March, 2014

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How do I Really Feel About Anonymous Apps Like Secret?

Both Sides of the Table

'By now you likely know that Marc Andreessen weighed in on anonymous apps in a 12-part Twitter diatribe. Anonymity. As the old joke goes, “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.” I have been weighing in slowly on the topic over the past few weeks on Twitter but have avoided writing a blog post about it until now. This was in part due to a tremendously busy 30-day period for me (in which my overall writing has been down) and in part the inevitability of knowing that weighing

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A Tale of Two Fundraising Stories

This is going to be BIG.

'Here are two contrasting startup stories I''ve seen firsthand. With one company, a founder and his super inspirational, creative, and established buddy hatch a plan to build a very strong content brand that serves as a platform for a lot of diverse revenue streams--events, ecommerce, advertising. You could think of it as a spin on Thrillist. With the author staying close as an advisor, they build a real, cashflow positive business and start to think about where they could go with some outside c

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Set Your Online Reputation Before Someone Else Does

Gust

'Image via Flickr by krossbow. These days, your online Internet reputation is your reputation. Of course, having no reputation is usually better than a bad one, but don’t wait for someone else to establish a good one for you. It’s time for every business and business person to proactively create a positive presence, before someone else puts you in a defensive mode that is hard to win.

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The “inciting incident:” Movie scripts tell us how and when to look for investment.

Berkonomics

'By David Steakley. If you are a screenplay writer, you are familiar with the dogma of the inciting incident. In a movie, the inciting incident is the event at the beginning of the story which causes the hero’s life to be completely transformed and irrevocably changed, and which makes the whole story unfold. Companies also need an inciting incident, because, more often than not, you often will depend upon selling your story to someone.

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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Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business.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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Do More Competitors in a Sector Decrease Fundraising Success?

Tomasz Tunguz

Over the last 12 years, the number of startups founded has grown each year by 25%, according to Crunchbase data. That’s quite an acceleration each year! See the chart here. As the number of companies in a sector grows, do the odds of successfully raising capital decrease? The chart above shows startup company formation rates, the number of new companies formed each year from 2004-2011 by Crunchbase sector.

More Trending

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Here’s Why it Was an Epic Month for #LATech

Both Sides of the Table

'A few years ago I started calling the local tech ecosystem down here #LATech. I had an agenda. We graduate more engineers in our greater region than anywhere else in the US. We have top 25 engineering schools than anywhere else, too. I never wanted to be a derivative of Silicon Valley. I have the utmost respect for the tech produced by our northern colleagues and acknowledge it is the tech capital of the world and that won’t change.

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Who's any good?

This is going to be BIG.

'The NYC startup community maintains a positive, supportive atmosphere. We celebrate a strong effort. However, that often makes it hard to tell who actually excels at their job and who just mails it in or got lucky. This goes for founders, employees and investors alike. I was just noticing that a professional acquaintance of mine just changed jobs for the third time in two years--going from startup to startup to startup without, ostensibly, accomplishing much at any of the companies.

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Founder’s Stock Is Gold, If You Know The Rules

Gust

'Image via Flickr by BullionVault. In reality, so-called “Founder’s” shares are simply common stock, issued at the time of startup incorporation, for a very low price, and normally allocated to the multiple initial players commensurate with their investment or role. But that’s only the beginning of the story. These shares are allocated and committed, but not really issued and owned (vested) until later.

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How many innovations are carefully planned?

Berkonomics

'Most innovations come from responding to a customer’s needs, or finding a niche where products need improvement or extension. It is rare to innovate using a blank sheet of paper in a room with bare walls and no other contributors. Imagine the room in which several graduate business school student groups have gathered, tasked with coming up with an idea for a business plan competition.

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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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Reflections on YCombinator Demo Day: How the Seed Market Has Changed

Tomasz Tunguz

Earlier this week, I attended the Spring YCombinator Demo Day. I’ve been attending for six years now. Each time, I’m impressed by the intelligence, ambition and the polish of the founders presenting companies only a few weeks or months old. As I listened to the pitches, I wondered if the types of startups founders decide to build at YC has changed over time and whether those trends are lagging or leading indicators of the market as a whole.

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Change careers like Tarzan

Derek Sivers

I get emails from many people who want to make a big change in their career. Each one wants to quit their current career, and boldly leap into their new venture or preferred lifestyle. When they ask my advice, they think I’m going to say, “Yes! Quit! Go for it!”. But instead, they’re surprised at my suggestion: Remember how Tarzan swings through the jungle?

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How I Got the Monkey Off My Back – Today Was a Good Day

Both Sides of the Table

'I become a venture capitalist in September 2007 – exactly 6.5 years ago. I spent my first year developing proprietary deal flow and learning the business and then the Sept 2008 / Lehman Bros collapse / financial meltdown happened. As a result I didn’t write my first venture capital check until March 2009 – exactly 5 years ago. That company was Invoca, which just announced a $20 million fund raise led by Accel.

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How to Get into Venture Capital - An Update

This is going to be BIG.

'About seven years ago, I wrote a post on breaking into venture capital and I continue to point the five or six people a week who ask me how to break into venture. Today, I want to add two addendum to it, based on the work of two up and coming women in the NYC tech community. Yesterday, Amrit Richmond announced her new employment at RRE as Director of Community & Platform.

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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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One Of These Days, You May Not Be An Entrepreneur

Gust

'Image via Wikipedia. If I had a dollar for every time someone has said to me, “One of these days, I’m going to start my own company,” I’d be rich. If this day ever comes for all these people, we will be overrun by startups. Yet I don’t lose any sleep over either of these possibilities. Most people procrastinate from time to time, but I suspect that the challenge here is somewhat deeper than that.

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Can you borrow your way to success?

Berkonomics

'With help from JJ Richa. There are so many ways to finance a small business. Most of them rely upon some form of debt, often personally guaranteed by the founder(s). So we investigate the most simple of these methods of debt financing first, since most are simple to execute and non-dilutive – that is help you to retain your ownership intact. Here is a list of common loan types: Line of credit – short term working capital.

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The Hardest Round to Raise for Startups

Tomasz Tunguz

Over the past few years, I’ve debated the existence of a Series A crunch and found in that analysis that the volume of Series As was increasing. This trend hasn’t abated. The number of Series As has grown by 31% annually for the past 5 years, reaching more than 831 Series As in 2013, up from 284 in 2009. In short, no founder should be concerned about the Series A market.

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What if you didn’t need money or attention?

Derek Sivers

You know that feeling you have after a big meal? When you’re so full that you don’t want anything more? Ever wonder what that would feel like in other parts of your life? We do so many things for the attention, to feel important or praised. But what if you had so much attention and so much praise that you couldn’t possibly want any more? What would you do then?

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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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Understanding the Power of Your Human Networks

Both Sides of the Table

'We all intuitively know how important human connections are in business but for many people it’s like exercise or eating well – one of those things you keep meaning to get around to. It reminds me of a line my wife and I often jokingly say to each other after seeing the awesome film “ Notorious ” about the life of Biggie Smalls. “I know mothafuckas who know mothafuckas.” Please just take 8 seconds to listen to this clip on YouTube – it’s priceless

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Conference Neighborhoods

This is going to be BIG.

'Greg Galant of Sawhorse coined a term yesterday that captures perfectly what I thought of my 8th SXSW. We were having a discussion about big brands taking over the scene and he called it "conference gentrification". That''s exactly what has happened down in Austin. The small startups and individual creatives were early to SXSW and created a great, authentic experience over many years--a "neighborhood" if you will--with a certain attractive vibe.

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How To Size Your Marketing Budget For Funding

Gust

'Image via Flickr.com. It’s not uncommon for me to see a startup business plan “mission” to be the “premier brand” for their product, yet their marketing budget in the financials is trivial. This combination will almost certainly get your plan tossed by potential investors, who understand all too well the need and cost for marketing in today’s environment.

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Pinpointing Problems Worth Solving (Part Two of Three)

Fink About It

In my last post, I wrote about how many startups fail because they try solving problems no one really has or cares enough about to spend money to solve. I mentioned that while poor execution is responsible for many startup failures, you can’t execute your way out of a bad idea. In the venture capital [.]. The post Pinpointing Problems Worth Solving (Part Two of Three) appeared first on Fink About It.

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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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The Machinery of Blogging

Tomasz Tunguz

I’ve been getting a few questions about the tools I use to publish this blog, so I figured I’d write about it and reveal the machinery behind the curtain. I use four main tools Jekyll, Github Mou, and RStudio. Jekyll is the blogging engine; Github is the hosting provider; Mou is the app I use to write these posts; and RStudio is the place I analyze data and make charts.

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A Deeper Look at Uber’s Dynamic Pricing Model

abovethecrowd.com

'Over the course of the past year, many writers have offered their perspectives on Uber’s dynamic pricing strategy. Perhaps the only consistency is that people have deeply passionate views on this topic. However, there are still many misperceptions about how the model works, and the purpose of this post is to clarify some of those misperceptions. I am an Uber investor and board member, and therefore expect that many will dismiss these thoughts as naked bias.

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One of My Most Frequent Pieces of Advice: Be Politely Persistent

Both Sides of the Table

'One of the hardest things for most entrepreneurs to know is how hard to push in situations where people tell you “no.” But then again most entrepreneurs fail. There is that rare breed that doesn’t accept “no” for an answer. It is impossible advice to give because there is such a fine line between being persistent and being annoying and it’s something you probably can’t teach.

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Creating Better VCs: An Accelerator for the Dark Side

This is going to be BIG.

'These days, there are a ton of options for you if you''re a startup seeking guidence. Every single topic about running a company has been written about ad nauseum, there are incubators, accelorators, mentoring programs, events, talks, etc. We''ve done a lot to make sure startups get all the help we can get--and it''s leading to higher companies getting off the ground.

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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