February, 2022

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Don’t Make These 5 BIG Mistakes When Answering VC/Customer Questions

Dream It

When pitching a potential investor or customer, time is of the essence. Most of that time goes to the meat of the conversion: the question-and-answer portion. During Q&A, both sides start engaging in a sort of conversational dance - with one side leading (VC/customer) and the other side following (founder). But often, we’ll hear founders misstep and repeat easy mistakes that throw off Q&A flow and cause startups to lose points.

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How entrepreneurs are building resilience in their communities

Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative

How entrepreneurs are building resilience in their communities. By Shannon Courtney. Developing the skills to be resilient is essential in order to be a strong leader, to recover from setbacks and to adapt to whatever challenges come your way. Communities, economies and trade benefit from strong businesses that have learned to weather unexpected challenges.

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5 Strategies for Startups Navigating an Uncertain Supply Chain

Venture Well

Our experts offer five tips to help early-stage startups manage global supply chain disruptions. The post 5 Strategies for Startups Navigating an Uncertain Supply Chain appeared first on VentureWell.

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3 ways to measure employee happiness (and 1 step you shouldn’t skip)

Entrepreneurs' Organization

Contributed by Verne Harnish, founder of EO and founder and CEO of Gazelles, a global executive education and coaching company with over 150 coaching partners on six continents. Together with Daniel Marcos (EO Austin), Verne is co-founder of Growth Institute , which provides online executive education based on the Scaling Up methodology. Want more Verne?

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The Big Payoff of Application Analytics

Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.

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Learning the Hard Way - Due Diligence Mistakes

The Seraf Compass

It is easy to talk about due diligence in the abstract, but it is much harder to practice what you preach. One of the hardest things about early stage investing is that it is really risky - if you don’t have some suspension of disbelief, and you obsess too much about cataloging every risk, you will never get a deal done. As a way of wrapping up this series of articles with a review, let’s take a look at a few common mistakes and see what we can learn from them.

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More Trending

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Nigerian healthtech startup Reliance Health raises $40M led by General Atlantic

TechCrunch

There’s no denying the growth of healthtech globally over the past three years thanks to the pandemic. The event has accelerated the use of telemedicine, virtual care, and drug delivery, thus fuelling investor interest in the sector. Investment has also trickled down to Africa, with large checks going into growth-stage startups. Lagos- and Texas-based digital healthcare provider Reliance Health is the latest beneficiary and is doing so in grand style, raising $40 million.

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How to Build and Fund a Startup as a Black Woman

StartupNation

Securing funding for a startup relies heavily on the connections you have among investors, as well as your ability to attract attention to your business. What happens when those investors are mostly upper-class white men, and you are not? It can be difficult for people of color, women, and working-class backgrounds to find investors for their startups when most of the funding comes from people outside their social circles.

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Proven Strategies to Efficiently Manage a Remote Team

Smart Hustle Magazine

It’s no surprise that remote work will persist way into the future, especially with most professions being able to collaborate and achieve office levels of productivity virtually. For example, a recent remote work survey by the PWC revealed that business executives expected a massive 55% of their employees to work from home at least one day a week even after the pandemic.

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Why experience sharing is key to entrepreneurial growth

Entrepreneurs' Organization

Almost 10 years ago, I had my first experience with a professional Forum when I joined Entrepreneurs’ Organization. A Forum, which is also often referred to as a Mastermind, is a group of peers who meet regularly, with the goal of helping each member improve personally and professionally. The Forum structure is a foundation of many professional organizations and self-help groups. .

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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 Next Key Innovation in the Shift-Left Movement

Tomasz Tunguz

Microservices has become the default architecture for many companies. By breaking down large codebases into smaller pieces, microservices empower engineers to ship code faster. Continuous integration, the process of constantly folding new code into production (live on the website or service), further accelerates the software velocity. There’s a cost to this speed: coordination.

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How To Raise Venture Funding When Investors Hate Your Market

Hunter Walk

There’s a Specific Strategy For Getting Capital When Sentiment Turns Sour. “There’s only one thing that entrepreneurs have complete control over, and that’s picking the market they want to operate in.” I’m paraphrasing wisdom shared by entrepreneur/investor Jeff Kearl at a conference. Jeff was pointing out there are a host of attributes tied to the market you’re deciding to operate in and you should be thoughtful about that selection.

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Nigeria’s AltSchool raises $1M pre-seed to build an alternative school for Africans

TechCrunch

The demand for software engineers is expected to grow by 22% between 2020 and 2030, according to a report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This figure is larger than the 4% average for other careers. One would be out of touch with reality to say they haven’t noticed this phenomenon in Lagos, Africa’s startup capital city, where mid to senior-level engineers are leaving in droves to seek better pay and opportunities in companies outside Africa.

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10 Ways to Boost Your Startup’s Customer Acquisition

StartupNation

Many startups struggle with finding and retaining customers. Having a sustainable and systematic customer acquisition strategy is an essential component of success for any organization, especially as a startup. Once you’ve implemented the basics to identify and attract new customers, you need to continue growing. Why is customer acquisition important?

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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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Forget the Fancy Logo – How to Start Scrappy

Smart Hustle Magazine

When you’re starting a business, it’s very common to jump online and do some research. There’s a lot of advice out there about how to start a business, much of it written by people who have money and are well established already. In an ideal world, when you start a business, you’re well-funded. That’s just not always the case and it is possible to start a successful business by being scrappy.

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3 ways the Olympics are similar to entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs' Organization

Lou Cysewski, EO Seattle, is co-founder and CEO of Coolperx , the world’s first net carbon neutral merchandising company. As a minority female entrepreneur, Lou shared her observations on the Olympics and how they reflected and exposed the struggles of female entrepreneurs striving to build sustainable businesses. With the 2022 Winter Olympics upon us, we’re reposting this article that originally appeared on EO’s Inc.com channel.

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Why Early Valuations Might Surge in 2022

Tomasz Tunguz

Will year-end Series A and B valuations top or trail those of January? This question sits atop most founders' lips and boardroom agendas. The broad market sentiment is they will be lower. Public-market software valuations have withered more than 60% from their highs. Alarm about interest rates, QE ending, and geopolitical risk have swirled around public technology companies, kinking the valuation curve.

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#15. Netflix Founder Marc Randolph Shares An Entrepreneurship Masterclass

Entrepreneur's Handbook

Image provided by Marc Randolph Inspirational stories plus practical takeaways from the entrepreneurship world. Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or YouTube. [link] Today’s guest is Marc Randolph, the Co-Founder of Netflix who has had an entrepreneurship career that spans four decades. He’s been a founder of more than half a dozen other successful start-ups, a mentor to scores of early-stage entrepreneurs, and an investor in numerous successful tech ventures (and an even larger number of uns

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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

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Stop guessing your KPIs; Varos shows e-commerce, SaaS companies how you compare to peers

TechCrunch

When one public company in a certain sector communicates a difficult quarter, the other companies in the sector tend to see a dip in share price. However, for private companies, it is hard to know exactly why there was an increase in costs last week — was it due to the company’s performance or happening to everyone else, too. Varos , based in San Francisco and Tel Aviv, is shedding some light on how companies compare to their peers in terms of key performance indicators, like customer acquisitio

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Stop Doing These 4 Things if You Want Your Business to Last

StartupNation

We’ve all seen the statistics on how many businesses fail within the first few years of operation, and the current pandemic may accelerate that struggle for some startups. After fielding literally thousands of questions from small business owners during the past few months at Nav, we’ve identified four ways businesses are setting themselves up to fail.

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A Commitment to Lifelong Learning Is Essential for Your Success

Smart Hustle Magazine

There’s a misconception that the most successful business leaders are born with their leadership credentials imprinted in their DNA. Surely because they are more successful than their peers, it stands to reason they’re extremely sharp or even smarter than their non-CEO cohorts. But in truth, what sets successful business leaders apart is their innate curiosity and sponge-like ability to draw out insights about their business from all kinds of places.

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If you can’t answer these 3 questions, you’re not ready to sell your business

Entrepreneurs' Organization

The process of selling a business is complex and multifaceted : It involves working with multiple stakeholders who sometimes have conflicting priorities. While only you can decide when to sell your business , you also must rely on these other stakeholders in order to have a successful sale. It’s your job to make sure their decisions align with your own goals.

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How to Avoid the Pain and Cost of PCI Compliance While Optimizing Payments

Speaker: P. Andrew Sjogren, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Very Good Security, Matt Doka, Co-Founder and CTO of Fivestars, and Steve Andrews, President & CEO of the Western Bankers Association 

PCI compliance can feel challenging and sometimes the result feels like you are optimizing more for security and compliance than you are for business outcomes. The key is to take the right strategy to PCI compliance that gets you both. In this webinar, we have a great set of panelists who will take you through how Zero Data strategies can be used as part of a well-rounded compliance and security approach, and get you to market much sooner by also allowing for payment optimization.

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Are you ready to invest in the Metaverse?

OurCrowd

Underneath the hype, a synthesis of trends has been brewing that could create opportunities. By Josh Liggett. Principal, Investments Team, OurCrowd. Even in late 2021, most people had no idea what the Metaverse was. Then Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s rebrand to Meta and interest in the Metaverse exploded. . Goldman Sachs estimates the Metaverse to be an $8 trillion market opportunity.

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7 Biggest Startup Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make, and How to Avoid Them

Entrepreneur's Handbook

Failing brings new experiences to adjust our direction to get closer to our goal. Continue reading on Entrepreneur's Handbook ».

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The idea that university degrees don’t matter is a Silicon Valley fantasy

TechCrunch

Jamie Beaton. Contributor. Share on Twitter. Jamie Beaton is the author of “Accepted! Secrets to Gaining Admission to the World’s Topic Universities,” and is CEO of Crimson Education , a university admissions consulting company. Silicon Valley loves to celebrate the cult of the dropout — the inspired entrepreneur who decides that traditional education isn’t for her because it teaches her nothing of relevance, slows her down, and, in a world of readily available information, no longer gates

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Change Management Helps Achieve Business Goals

StartupNation

If there is one thing that is true, it is that change is the only constant. According to Gartner, the average organization has implemented about five significant business changes over the last three years. However, only 34% of such changes are deemed a clear success by the organization. It can be hard to cope with change, both on the technical front and on account of the psychological fear of the unknown.

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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