2020

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10 Ways Entrepreneurs Limit Their Creative Potential

Startup Professionals Musings

Every entrepreneur believes in their heart that their startup is more innovative and creative than their competitors. Yet none knows exactly.

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How I Lost 65 Pounds In 18 Months Without Any Fad Diets or Gimmicks

Both Sides of the Table

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.

Developer 526
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SAP Data & Analytics Analyst Summit - a review

deal architect

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.

Analytics 488
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Rising out of the Crisis: Where to Find New Markets and Customers

Steve Blank

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 Revenue models and forecasts are no longer valid.

Customer 436
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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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Announcing NextView’s Everyday Economy Accelerator

View from Seed

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.

Startup 436
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Wise Words from C.S. Lewis in 1948

Feld Thoughts

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

Email 254

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A Guide to Marketplaces: Third Edition

Version One Ventures

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.

B2B 218
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Is the Lean Startup concept of MVP dead?

VC Cafe

“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.

Lean 214
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10 Entrepreneur Podcasts Every Founder Should Listen To

ReadWriteStart

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.

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5 reasons why Germany is the best country for startups

The Next Web

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.

Germany 209
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6 Tips For Combining Passion And Purpose To Stand Out

Startup Professionals Musings

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.

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9 Steps to Repeatable, Scalable, and Profitable Growth

For Entrepreneurs

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.

B2B 206
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Davos report - a conversation with Alan Alper of Cognizant

deal architect

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.

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The Virus Survival Strategy For Your Startup

Steve Blank

“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

Startup 436
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Sizing the Ask

View from Seed

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.

Valuation 418
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Exponential Growth and Covid-19

Feld Thoughts

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.

Green 254
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How to Talk About the Arc of Your Career

This is going to be BIG.

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.

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The Energy Revolution is (Finally) Here

Version One Ventures

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).

Finance 218
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The Creator Economy is rising, but challenges abound

VC Cafe

“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.

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How to Name Your Tech Startup

ReadWriteStart

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.

Naming 205
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Get The Startup Way ebook for $2.99 for a limited time

Startup Lessons Learned

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 199
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6 Observations On Key Challenges Facing Every Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

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

Startup 436
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2020 SaaS Survey Results- COVID Edition!

For Entrepreneurs

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.

Security 200
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5 Key areas to Improve your Printing Strategy and Business

The Startup Magazine

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.

Startup 191
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What’s Missing From Zoom Reminds Us What It Means to Be Human

Steve Blank

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.

Video 428
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Be Like Water – A Guiding Principle for Consumer Product

View from Seed

“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?

Product 411
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The Great HQ Migration

Feld Thoughts

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

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10 Post-Coronavirus Trends for Life After Quarantine

This is going to be BIG.

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

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The Solar-Bitcoin Convergence

Version One Ventures

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).

Demand 217
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The stars align for AR to go mainstream

VC Cafe

“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.

Engineer 203
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How Remote Startups are Changing the Game for Everyone

ReadWriteStart

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.

Startup 190
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How to Prepare for Startup “Postpartum”

Up and Running

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 190
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7 Personal Productivity Tactics To Get More Work Done

Startup Professionals Musings

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.

Product 435
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How to Survive and Thrive in the post-Covid Era

For Entrepreneurs

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.

Forecast 194
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3 Smart, Sustainable Ways to Monitor Your Organic Search Rankings

ConversionXL

“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?

Search 173
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Technology, Innovation, and Modern War – Class 1

Steve Blank

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.