founders, VC's, mentors and startup experts.
In a competitive landscape, one of the most important consideration is standing out from the crowd. For startups, this is crucial because the barriers to entry are relatively low, while new or innovative ideas can quickly be replicated by agile ...
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Via: Mark Evans Tech
Startup marketer, conference organizer, hockey player, dad, |
I have known Dr. William Miller (co-founder of Value Centered Innovation) for a number of years and every conversation with him on business model innovation and beyond has been delightful and insightful. Hers is a quick interview with him on the topic. ...
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Via: Rajesh Setty
Bringing Ideas to Life. With Love! Rajesh is an entrepreneur |
It's been interesting over the years to observe which vertical marketplaces take off sustainably and which fizzle, especially in light of the two dominant horizontal liquidity behemoths: eBay and Craigslist. For a while it looked like vertical sites would take away eBay's business category after category as experts in each vertical with the right community credentials built something better attune ...
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Via: Fabrice Grinda
Entrepreneur, student and lover of life and aspiring Renaiss |
We always glorify the struggle of the entrepreneur. Late nights, poor diet and little contact with friends. It's cliche because it is real but we gloss over just how big of a toll it really takes. ...
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Via: StartupNorth
VP http://Salesforce.com / Co-Founder of @goinstant / Co-Fou |
This is not going to be an easy topic to talk about, but it needs to be said. This post is about failure, the way we talk about it in the startup world, and the disparity between the way we talk about it and the way it is. ...
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Via: Jordan Cooper
NYC based entrepreneur...Sling the Venture Capital rock on t |
Earlier today I got into a conversation with a colleague about the relative importance of a startup idea vs a startup team. Naturally, both the concept and the people are critically important, but if you had to pick one, which would be most important? ...
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Via: David Cummings
10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family, |
"He cares deeply about... the advancement of humankind, and putting the right tools in their hands." - Laurene Powell Jobs on her husband, Steve Startups aren't here to change the world, they're here to save the world--by bringing us innovation that advances humankind. ...
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Via: Venture Hacks
I started @angellist and @venturehacks. |
It's inevitable that any startup will lack expertise in some key areas needed to grow their business. The question is: should you hire and bring that expertise in-house or outsource it? ...
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Via: Version One Ventures
Early-stage investor through Version One Ventures (35+ inves |
I am fond of quoting that about 70% of my investment decision of an early-stage company is the team. My rationale is simple: everything goes wrong and only great teams can respond to competitors, markets, funding environments, staff departures, PR disasters and the like. ...
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2x entrepreneur. Sold both companies (last to http://salesfo |
The purpose of this post is to clearly delineate the differences between Strategy and Tactics, and show how they work in tandem for your organization. Often, we use the terms strategy and tactics are used interchangeably and often haphazardly. ...
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Industry Analyst, Partner at Altimeter Group. Some tweets pu |
Here's a lie that feels like the truth: "A mother is a person who, on seeing only 4 pieces of pie for 5 people, promptly declares, 'I never did care much for pie.'" That's a lie that turns moms into martyrs, which is not what moms are supposed to be. It's one of many lies [...] ...
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Via: COPY HACKERS
Copywriter at http://CopyHackers.com. Staunch advocate of co |
"It's one thing to work on stuff that seems sexy because it's socially cool and financially rewarding. But fulfillment doesn't come much from money or cool-power -- all the money in the world can't buy you a searing sense of ccomplishment." Umair Haque Recently Umair Haque wrote a great piece for HBR on meaningful work. ...
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Via: Usman Sheikh
Co-Founder of IDENTIFI. On a mission to get the right people |
It's time again for all those year-end blog posts about design trends. They're fun to read, but they contain a hidden implication you might miss: design and fashion are easily confused. ...
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Via: Studio Fellow Blog
Designer & coder. Author of http://BootstrappingDesign.com. |
Am I taking enough risks? Am I being daring enough? Am I being a hero? Answer: Not often enough.So, here's advice to my future self and all of you: *DO* be a hero. ...
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Via: On Startups
Entrepreneur. Founder/CTO @HubSpot inbound marketing and st |
The Lean Startup method strongly advocates experiments - and for good reason. It's critically important for a startup to acquire validated learning as quickly as possible. How quickly can you get through a learning cycle? How efficiently can you get to the answers to crucial questions? ...
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Via: On Startups
Entrepreneur. Founder/CTO @HubSpot inbound marketing and st |
"Behind every startup are amazing lawyers, mentors, exec, coaches, recruiters etc. that never get the full credit they deserve." ...
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2x entrepreneur. Sold both companies (last to http://salesfo |
We're all very well aware of Steve Jobs' contributions to technology and society. Without Steve, and Apple, we would all be using Motorola Razors or some other "cool" phone (ah, those were the days) or tablets would be just a failed Microsoft project.But there's one thing that Mr. Jobs has indirectly contributed to that I'm not a big fan of. ...
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Via: Treehouse Blog
Expert Teacher at @treehouse, husband to @hpremaratne, autho |
The startup world today loves hacks. Growth hacks. Venture hacks. Social hacks. The result ends up being a focus on the means, rather than the ends. And I think that's a shame. In one sense, hacking a startup is a great thing. Who doesn't want to get rich quick? I certainly wouldn't turn down easy money. But in another sense, it's a terrible thing. ...
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Entrepreneur, Investor, Writer, Dad. |
The great dilemma of lean. When do you pivot or quit, and when do you persevere? There is no firm answer. I doubt there will ever be one. This isn't color by numbers. Entrepreneurs need incredible fortitude, resilience, and persistence, because success does not comes easy. Even the seemingly "instant hits" are very hard to build. ...
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Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
Is the European tech industry building companies poised to change people's lives, or just wasting everyone's time with pointless apps? Matthew Bostock worries it might be the latter. ...
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Via: THE KERNEL
I write stuff. I read stuff. |
Should you test one thing at a time? Or many at once? A poor experimental workflow can waste loads of your time. Here's an extreme example: We've seen a company take six months to do something that took another company thirty minutes.To grow quickly, you need to implement quickly, so our work with clients goes beyond suggesting what they should test; we build their in-house capab ...
One of the most common objections you hear from investors is that the market you are going after is too crowded. I have been on the receiving end of this many times and had to convince investors about the vision we saw for disrupting that market despite the existing players. ...
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Via: Mark MacLeod
Seed investor for SaaS, e-commerce and other awesome startup |
We live in a time where we are always trying to work more, be more efficient, increase our productivity. We strive to do more, so we get involved in more projects ...
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Via: Adii
Entrepreneur, co-founder of WooThemes and general creator of |
Recently I talked to a sharp entrepreneur with tons of energy. Over the past year he's been working part-time on a startup with a couple friends that had already been at it for a year before he joined. Product launch is right around the corner and exemplifies the challenge of working on startup part-time ...
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Via: David Cummings
10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family, |
There has been a lot of discussion lately about the markets for startup financing. Many of the discussions use words like "valuations" "bubble" "crunch" etc. Words like that generally mean the writer is discussing the world through the lens of finance. This is a useful lens, but I'd like to suggest there is another lens that is also useful: the product lens. ...
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Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
Some successful community professionals express surprise that community building is such hard work. They launched their communities and it just took off. Yes, this really happens. Communities can go from inception to maturity in a matter of weeks. ...
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Via: Feverbee
Founder FeverBee Limited - Online Community Consultancy |
There are many levels of success (across any definition of the term), and there will generally always be people more successful than you in any endeavor. What's not obvious is that as you become more successful you actually increasingly meet and become friends with even "more successful" people. As a result, envious feelings can still easily become an issue after having a successful exit, and more ...
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Via: Gabriel Weinberg
Founder, DuckDuckGo. Angel investor. Family guy. |
I always enjoy reading Paul Graham's essays and his latest one How to get startup ideas is another great read.I'm going to focus on one of the by-products of Paul's essay which is a list of indicators that an idea might be good or an idea might be bad. ...
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Via: The Equity Kicker
I'm a VC in London |
Andrew Parker had a great post a few years ago where he sketched out all the startups going after pieces of Craigslist: Startups that have tried to go head-to-head against the entirety of Craigslist (the "horizontal approach") have struggled. Startups that have tried to go up against pieces of Craigslist (the "vertical approach") have been much more successful. ...
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Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
When recruiters ping me about open positions at hot companies, I tell them "thanks, but the next company I work for will be (another) one I start myself." It's not clear whether I'm masochistic or just dumb; life was a lot easier before I got started on this whole founder thing. ...
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Via: Numerate Choir
http://t.co/rPjQvufk; help w/ data/growth (@500startups); st |
Every so often, I meet an entrepreneur who has big ideas for their startup but who never seems to get anything done. It's a pattern that I see in smart people who haven't had experience building real world products. "It's gonna be huge! Revolutionary is only the beginning of how you would describe it." ...
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Via: James Yu
Co-founder of Parse, the mobile application platform. I'm an |
I was reading Paul Graham's latest essay, How to Get Startup Ideas, and the second paragraph jumped out at me. He says: The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way. ...
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Via: MattMaroon.com
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A bit of bullshit is no bad thing when you're a scrappy company, punching above its weight. But must we really bestow the term "chief executive officer" on every self-promoting booby with a website? ...
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Via: THE KERNEL
Journalist. Founder & Editor-in-Chief, @KernelMag. Advisor t |
The language we use for startup stages (discovery, validation, customer creation, company building) is abstract. The lines are blurry. And if jumping ahead of yourself is the #1 cause of startup death[1], that's a problem. So here's another way of thinking about the stages of a startup in visual terms using the business model canvas ...
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Via: The Startup Toolkit
Founder at http://dex.io (get more speaking gigs). I talk & |
"Going viral" is often the holy grail for Internet startups, who hope to quickly scale to hundreds of thousands of users (then hundreds of millions) with relatively low user acquisition costs. However, in a recent blog post and presentation, Andrew Chen argues that SaaS products aren't viral ...
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Via: Version One Ventures
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The heart and soul of an entrepreneur lies in two things: the need to solve problems and the desire to change the world. Now, that might seem like a very glamorous thing to many people, but, what people don't realize is that it's not. You have to be ready to give up your entire life and learn to live, eat, breathe, and sleep your endeavor. ...
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Via: Tony Adam's Thoughts
Founder & CEO of @eventup - we're changing the way people bo |
There have been some interesting posts on Hacker News of late around side projects. Some have pointed to their potential to distract. Others, the importance of having an "end" in mind. And while these are very real considerations, I keep feeling as though the obvious has yet to be stated. The obvious being; life needs side projects. If nothing else, they are the lifeblood of creativity. ...
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Via: Swombat on Startups
Founder @Rocketr / EiR @JetCooper / Speakers Coach @TEDxToro |
It's easy to take for granted just how good we have it as software makers selling on the internet. This is truly a unique period in human history with unprecedented commercial freedom. ...
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Creator of Ruby on Rails, Partner at 37signals, Co-author of |
Some people get excited about building something new that the world has never seen. Others get excited about making something more beautiful than it was before. Others like making things faster. And some others get off on making something less expensive. To differing degrees, these are all personal driving factors of mine as well. But the one that stands out above all the others is. ...
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Founder of 37signals. Co-author of REWORK. Credo: It's simpl |
If you keep treating your business like a baby, it will keep acting like one -- in the form of infantile profits, sophomoric growth rates, underdeveloped vendor relationships, and an overall juvenility that will cripple your ability to accomplish long-term goals. Fortunately, there's a solution for this: Cut the cord ... as in, the umbilical cord. But how do you let go of the fear that's tethering ...
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Via: Venture Beat
Entrepreneur, Author (www.EffortlessEntrepreneur.com), Speak |
The movement towards data-driven marketing makes creativity the most important asset they can offer. Specifically, great marketers will engage in creative destruction of data driven norms and disrupt market standards to stand out. ...
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Marketing strategist. Author. Agent for change. Amateur phot |
I've long been a fan of the CEO setting top level goals for a startup and then having those goals cascade down through the business with each function head setting more detailed goals for their department which in aggregate add up to the CEO's goals, and then each employee setting still more detailed individual goals. ...
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Via: The Equity Kicker
I'm a VC in London |
A common way to think of business regulations is by analogy to sports: the rules are specified up front, and the players follow the rules. But real regulations don't work that way. Businesses follow regulations as much as regulations follow businesses. Sometimes the businesses that change regulations are startups. ...
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Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
When I was a kid, "The Graduate" was a generation-defining hit movie, with Dustin Hoffman playing an aimless college graduate. In the middle of a graduation party, an older businessman takes the wayward Hoffman aside and delivers some wise advice: "plastics." That should be the field his generation should focus on, the field that would shape the future. Today's advice for aspiring graduates is als ...
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Via: Seeing Both Sides
Former entrepreneur turned VC at Flybridge Capital, author o |
There's no doubt technology entrepreneurship is becoming its own kind of celebrity. Here is a quick rundown of its appearances on the national stage: The story of the founding of Facebook receiving a feature-length Hollywood portrayal in The Social Network; Hollywood celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Justin Timberlake, MC Hammer, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber investing in technology startups ...
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Via: Startup Genome
Founder of the startupcompass.co, Student of life. The wor |
Every entrepreneur wants to believe their product is taking on a big market. Sometimes they're kidding themselves. If they are making something fun, they'll say- "we're competing against TV! The market is huge!" If they are making something utilitarian and functional, they'll say, "everyone wants to save time- there's millions of people who want that ...
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Via: Andrew Chen Blog
Bay Area entrepreneur, blogger, formerly in online ads and v |
Successful businesses are often not distracted by a hundred different metrics but laser focused on one metric that is the best predictor of scale. How does a business identify such a metric? ...
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Exploring the disruption caused by online and mobile platfor |
Somehow there is this theory that Accelerators are the new version of the Old-age Incubators. IMO, that is not true. It is also my belief that in a mature and functional ecosystem, we need both the players. I'll tell you why that is so. ...
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Via: The Startup Guy
The Startup Guy. Talk to me about The Startup Centre (@start |
People who tell you that VCs won't look at a company with an even equity split are being silly. That has never once, in my experience, been even a slight hiccup, let alone a dispositive factor in a seed investment.→ ...
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Via: Gust Blog
Venture capitalist, entrepreneur, angel investor |
Gamification is the craft or framework to derive all the fun and addicting elements found in games and apply them to real-world or productive activities. Games have the amazing ability to keep people engaged for a long time, build relationships and trust between people, and develop their creative potentials. ...
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Via: Yu-Kai Chou
RewardMe Co-Founder. Gamification Expert and Lecturer/Speake |
Problems can often be classified as either leaky bucket or power law problems. A leaky bucket requires you to fill all the holes before it will hold water. By contrast, a power law problem exhibits the Pareto principle, where you can get 80% of the effects (holding water) by focusing on just 20% of the caues (holes). Power law solutions are all about focusing on one piece the ecosystem that happen ...
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Via: Gabriel Weinberg
Founder, DuckDuckGo. Angel investor. Family guy. |
"Can you bring me up to speed?" We all hate to hear those words, as it implies a big disruption to whatever we're currently doing. At The Agile League, that phrase is taboo. Instead, we humbly ask to bring each other down to speed. Here's why: Giving status updates and explaining things is very time consuming. There are people whose entire jobs consist of sitting in meetings and either bringing pe ...
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Via: The Agile League
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"The elevator to success is out of order. You'll have to use the stairs...one step at a time." ~Joe Girard As a community, I think entrepreneurs have gotten more knowledeable over the years. We know the difference between pre-money and post-money valuations. We've read "The Lean Startup". We've dug into the details of SaaS economics. ...
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Via: On Startups
Entrepreneur. Founder/CTO @HubSpot inbound marketing and st |
"We" is a bad, bad word in copywriting. You should reword every line of copy you have that begins with "we". Whether in an email. Or on your website. Because your visitors don't want to hear about you. They want to hear about themselves - about their problems, about their needs, about their futures. ...
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Via: COPY HACKERS
Copywriter at http://CopyHackers.com. Staunch advocate of co |
Building an enterprise software company used to be largely about sales, because enterprise software was sourced and purchased by high-level business people. Those business people needed to be charmed and convinced, an activity that was distasteful to many technologists. ...
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Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
Stay in stealth mode until the last minute. The last thing any startup needs is people finding out about it. You can get attention later -- that's not difficult. You don't need the distraction of customers clamoring outside your office while you're still refactoring your NoSQL database structures. ...
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Via: A Smart Bear
Keyword, buzzword, half-truth, adjective, hey look at me! |
A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth. ...
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Via: Paul Graham
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What's more exhilarating than jumping feet-first into a brand-new business idea and investing every waking hour into bringing it to life? For entrepreneurs, not much. The luxury of spending all that time on a new venture, however, is something few have at the very beginning. ...
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Via: Grasshopper Blog
Social media and community manager at Grasshopper, Shopping, |
There's a specific step every entrepreneur needs to take that isn't talked about nearly enough. So, what is this secret phase that almost every successful entrepreneur has gone through, but that no one cares to mention? Keep reading and I'll tell you. ...
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Via: Think Traffic
Founded http://PocketChanged.com | Film Maker http://calebwo |
The importance of thinking about 'why' in addition to 'how' and 'what' has been coming up a lot for me over the last couple of months, most recently in this fabulous quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. ...
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Via: The Equity Kicker
I'm a VC in London |
A few reasons why I don't like Net Promoter (at least for us as a B2B SaaS provider) and think it shouldn't be used as a growth predictor ...
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Via: UserVoice
Head of Community @UserVoice in San Francisco, singer in the |
Can a services company like an app development house become a product company, and, as Silicon Valley VCs typically demand, command high multiples? ...
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Via: Venture Beat
I tweet about the web, social media, tech, and startups. Wr |
Eric Ries uses the phrase "vanity metrics" to refer to metrics that founders cite to demonstrate progress but that are actually false signals. A related concept is "vanity milestones": achievements that are more about making you feel good than helping your company. ...
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Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
One question that everyone who starts a new venture has is how long it takes to start having results of this endeavor. As you can see in my previous posts from the numbers of my startup the path seems to be long. The interviews I did with other startups in order to include other startup cases in my book always show a history counted in years until the first positive financial results. ...
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Locaweb product development and product management. And open |
A curious email arrived in my inbox this morning from a new service I've recently joined. Curious mainly for a central feature that they'd woven into the footer of the email: know that you are welcome to contact us at any time about anything. And you'll get a reply from a real, live human. Personalized, human service as a competitive advantage. ...
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Via: Bryce DOT VC
VC, Dad |
A handy guide for aspiring start-up advisors. You do not need be wise, or old, to set up shop in the wise old man business. There is a shortcut to gaining your own following of initiates listening to your every word. It is simple: become a technology start-up mentor. No cave, flowing beard, or robes are required; all you need to do is follow a simple recipe. ...
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Via: THE KERNEL
Technology, media and politics for enquiring minds. Contact |
Companies like Automattic (WordPress), Puppet, Fitbit, MakerBot, and Ginger.io have broken out of the pack in their industries early and fast, and one thing these companies have in common is an enormous sense of mission. Some call them "missionary entrepreneurs." Their missions are value-based and therefore quickly understood. These missions aren't the ones posted on their websites, but these are ...
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Via: True Ventures
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Telling people what you think of their ideas is a terrible thing to do at a conference. It's not helpful. In fact, unless you're their target market and they're pitching you on their product, you're probably only hurting people when you give them your opinion. ...
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Co-founder of @LightPointSec - a web security startup. Proje |
The New York Times reported that recent research supported the hunch that open floor plan offices reduce roductivity. The research showed that ambient conversations at work and a noisy office space contributed to "a decline of 5 percent to 10 percent on the performance of cognitive tasks requiring efficient use of short-term memory, like reading, writing and other forms of creative work." ...
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Via: iDoneThis blog
The insane, on occasion, are not without their charms. - Kur |
Take a look at your business. If you fired yourself right now, would your company still operate as normal? Have you created systems in your company that allow you to remove yourself from the equation and still have a fully functional business? Notice that the key word here is operate. ...
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Founder of @TourWoo, the easiest way to book a tour online. |
Being acquired is one if the positive outcomes of starting a company, it means that some other - presumably larger - company agrees with the vision and the product created by the smaller entity and has decided to express this agreement with an offer that was substantial enough that the owners of the smaller company thought that it was good enough. ...
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Via: jacquesmattheij.com
techie, coder, troubleshooter (maker ;) ), outspoken, always |
Can you quit being an entrepreneur? I've thought long and hard about this in the past few months. It's been sparked by some fascinating conversations with fellow entrepreneurs and reading Peter Shallard's Why you should quit your business and get a real job. ...
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I'm a Suitcase Entrepreneur addicted to travel, Frisbee & us |
I was recently interviewed for a WSJ article that was exploring the trends associated with the popularity (or lack thereof) of the freemium model called "When Freemium Fails." In researching my answers for the WSJ reporter, I dug up some data on TechStars companies over the last several years that use the freemium model. Here's the data: ...
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Via: David G Cohen
Founder/CEO of TechStars. Investor 150+ Amazing Startups. Ge |
It's never been easier to raise seed funding, and there's warnings that we're in the midst of a "seed stage bubble." Whether you think it's a bubble or a boom things are good- you have to ask, how long will the party go on? ...
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Via: Andrew Chen Blog
Bay Area entrepreneur, blogger, formerly in online ads and v |
Often times when I see two teams going after a very similar market opportunity I look at the founders and can easily envision a great combined team. One start up has been founded by a marketing professional with ten years experience in a major consumer technology company, another by a tech whiz with a newly minted Masters from MIT, and a third by a born saleswoman. But each continue to struggle to ...
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Via: On Startups
13 start-ups, 10 exits, and counting. |
We live in an era where the press espouses the entrepreneurs who have five startups. I'm not one who has subscribed to the "superman founder" narrative. So I was intrigued by Brad's post. You should read the post in its entirety - it's a great learning piece. But for now, the summary is: ...
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2x entrepreneur. Sold both companies (last to http://salesfo |
In my opinion, right now there's way too much hype on the technologies and not enough attention to the real businesses behind them. - Mark Cuban. Whoever said "it's what's inside that counts" was only half right. Because sexy sells. Talk to any successful CEO in an "unsexy" vertical - like financial, infrastructure, communications, or data - and you can hear it in their voice: the struggle they en ...
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Via: 500 Startups
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Discipline is becoming my new favorite word. It's the action-oriented word to the more generic "focus." People struggle with focus, how to define it, and measure it. Discipline makes more sense. You know if you're being disciplined or not -in everything you do- inside and outside of your startup. It's pretty hard to lie to yourself about it. ...
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Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
One of the things I always suggest to CEOs is that they be an outside director for one company that is not their own. I don't care how big or small the company is, whether or not I have an involvement in the company, or if the CEO knows the entrepreneurs involved. I'm much more interested in the CEO having the experience of being a board member for someone else's company. ...
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Via: Feld Thoughts
I'm a managing director at Foundry Group. I live in Boulder, |
In an instant gratification, give-it-to-me-now, overnight success world, patience isn't a concept that is embraced or celebrated. Startups that don't enjoy immediate success when they launch or soon afterward are easily dismissed as yesterday's news. They get one shot at hitting the mark so if you miss, you're done...or so it goes. ...
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Via: Mark Evans Tech
Startup marketer, conference organizer, hockey player, dad, |
One of the seminal moments in the early days of the Web 2.0 era, was a simple default setting. At launch, a new photo service called Flickr set the default on images shared to "public". This was a stark contrast to the rest of their competitors at the time who all defaulted to private. This default to "public" had such a powerful effect on unlocking the network effects of this new service, and era ...
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Via: Bryce DOT VC
VC, Dad |
When people describe you or your company what is the first thing they say? What do they lead with? That's your leading characteristic (at least in that particular context).He's the _______ guy. That's the _______ startup. Isn't that the __________ search engine? ...
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Via: Gabriel Weinberg
My only regret is that I have... boneitis. |
I wanted to offer some thoughts on pitching versus product planning. In an effort to impress investors, we've all steered our products towards what we think is sexy or investable, versus what is most likely to work for consumers. I've come to believe that this is a kind of Silicon Valley disease, and we should try hard to avoid it. ...
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Via: Andrew Chen Blog
Bay Area entrepreneur, blogger, formerly in online ads and v |
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald One of the reasons running a startup is so interesting is the constant tension between opposing ways of thinking: short-term vs. long-term, internal vs. external, saving vs. investment, etc. ...
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Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
Three little words that mean so much. "Change the world." Entrepreneurs utter them like a badge of honor, after all its what we are put on this planet to do, right? Yet, so many of the startups I meet are trying to figure out how to put crap in a box and sell it every month, or as Jeff Hammerbacher, founder of Cloudera said: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people c ...
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Via: Micah Baldwin
Live a life of extreme honesty. First company when I was 14; |
Speed is killing our decisions. The crush of technology forces us to snap react. We blink, when we should think. Yet as our decision-making accelerates, long-term strategy becomes even more crucial. Those of us who find time to step back and think about the big picture, even for a few minutes, have a major advantage. If every one else moves too quickly, we can win by going slow. ...
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Professor, writer, procrastinator |
Have you ever heard of a PEST analysis? It's not something you do with annoying people on Facebook or around the house. It's a basic form of business analysis that looks at four key "big picture" factors that might influence your business, factors in the environment around you and your company. These factors are political, economic, social, and technological. ...
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Via: Christopher Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, ninja, PodCamp cofounder, Mar |
When Ries and Blank criticize the business plan. They say it gets in the way of the more agile and flexible lean startup. So, It would be better to advocate a type of business planning that could be called lean business planning. That would mean starting small with a business plan that summarizes the current strategy, metrics, milestones, tasks and basic responsibilities. ...
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Founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software; entrepreneur, bu |
How to distinguish between a Big Idea that simply starts small -- consistent with Lean Startup methodology -- as compared to a Small Idea that will always remain a Small Idea. This question has been on my mind because recently, when I talk to entrepreneurs, I'm seeing too many Small Ideas. ...
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Via: Seeing Both Sides
Former entrepreneur turned VC at Flybridge Capital, author o |
Before Hacker News, and the wealth of Paul Graham essays that came with it, there was, for me, ignorance. Today I want to, ungratefully, attack one theme that was common in those early essays, back in 2007 and earlier. Before I do this, it's fair to point out that Paul's view of this may well have changed since this was written (5 or more years ago!). ...
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Via: Swombat on Startups
Cofounder of GrantTree and Woobius, Blogger @ http://swombat |
There is no innovation without learning. Martin Kupp's areas of expertise are strategic innovation and organizational creativity and in this talk, he outlines why startups must engage in the right kind of learning to be innovative. ...
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Via: HackFwd Blog
We're experienced tech entrepreneurs looking to support and |
Devon Wijesignhe offers up that once you are profitable and have at least $10 million in revenue you aren't a startup: I agree with him that those criteria could be part of what makes a company no longer a startup but revenue and profitability alone don't feel right. In fact, I wanted to offer more specific ideas of when a startup is less like a startup and more like a regular business. ...
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Via: David Cummings
10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family, |
It seems like a commonly accepted fact that the more you do something, the better you get at it. In fact that's often how society decides how much money to give you: since it's hard to measure exactly how skilled somebody is, we use job experience as a proxy to judge their value. ...
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Via: SachaGreif.com
Designer from Paris, now living in Osaka. Creator of @YoFoly |
There are some overlaps. Challenges Status Quo Curious Self Motivated Visionary Entertains the Fantastic ...
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Via: Dorai's Learn Log
Favorite topics - Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurshi |
A vast majority of web entrepreneurs want to be millionnaires. It would be a lie and even economically bad if it wasn't so. But, is money the driving force for the founders? ...
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Co-founder @hackerrank & @interviewstreet |
Greed is good. ~Gordon Gecko. Focus is good. ~Steve Jobs. I'm a big fan of focus. I'm such a big fan of it, I try to apply it to as many things as possible. [just kidding] It's really, really hard to argue against focus. Who doesn't like focus? Who would contest focus? Focus is like motherhood and Apple (the company)... ...
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Via: On Startups
Entrepreneur. Founder/CTO @HubSpot inbound marketing and st |
Chief Executive Officer (or CEO in short) is that fantastically sounding job role that feels like a dream role to many. I used to fancy being a CEO one day and now when I am one (of Wingify), frankly it feels exciting and overwhelming. In fact, it is a big responsibility. ...
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Via: Paras Chopra
Startups and Online Marketing enthusiast |
What are the core ingredients of great idea executions? How are our workspaces impacting our creative output? And why do we waste almost 40% of our productivity each day? To answer these questions and more, we polled the creative community, crunched the data, and transformed it into a beautiful, poster-size infographic - otherwise known as the 99%'s annual Idea Execution Audit. ...
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Via: The99Percent
Jocelyn K. Glei is all about making ideas happen. She is the |
These seven factors are leading to better and more sustainable opportunities in venture capital than have been present at any time in our investment histories. Given these seven factors - it's hard to look in the rear view mirror and imagine you can see the future. ...
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2x entrepreneur. Sold both companies (last to http://salesfo |
When I got into online gaming it was a fairly small game which got me hooked. I played more popular games like Age of Empires and CouterStrike, but it was a simple racing game called Midtown Madness 2 with a small audience that captured my attention. I can remember there were only ever around 300 people online, and after a while I knew almost all of them. When I got involved in the community and f ...
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Via: joel.is
Founder of @bufferapp, a smarter way to share. Focused on th |
first-time entrepreneurs often fail to realize that when you build something new, no one will care. People won't use your product, won't tell people about it, and almost certainly won't pay for it. (There are exceptions - but these are as rare as winning the lottery). This doesn't mean you'll fail. It means you need to be smarter and harder working, and surround yourself with extraordinary people ...
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Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
I love the goal of Muse businesses (pay for your life without taking your time), but become extremely worried when I hear someone say they are going to start one. Here's the problem: Without significant development resources, the muse seems only to work for two types of businesses: drop-shipping and gadget innovations. ...
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Via: The Startup Toolkit
Founder at http://dex.io (get more speaking gigs). I talk & |
It's very surprising to see a post entitled "Please Don't Learn to Code" at the top of Hacker News, and even more surprising that its author would be Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror and StackOverflow fame. Jeff is arguing that not everybody needs to learn to code, and in fact the world doesn't need more mediocre coders. ...
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Via: SachaGreif.com
Designer from Paris, now living in Osaka. Creator of @YoFoly |
Something many entrepreneurs don't realize is that the farther you go with your startup, the tougher it gets.When you start with an idea, it's easy to be excited. Since it only exists in your head, it morphs every day, possibly even with every conversation. And because it hasn't reached the market yet, your mind fills with best-case scenarios. ...
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Entrepreneur, Investor, Writer, Dad. |
In the age of Skype, email, cheap telephony and collaboration tools it's all too easy to sit in your office and connect with people remotely. It's even easy to justify it to yourself, "it's such a productivity drain to spend time on the road and I can accomplish everything I need using modern tools." ...
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2x entrepreneur. Sold both companies (last to http://salesfo |
Every investor we worked with at Habit treated us unbelievably well. That being said, accepting (and striving for) the funding led us toward building a company we hated and were bad at. Turns out, we just wanted to make a living working on creative projects with our friends. The billion dollar dream was someone else's ...
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Via: The Startup Toolkit
Founder at http://dex.io (get more speaking gigs). I talk & |
I'm not sure when it happened. Maybe it comes with the territory. Or perhaps with the "tech bubble". It could have been the billion dollar valuations; or a secret dinner at Bin 38. I wish I knew. I wish that the exact moment that becoming an advisor to a company became hip. ...
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Via: Swombat on Startups
CEO and founder of @graphicly. Startup advisor. Animal lover |
"Do entrepreneurs just say they're passionate about their venture in order to get money?". Well I digress, it was a bit harsher than that. It was more like, "Is 'i'm so passionate for this idea' a BS story from founders?" The individual expanded on this in a way which made their question actually seem reasonable. They explained by asking how can anyone be passionate about sending and storing files ...
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Via: Grow VC
I am a modern philosopher of ancient texts, a designer, an e |
As a business owner, I encourage you to think about your business a little differently. That is, I want you to think about your business as a product. And specifically a product that one day you might sell to an acquirer (for a lot of money of course). By thinking about your business this way, you will be more likely to build a company that an acquirer would want to buy. ...
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Via: Growthink Blog
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Over the past year, a disease thought dormant since 2001 has become active again in London's Tech City. Symptoms include the promiscuous abuse of words such as "senior", "executive" and "international" and feigned embarrassment at the intergalactic grandeur of the sufferer's job title. ...
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Via: THE KERNEL
Journalist. Founder & Editor-in-Chief, @KernelMag. Advisor t |
What do Acquisio, Freshbooks, Hootsuite and Shopify all have in common? Well, for one, they are all kick ass, high growth Canadian startups. For another, they all started out as web agencies. i.e. service companies. Each has a different story for how they transitioned from services to product. ...
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Via: Mark MacLeod
Seed investor for SaaS, e-commerce and other awesome startup |
One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are. In this essay I'm going to demonstrate this phenomenon by describing some. Any one of them could make you a billionaire. That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet when I describe these ideas you may notice you find yourself shrinking away from them. ...
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Via: Paul Graham
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Once I attended a conference where a serial entrepreneur was sharing his advice on what works now. The people in the audience were employees from high tech companies who wanted to be entrepreneurs. The speaker shared a lot of things that were counter-intuitive but lot of it was plain bad advice ...
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Via: Rajesh Setty
Bringing Ideas to Life. With Love! Rajesh is an entrepreneur |
A friend of mine recently asked me a simple question: "After four years as a VC, knowing what you know now, what basic tips do you have for guys like me who are growing venture-backed businesses?" It got me thinking ...
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Via: Venture Beat
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Every engineer who has invented some new technology, or is adept at creating solutions, believes that is the hard part, and it should be a short step to take that solution to market as an entrepreneur. In reality, that short business step embodies far more risk, and a poor technology solution is not near the top of most lists of common reasons for business failures. ...
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Veteran startup mentor, executive, blogger, author, tech pro |
So you want to start a company. You've finished your undergraduate degree and you're peering into the haze of your future. Would it be better to continue on to an MBA or do an advanced degree in a nerdy pursuit like engineering or mathematics? Sure, tech skills are hugely in demand and there are a few high-profile nerd success stories, but how often do pencil-necked geeks really succeed in busines ...
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Via: Forbes
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Entrepreneurs are the most hopeful people on the planet. They all start something with the hope that it will be "the next Facebook" or will be as important as Netscape, or maybe will become a billion dollar company with minimal social value like Groupon. We believe in ourselves so much, that when someone else doesn't believe in us, we are flabbergasted. So entrepreneurs apologize. They apologize ...
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Via: Learn to Duck
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US Bureau of Labor Statistics research indicates that almost 60% of businesses shut down within the first four years of operation. Â Why? Â Most fail for one of these reasons. 1. No viable market for their products Many businesses start with the strong conviction that customers will want their products, but without solid experience or data [...] ...
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Via: Business Planning
All things social enterprise/social ventures, author Venture |
The following is a guest post by Ty Danco. Ty is an angel investor and startup mentor. Read more of his thoughts at tydanco.com. Or, check out his recent article "What To Do If You Don't Have An Idea" It's time to review the past year, so without apology for personal taste, here's my list of the best (and a few of the worst) of 2011. Best Startup Book of 201 ...
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Via: On Startups
http://www.linkedin.com/in/tydanco |
- beta (7)
- Development (44)
- Features (23)
- Pricing (42)
- Product Management (41)
- Rapid Prototyping (8)
- Usability (12)
- User Engagement (15)
- Wow Factor (5)
- Advertising (9)
- Branding (10)
- Competition (16)
- Customer Acquisition (30)
- Demand Creation (2)
- Launch (14)
- Lead Generation (5)
- Market Positioning (6)
- Marketing (97)
- Networking (8)
- Pitching (26)
- PR (13)
- Pre Launch (2)
- Press (3)
- Product Marketing (31)
- Sales (48)
- Value Proposition (14)
- Viral Marketing (10)
- Word of Mouth (5)
- Blogging (8)
- Community Management (19)
- Content Development (9)
- Content Marketing (26)
- Email Marketing (2)
- Inbound Marketing (4)
- SEO (6)
- Social Media Marketing (8)
- Angel Investors (10)
- Bootstrapping (15)
- Burn Rate (1)
- Equity (26)
- Funding (64)
- Valuation (5)
- VCs (24)
- Advise and Tips (220)
- Book (4)
- Business Planning (11)
- Case Studies (45)
- How To (105)
- Interviews (11)
- Lessons Learned (63)
- Methodologies (19)
- Mistakes (104)
- Opinion (119)
- Advisers (9)
- Co-founders (33)
- Culture (39)
- Hiring (62)
- Mentors (10)
- Organization (9)
- Team (85)
- Work Ethics (3)
- Decision Making (18)
- Entrepreneurial Skills (29)
- Leadership (29)
- Negotiation (1)
- Passion (4)
- Persistance (9)
- Technical Skills (12)
