This is going to be BIG.
AUGUST 13, 2013
'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.
Both Sides of the Table
AUGUST 29, 2013
'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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Berkonomics
AUGUST 8, 2013
'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.
Tomasz Tunguz
AUGUST 1, 2013
As I wrote about in a post on aligning founder and VC incentives , it’s important for entrepreneurs to understand their own ambitions and the ambitions of investors. The most important part of that is understanding the financial motivations and the dynamics of the industry VCs face. Typically, VCs adopt primarily one of three strategies with a fund [1]: Small fund , small ownership positions, many investments in markets that will consistently generate sub-$100M acquisitions.
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This is going to be BIG.
AUGUST 19, 2013
'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.
Startup Catalyst Brief brings together the best content for the entrepreneurial ecosystem from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Both Sides of the Table
AUGUST 25, 2013
'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.
Both Sides of the Table
AUGUST 10, 2013
'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.
Berkonomics
AUGUST 1, 2013
'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.
Both Sides of the Table
AUGUST 20, 2013
'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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Berkonomics
AUGUST 29, 2013
'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.
This is going to be BIG.
AUGUST 8, 2013
'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.
Tomasz Tunguz
AUGUST 21, 2013
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.
Tomasz Tunguz
AUGUST 12, 2013
Big data technologies like Hadoop, HBase, Redshift, Vertica and others store ever greater quantities of data. As the capacity to store this data increases, so does the importance of extracting value and insight from it. Big data adoption is a four step process : generate data, store data, hire specialists to analyze the data, and finally democratize data exploration.
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This is going to be BIG.
AUGUST 14, 2013
'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.
Tomasz Tunguz
AUGUST 15, 2013
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.
Tomasz Tunguz
AUGUST 28, 2013
There’s a concept in computer programming called operator overloading that neatly describes the current Series A investment market. Overloading means using the same code for two very different purposes depending on inputs. For example, a programmer could redefine the + function so that instead of adding two numbers, the function would multiply the numbers if one of the numbers was negative.
Tomasz Tunguz
AUGUST 25, 2013
I’ve been promoting my Twitter account since October 2012 in effort to better understand social media content marketing and to promote that great vanity metric, Twitter follower count. At the outset, I promoted my account and links to blog posts. I prize followers more than one time visits to a blog, because the long term marketing relationship provides many chances to bring someone to my blog.
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Tomasz Tunguz
AUGUST 20, 2013
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.
Tomasz Tunguz
AUGUST 14, 2013
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?
Berkonomics
AUGUST 15, 2013
'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.
Berkonomics
AUGUST 21, 2013
'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.
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
Tomasz Tunguz
AUGUST 29, 2013
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.
Tomasz Tunguz
AUGUST 25, 2013
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.
Tomasz Tunguz
AUGUST 4, 2013
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.
Tomasz Tunguz
AUGUST 29, 2013
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.
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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