilliant the team, idea and technology are, get the timing wrong and the chances of success are slim.
ReadWriteStart
DECEMBER 16, 2020
Based on our history, we can see that unprecedented events have the potential to cause permanent mass changes. Remember the 9/11 attack? That attack changed the face of airport security forever. Suddenly, new transit rules were enforced and sophisticated surveillance gear became commonplace. Here is how remote startups are changing the game for everyone.
Up and Running
JULY 2, 2020
You’ve been dreaming of this moment for years; the moment that the dream of owning your own business becomes a reality. Your business, after all, is your baby. It’s your passion and your purpose. But now the fantasy has become a reality, and the simple fact is, it’s not what you dreamt it would be. Especially now, as the COVID-19 pandemic is claiming millions of jobs and endangering small businesses from coast to coast.
Startup Professionals Musings
DECEMBER 19, 2020
In business, the only thing that counts is results, not how hard people work or how many hours they put in. Have you noticed in your startup or around your office that some people are always at work and busy, but others seems to consistently get more done? Studies of software teams, for example, show differences as great as ten to one in productivity between working team members.
For Entrepreneurs
JUNE 10, 2020
Covid and the associated lockdowns are likely to be the biggest disruptive event to occur in most of our lifetimes. There are huge global changes coming as a result. The OECD is forecasting the worst recession in a century. But expect to see far more change than just a recession.
ConversionXL
DECEMBER 16, 2020
“Why don’t we rank first for [keyword]”? Every SEO analyst gets this question. And every business investing in SEO uses keyword rankings to judge performance. Despite the flood of “organic rankings are dead” articles in recent years, I have yet to see a single business or agency that has given up on tracking keywords. So are all those articles wrong?
Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 24, 2020
We just had our first week of our new national security class Technology, Innovation and Modern War. Given the tech-centricity of Stanford and Silicon Valley, Joe Felter , Raj Shah and I thought it was natural to design a class to examine the new military systems, operational concepts and doctrines that will emerge from 21st century technologies – Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning and Autonomy.
Let's personalize your content