November, 2010

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Understanding How The Innovator’s Dilemma Affects You

Both Sides of the Table

One of the most influential books of my career is The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clay Christensen. I cannot recommend it enough for people in the technology or media sectors. Many people bandy about the definitions of “disruptive technology&# or “the innovator’s dilemma&# without ever having read the book and almost universally misunderstand the concepts.

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Anything is Possible (in a Startup)

This is going to be BIG.

I know you're out there. I can feel you now—corporate recruiters at career fairs, sending offer letters to work at banks and consulting firms. I know that you're afraid. Google is. You're afraid of startups. You're afraid of change. You’re afraid that students and young people are going to realize that you’re not the best place for them to learn, grow, or gain in responsibilities.

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Setting the Startup Accelerator Pedal

For Entrepreneurs

Startups frequently make one of two mistakes: spending too much money, or spending too little money. A key job of the CEO is knowing where to set the startup accelerator pedal. In a recent series of three blog posts published in GigaOm, I discuss the three key phases of a startup lifecycle, and how each phase requires a different focus, and approach to spending.

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Any advice can be worthless, or worse.

Berkonomics

Let me tell you the story of the first investment made by a newly organized formal group of angel investors. It was thrilling for these angels to find a young entrepreneur with an idea for a business that seemed so destined for greatness that the angels invested over $1 million on the condition that the group receive two board seats and one observer seat on the start-up’s board.

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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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Silicon Valley’s IPO Anxiety

abovethecrowd.com

[Follow Me on Twitter] “Living in the limelight The universal dream For those who wish to seem. Those who wish to be Must put aside the alienation, Get on with the fascination…” — Limelight from Moving Pictures, Rush If you could travel back in time to the early 1990’s and ask Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurs [.].

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Embrace Losing – It Will Make You Stronger

Both Sides of the Table

This is an updated post from my ongoing series on Startup Advice that I learned from founding two companies. . I HATE LOSING. I hate it. I really, really, really hate it. It chaps my hide. It rips at my core. I don’t get over it easily. I lose sleep. I fucking hate losing. It’s not so much the actual outcome that I hate – it’s the process.

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Design for the Novice, Configure for the Pro

Both Sides of the Table

I recently wrote about my philosophy of minimalism that “ less is more &# with the mantra “when in doubt, leave it out.&#. I’ve had a long-standing rule of thumb in product design, which I call “design for the novice, configure for the pro.&# I started saying this back in 2001/02, long before the era of Web 2.0, lean startups or even the advent of AJAX.

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What Angel Investing & Florida Condos Have in Common

Both Sides of the Table

It’s really hard to zig when the whole world seems to be zagging. One of my favorite quotes I learned in high school was: “Nonconformity is the Highest Form of Social Attainment&#. It was written as the yearbook quote of the smartest seniors as I was finishing my freshman year. It has always stood with me. I have had a low bullshit meter.

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Scaling Sales: Arming & Aiming – Objection Handling

Both Sides of the Table

This is part of a series on sales & marketing. The original post of this article on appeared on GigaOm in a more concise version here. I previously covered how early phase sales teams should be “evangelical&# and consultative in nature. As a tech startup grows it needs to develop more process & management if it is to scale. I call this “arming & aiming&# your salesforce.

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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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It's Just the Principal of It

This is going to be BIG.

A little over a year ago, I joined First Round Capital as an EIR -- with the goal of helping First Round root deeper into the community here after having already done almost a dozen deals, mostly out of their Philly office. Since that time, I’ve seen the whole firm mobilize in an effort to better support the NYC innovation community. We’ve gone from just having Howard’s office at Partsearch, with Chris parking himself at Niles close to Penn Station, with Phin living on Amtrak a

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Be Careful not to be Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

Both Sides of the Table

Justyn Howard, founder of Sprout Social has a blog post that he’s written about his experiences of migrating from scrappy tools to more efficient ones (i.e. Using Balsamiq instead of SnagIt, Website Optimizer over just Google Analytics and FTP). It’s a great topic, his post is well written and given that he’s going through it right now in his startup it’s worth reading his point of view on the topic.

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You’re Most Vulnerable in a Deal Right After You’ve Won

Both Sides of the Table

Recently I wrote a blog post about how I hated losing, but I embrace it as a way to learn, improve and increase my win rates. One of the things I learned from my “post-game analysis&# is that you’re most vulnerable right after you’ve won the deal. I know it sounds counter-intuitive but my experience tells me it’s true. At the moment you pop the champagne cork and let down your guard is when you’re easiest to attack.

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Give Your Teams Swiss Army Knives

Both Sides of the Table

There is a transition in every company from a “seat of the pants&# kind of entrepreneurial company to a “process driven&# mechanized one. Many people who are successful in the former fare less well in the latter. Frankly, I’m much more of the former kind of guy and I tire of the routine process & politics required to succeed in a big company.

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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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Getting high on your own Svpply: When who’s using the service is part of the product

This is going to be BIG.

I learned about Svpply at Brooklyn Beta. It's a beautifully uncomplicated service--you share cool products and follow the shared products of others. Sharing is quick and easy. It's been done before--whole social networks have been built out around the idea of product sharing and cool finds, but their comprehensiveness (complexity) seemed to be their downfall.

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Getting high on your own Svpply: When who’s using the service is part of the product

This is going to be BIG.

I learned about Svpply at Brooklyn Beta. It's a beautifully uncomplicated service--you share cool products and follow the shared products of others. Sharing is quick and easy. It's been done before--whole social networks have been built out around the idea of product sharing and cool finds, but their comprehensiveness (complexity) seemed to be their downfall.

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Top 10 Business Plan Mistakes #4: Lowball Pricing

This is going to be BIG.

Last night, my ZogSports softball team, the Lousy Shirts (so named b/c we won last year and all we got were these…), won our second championship—back to back after winning the Spring/Summer league. In the earlier league, we went 9-0, absolutely crushing most of the teams we played along the way. We were scoring at least 15 runs a game, and had one of the best pitchers in the league to go along with a very tight defense.

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A Dinevore list that can get you funded: Where do New York VCs eat?

This is going to be BIG.

I’m a big fan of the lunch meeting—because I like food, I like efficiency, and I like the fact that there’s a scripted end. The food is gone, plates have been removed… once the check is paid, we’re done. I wish the end of the meeting in the office came with that obvious of a milestone. I’m really horrific at keeping meetings from running over—especially when I’m really interested in the topic.

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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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D&O insurance is a “cost of respect” for board members.

Berkonomics

Whenever there are outside shareholders, and when there is a product in release, there is a chance, no matter how slight, of a lawsuit against members of the board as well as against the corporation itself. Even if such a suit is completely without merit, the cost of defense and the risk of a negative outcome both hang over the company and the director.

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How to Connect with High Volume People

Both Sides of the Table

I’m a high-volume person. That doesn’t make me important. It doesn’t mean I’m not accessible. It means simply what I’m stating – high volume. What that means is that in a typical week I might see 10-15 new company pitches. Sometimes more. I speak at conferences where I might meet 75-100 people and have conversations.

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Product Design for Iterative Processes

Both Sides of the Table

Everybody has some portion of their life that is repetitive. For these cases we want software that is optimized for massive iteration. I recently wrote a post about design simplicity where I encouraged technology design teams to think about “designing for the novice, configuring for the pro&# users. I wrote this post because I feel that too many products let features creep sink into the design under the guise of making the product more powerful but in turn they make their products less u

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Follow-up #fail

This is going to be BIG.

I take a lot of meetings to just try to be helpful, especially with people's careers. Other times, I'll take a very early meeting with an entrepreneur throwing around a few ideas or someone who comes to me when things just aren't working. I feel like I give pretty decent advice--and that's just purely based on the excitement of the person when they walk out of the meeting.

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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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Workout Routine Hack

This is going to be BIG.

For years, I had a pretty standard workout routine. I basically only worked out in the mornings before work. However, the more and more I have breakfast meetings, conferences, two days of teaching a morning class, the more than is proving unsustainable. My workout schedule has gotten pretty borked in the meantime. Lately, I’ve been using a set of recurring calendar appointments to schedule my workouts week to week.

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Up-Up Down-Down Left-Right Left-Right B-A Start: Contra Jam

This is going to be BIG.

Spent way too much time playing this game growing up. Tags: It's My Life.

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ZOMG Castlevania Jam

This is going to be BIG.

YouTube, you have gotten the best of me tonight. Tags: It's My Life.

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Pattern Recognition

This is going to be BIG.

Tags: Random Stuff.

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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.