August, 2013

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The Underwhelmingness of Facebook

This is going to be BIG.

'Facebook is an incredible thing in many ways. It has over a billion people on it--a reach unlike anything in the social software space we''ve ever seen. The numbers of photos uploaded, likes per second, page views, etc are absolutely staggering. Its sheer growth is truly an accomplishment. Yet, when I think about its impact on our lives and what it enables people to do, I can''t help but be underwhelmed.

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Bring Me Your Accents. Immigration Fuels Innovation

Both Sides of the Table

'I have lived (England, France, Italy, Spain, Japan & the US) and worked (Ireland, Germany, India) around the world. I adore accents. I listen not only for the country but the region. I became engrossed with the origins of both accents and phrases. One of most fascinating & enjoyable books on the topic is Bill Bryson’s “ Made in America ,” which demystifies the origins of the English language and why Americans speak more traditional English than the English do.

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Create and nurture your collective intelligence.

Berkonomics

'At the MIT Center of Collective Intelligence, professors and graduate students are wrestling with an important opportunity – and gaining ground. With new collaborative tools available for use in the cloud, people are no longer isolated in their creative endeavors. Some label this “crowdsourcing,” a term used to describe one form of this new empowerment.

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Marketing’s Technical Liberation

Tomasz Tunguz

Product and engineering teams are inseparable and at the core of most startups. One degree removed, sales and customer support teams ply the voice of the customer to influence product and eng. Of the five teams in a startup, marketing teams tend to have the least influence because traditional product marketers must influence others to enact change. Marketing works with product and engineering to update branding and communication within the product.

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Navigating the Future: Generative AI, Application Analytics, and Data

Generative AI is upending the way product developers & end-users alike are interacting with data. Despite the potential of AI, many are left with questions about the future of product development: How will AI impact my business and contribute to its success? What can product managers and developers expect in the future with the widespread adoption of AI?

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Honesty and Relationship Building with Investors

This is going to be BIG.

'There''s been a lot of innovation in the startup fundraising world in the last couple of years--Angellist, Second Market, accelerators, etc. One thing you can''t innovate around, however, is building a human relationship. That''s why I really liked two posts on the topic of investor/founder relations that I read this weekend. First, from Paul Graham : "The way to seem most formidable as an inexperienced founder is to stick to the truth.

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How to Get Busy People to Take Action When You Send an Email

Both Sides of the Table

'We all get a lot of email. And we send off scores of them, too. For important emails we hope for replies or action. If you do the math on the number of inbound emails you get multiplied by the time it would take to read them all and respond to those that expect a reply you would be astounded. It is simply unmanageable. Yet some simple techniques can help massively improve your ability to get people to take action on your important emails.

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The Importance of Realism in Startups

Both Sides of the Table

'I’ve done a lot of video interviews. This is one of my favorite if not my favorite outright. It’s only 12 minutes long and if you’re a first-time entrepreneur (or second time, frankly) I encourage you to watch it if for nothing else than to get a sense that your struggles are universal. TechCrunch interviewed me and asked me to talk about failure.

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Measuring your power in the Internet marketplace.

Berkonomics

'There are a number of key performance indicators that help new generation company management see more clearly their progress and corporate health. The old measures, including return on investment, percentage of profit against revenue or employee count, and more, obviously are still relevant. But businesses that expose their story to tens of millions of potential customers through the Internet need additional tools.

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The Perils of Shiny New Objects

Both Sides of the Table

'I have a saying that I employ as a powerful metaphor at every startup with whom I work – “beware of shiny new objects.” It is one of the easiest pieces of advice to give as it is almost always valuable if entrepreneurs follow it as a guideline. Yet sadly most startups have “shiny object” obsessions. In today’s uber-connected, social media, everything-is-public, people tell you there’s killing it with these new features, investor & mentor whiplash &#

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Your Fractional Finance and Accounting Team

Mighty Financial specializes in supporting the financial aspirations of small businesses and entrepreneurs. With our comprehensive bookkeeping and precise accounting expertise with decades of experience across diverse financial roles, our team offers tailor-made services ranging from essential bookkeeping to strategic fractional CFO support, catered specifically to the unique challenges of technology companies, startups, and SMEs.

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Don’t be greedy even if you have the power.

Berkonomics

'Sometimes the end game or sale of the company is not a happy event. Especially when outside investors, venture capitalists, or angels, have put in substantial money and the sales price is less than the value of their investment. Most all experienced VC and angel investors have found themselves in such a situation, since it is the unfortunate truth that half of their investments fail, on average, within the first several years of the investment.

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The Forwardable Intro

This is going to be BIG.

'I offer up a lot of intros to people, and when you add them all up, they can take a lot of time. That''s why I try and push off as much of the work to the person being introduced by asking for a clean, forwardable email. What is that? Well, first, it starts with the person being introduced hitting Compose, not Reply. We don''t want the history of how the guy I''m introducing you to is an a **e sometimes finding it''s way into his inbox.

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Clutter

This is going to be BIG.

'I came to the realization yesterday that I have too many things. They''re not fancy things. Many of the things are things that I have that go with other things that are things I no longer have--phone cords in historic form factors. Some are necessary things in unnecessary numbers. I appear to have three or four dozen forks, yet seating for only eight (fourteen if you count the couches and the popason chair.

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Your Startup’s Three Horizons

Tomasz Tunguz

Credit: Karl Scotland. When I started at Redpoint in 2008, I wanted to find every way of analyzing companies I could. Consultants scrutinize the inner-workings of companies daily and create simple frameworks for explaining their operations. So I bugged a handful of friends with experience at the Big 3 consulting firms for their most used frameworks.

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Digitalization: 5 Tech Updates That Will Help You Survive The Recession & Thrive

Lack of digitalization decreases business competitiveness. To thrive, embracing modern solutions becomes essential. The approach to digitalization often aligns with a company's business model. This shift not only boosts productivity but also automates processes and improves security. The tech market offers a wealth of technologies tailored for management, planning, and forecasting, replacing outdated pen-and-paper methods.

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The Fundamental Challenge of Your Startup’s First Hire: Leading and Learning at the Same Time

Tomasz Tunguz

A team of founders who had just made their first their first hire asked me about culture and on boarding. How do they go about managing people? How do they maintain the values of the business? The underlying question of successful management is: How can founders lead and learn at the same time? I think a bastardized version Tolstoy’s well-worn refrain is apt: Happy teams are all alike; every unhappy team is unhappy in its own way.

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The Seed Investment Patterns of Billion Dollar Startups

Tomasz Tunguz

Over the past few years, there has been a pronounced shift in the seed market. VCs now participate quite actively in the market. As a result, seed investment volumes have roughly doubled in the past year. But is the seed strategy working for startups and VCs? Do hugely successful businesses raise seed capital? Do those businesses include VCs in their seed rounds?

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Create a Powerful Dashboard.

Berkonomics

'From sports car to aircraft to super tanker, successful operation depends upon the pilot’s understanding and urgent timely use of a dashboard. Real time information is critical to real time decision-making, and increasingly in the modern business world, decisions are made by management without extended meetings or discussion with others. And with the rise of modern technology-driven businesses, the same is true of management in the business world.

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Growth requires a different kind of capital.

Berkonomics

'Growing companies usually require more working capital during their periods of rapid growth. In past insights we have calculated the amount of additional capital needed for a business as it grows, and the additional capital required is often surprisingly large. In this insight, we need to speak of the sources of working capital and the implications to the future financial health of the choices made when selecting one financial resource.

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PE Mastery: CAPTARGET's Playbook for Quality Lead Flow

CAPTARGET presents a masterclass in M&A deal sourcing. Learn to cast a wide net, embracing seller self-identification. Consistency is the linchpin: keep the origination process steady for a reliable flow of opportunities. Diversify your tactics, employing various tools and vendors. Tech matters! Understand DNS settings, domain authority, and brand presence for optimal outreach.

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The Part They Don’t Tell You About Startup Team Building

Tomasz Tunguz

At Google, the director of my team repeated a management mantra to us quite often. “Manage yourself out of a job; make yourself redundant”, she would say. “Empower your people and then get out of the way.” Our director was a terrific team builder. Before Google, she founded a startup where she learned to build a company. When she told us her mantra, she was sharing her learnings with us.

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The Sales and Marketing Spend Strategies of Billion Dollar SaaS Companies

Tomasz Tunguz

How much should your SaaS startup spend on sales and marketing? I’ve written about using unit economics and lead funnel performance to answer this question. Emulating the patterns of successful SaaS companies is another technique. There are about 34 publicly traded SaaS companies that have published their revenue and sales & marketing expenses. Though their revenue growth rates are each unique, the sales and marketing spend patterns are quite similar.

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Great Startup Product Design Is Telepathic

Tomasz Tunguz

I never thought learning how to write better might help me understand product design but it has. Great literature and well designed products share one defining attribute: they create a telepathic connection between the creator and the consumer. Before you chuckle and write me off as a palm reading gypsy, hear me out. The idea isn’t mine, but Stephen King’s.

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Mobile Social Networks: The New Customer Acquisition Powerhouse

Tomasz Tunguz

There’s a force in mobile app distribution that isn’t talked about much despite its magnitude: mobile social networks. Mobile social nets are becoming the predominant mobile app paid discovery/distribution platforms. How big is this force? Line, the Japanese mobile messenger with more than 200M users is on a $400M run rate , 60% of which is derived from app distribution.

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How to Stay Competitive in the Evolving State of Martech

Marketing technology is essential for B2B marketers to stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital landscape — and with 53% of marketers experiencing legacy technology issues and limitations, they’re researching innovations to expand and refine their technology stacks. To help practitioners keep up with the rapidly evolving martech landscape, this special report will discuss: How practitioners are integrating technologies and systems to encourage information-sharing between departments and pr

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Choosing a Content Marketing Strategy for Your Startup

Tomasz Tunguz

For bloggers and content marketers, choosing the right content syndication tools to distribute posts is critical to developing an audience. The author/marketer must balance four attributes: distribution, measurement, retention and brand. Table 1: Balancing Syndication Tools Attributes. Channel. Distribution. Measurement. Retention. Brand. RSS. Poor : only one subscriber.

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The Founder’s Null Hypothesis

Tomasz Tunguz

Credit: xkcd.com. Over breakfast, I caught up with a close friend, an entrepreneur who is exploring a number of ideas for his next venture. He and his co-founder want to test their way to success with the Lean Startup Model. But they have added a twist to the Lean Startup process I call the Founder’s Null Hypothesis. Here’s how it works: First, this entrepreneur assumes each of his ideas will fail - the null hypothesis.

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Cohort Analysis for Startups: Six Summary Reports to Understand Your Customer Base (With Code)

Tomasz Tunguz

Cohort analysis provides deep insight into customer bases because cohorts expose how customer accounts grow, evolve and churn. Plus, cohort analysis provides a framework to evaluate product releases, marketing pushes and advertising campaign performance. The Six Cohort Reports I Use to Understand Trends. Below is a list of the six reports I create when analyzing cohorts.

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Anticipatory Computing: The Next Big Thing Is Enabling Laziness

Tomasz Tunguz

Control4’s IPO last week and Nest’s massive success mark the beginning of mainstream, useful connected devices. In the decade to come, the most successful will be united by one common characteristic. They will anticipate our needs and make us lazier. Living is hard work. So many things to remember, like buying milk on the way home tonight. Plenty of software has been written to help us manage our daily torrent of to dos.

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Statement of Cash Flows vs. Cash Flow Statement

Speaker: Wayne Spivak - President and Chief Financial Officer of SBA * Consulting LTD, Industry Writer, and Public Speaker

The old adages that "cash is king" and "you can’t spend profits" still hold true today. But however well-known these sayings might be, it requires a change in mindset to properly implement a cash flow management system that predicts your business's runaway as accurately as possible. Key to this new mindset is understanding the difference between the Statement of Cash Flows, a historical look at the source and uses of cash, and the Cash Flow Statement, which uses transaction history and forward-l