June, 2012

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When good things happen to good people: SinglePlatform acquired by Constant Contact

This is going to be BIG.

The news just came out that SinglePlatform is being acquired by Constant Contact--up to $30 million of the $100 million deal in incentive based awards. If you've ever met Wiley, you know you can bank on him maxing out that additional $30 million. You don't give a sales team like that a target without expecting him to crush it. I first met Wiley Cerilli on April 23, 2010.

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Gust Blog - Thoughts on startups by investors that fund them

Gust

Blog. Thoughts on startups by investors that fund them & entrepreneurs that run them. Subscribe by email. RSS Feed. Invested Interests. Who Makes the Money on an Inevitable Shoe Dropping? Last weekend I caught Mashable announcing that Ebook Sales Surpass Hardcover in the U.S. , something I’ve expected since I first bought a Rocket ebook reader about 10 years.

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Pacific Crest’s 2011 SaaS Survey

For Entrepreneurs

Pacific Crest, an investment banking firm with a strong focus on SaaS, has surveyed a 70 SaaS companies with very interesting results. There is some great data on topics such as growth rates, cost of customer acquisition, churn/retention, expense models, capital efficiency, etc. The full survey, which was put together by David Spitz and his team [.].

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Incremental differentiation doesn’t cut it anymore.

Berkonomics

One important element of positioning a company is pricing strategy. There are five niches you can chose when defining your positioning strategy: price, quality, service, innovation, and elegance. And although many positioning efforts cross the lines between these, great companies play to the strength of just one. And within that slice of differentiation, to make any sort of impact and lasting company, the difference between you and your competitor cannot be incremental.

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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Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business.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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Stories, not sentences

Tomasz Tunguz

Although today’s society is said to be in a state of information overload, in fact it may not be in excess. It’s just an overflow of odd and fragmented information in the media. The amount of information in each fragment is in fact quite small. In this slew of half baked information, isn’t the brain oppressed? The stress on the brain isn’t because of quantity, but because of limited quality.

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More Trending

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From Agency to Enterprise Software: The Evolution of Buddy Media

This is going to be BIG.

The other day I wrote a post about the lack of Enterprise Software disruption coming out of NYC —and a lot of people responded that I wasn’t citing Buddy Media. Buddy Media was an amazing exit, but I never really thought of it like “enterprise software” I thought about it more like an agency that had developed off the shelf social tools around its service solutions.

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The 10 Best Sources of Cash to Start Your Business

Gust

Money to build the business is the number one challenge for most startups. Don’t believe the urban myth that you can sketch your idea on a napkin, and professional investors will throw money at you. In reality, only 3 out of 100 companies who apply are successful with Angels, and the success rate with VCs is even lower. A large percentage of startups never apply to either.

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Social-Mobile-LOCAL: “Local” Will Be The Biggest of the Three

abovethecrowd.com

“Well I was born in a small town And I live in a small town Prob’ly die in a small town Oh, those small – communities” — Small Town, John Mellencamp While “Social-Mobile-Local” is certainly an overused buzz phrase, most of the attention has been placed on the “social” and “mobile” parts of the phrase. In social, [.].

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A good case study is worth many paid ads.

Berkonomics

We have grown more than a bit weary of most advertising, no matter in what form. We are constantly bombarded by ads in multiple types of media, to the extent that we most often tune them out unless particularly entertaining from the first moment. Dave’s book: Positioning. In my keynotes on trends in technology, I often lead into one of the trends with the proposition that we have left the information age and are solidly within the age of recommendation , pointing to the fact that 69 perce

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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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Facebook’s new feature: your top 7 friends

Tomasz Tunguz

Facebook is asking me to redefine my closest 7 friends. I logged into Facebook today to see this new feature, starring your friends. Below this text is a Google circles like UI that asks me to star friends whose updates are particularly important to me. With hundreds of friends, the average Facebook user logs in to see wall of updates that aren’t quite relevant.

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Subway Thumbing

This is going to be BIG.

I haven't done this in a while because I don't really subway nearly as much as I thumb. I'm standing on the 77th Street R stop in Brooklyn.waiting. If you take the R, that's what you do. You wait. I wonder what these other people are doing on the platform.the intraborough midday subway commuters. I feel like it might be all old people going to doctor appointments.yet I normally assume most elderly doc runs are done on the bus.

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Who Makes the Money on an Inevitable Shoe Dropping?

Gust

Last weekend I caught Mashable announcing that Ebook Sales Surpass Hardcover in the U.S. , something I’ve expected since I first bought a Rocket ebook reader about 10 years. And in January I saw that digital music overtook physical media for the first time in 2011, something I expected since 1998. In both cases what surprises me is not that it happened, but how long it took.

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Entrepreneurs: Don’t Quit Your Real Job Too Early

Gust

Many entrepreneurs I know feel guilty about not quitting their day job when initiating their startup, worrying about not giving their all to an employer, juggling the multiple roles, or even a legal conflict of interest. I’ll try to offer some guidelines to address these issues, but I generally recommend you keep the day job until your new company is producing real revenue.

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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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The Cost Equation for a Startup is Better Than Ever

Gust

I come from a high-tech software background, and only a few years ago, it would cost at least a million dollars ($1M) for a team of professionals to produce any commercial software product. Now, with open source software components, and low-cost development tools, the same job can be done by one good hacker for a few thousand dollars. Even for low-tech startups, the scope of information available on the Internet, and its global reach, has had a similar financial impact on the many other challeng

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Assume Your Market is People Like You, Then Fail

Gust

Face reality. As an entrepreneur, you should assume none of your customers is like you, yet I find that most entrepreneurs assume just the opposite. Customers don’t have your technical base, the passion, and interest in your solution. In fact, even if they did, they couldn’t find you in the clutter. An underrated portion of every startup effort must be about communication and marketing.

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True Story: We Didn’t Buy The Victim Pitch

Gust

Most of us know not to complain about the previous employer during a job interview. Fair or not, it just doesn’t work, right? The new job never want to hire somebody with that kind of chip on a shoulder. More so with investor pitches. I was at one once, as an investor member of a local angel investment group, when this happened. The pitch had been intriguing, the product/market fit looked attractive, and the guy in charge seemed to know his stuff.

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Read ‘Painting with Numbers.’ Please.

Gust

If you’re doing investment pitches, you should read this book. If you’re doing a pitch I’m going to see, I want you to have read this book. And if you’re a startup CFO, finance lead, bean counter, or presentation slide deck preparer, then you should read this book. Painting with Numbers , by Randall Bolten. And it has a subtitle that exactly explains why I recommend it: .

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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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Mark Suster’s “Never Negotiate Piecemeal”

Gust

Nothing tells a truth better than a good story. Especially when it’s true. Read Mark Suster’s Never Negotiate Piecemeal. Here’s Why on his Both Sides of the Table blog for a good read and a good lesson. He tells the story of his baptism by fire in startup-dom, a series of negotiations including office rent, sublet, getting people on board, getting the media to care, dealing with recruiters, dealing with the tech prima donnas, and (a favorite of many) “dealing with pesky VCs.&

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On Patterns

This is going to be BIG.

The person who is sitting across from you in the conference room, more and more often, doesn't look like you. Neither does the person who gets off at your subway stop. The PTA Board is changing, too. This doesn't sit well with most people, but not because they're bad people. It's because we are pattern matchers. If you live in a city, you're probably more used to this change than most--but you would be lying if you have never, ever in your life had a moment where you paused because someone was d

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Quick thoughts on the New Foursquare

This is going to be BIG.

Here's the thing you have to realize when you're just one user. . You're just one user. I know I'm not a typical Foursquare user. I've been rabidly checking in from the beginning, no fatigue at all, and I love sharing where I am and seeing where everyone else is. I also didn't really count on it for recommendations that often. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty awesome for reqs and if I do want one, I go to Foursquare, but I'll depart from the NYC norm and admit that I'm not really a foodie.

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On Soda and Mayoral Parenting

This is going to be BIG.

On the heels of his successful anti-smoking campaign in NYC, Mayor Mike Bloomberg made a move to start banning extra large sugary soft drinks to combat obesity, particularly in children. Basically, you'll hear one of three utterly ridiculolus arguments against it. 1) Sodas aren't the only thing that makes you fat. Totally true, but does that make the soda ban a bad idea?

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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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It's not between you and them

This is going to be BIG.

A new friend of mine sent me a poel that was inscribed on the wall of Mother Teresa's children's home in Calcutta. Whether or not you believe in God, I think everyone can take something from this. Competition is an illusion. The race is most often with yourself--and you have to be confident that you're going as hard as you can and doing it in a way that allows you to be honest with yourself and happy with who you see in the mirror.

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Biking home in 2019

This is going to be BIG.

It's June 15, 2019. The air is a little cool for a summer night and I'm biking home. I'm eyeing the flashing red LED of the bike ahead of me. I make her bike ahead of me because seeing her makes me feel like I'm somehow keeping an eye on her--even though she's become just as comfortable biking in the streets of NYC as I am. We're making our way down the West Side Bikeway at a pretty good clip because we don't want to be late for the ferry.

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Manage your MANTRA.

Berkonomics

I am constantly surprised when speaking with entrepreneurs and CEO’s who act puzzled and a bit flustered when I ask, “So what is your mantra? Tell me about your company in ten words or less.” Almost every one begins a long explanation of their business that is nearly impossible to follow, let alone recall a few moments later. And each lost an opportunity to tell their story in a memorable way that has power and boosts their enterprise value in the minds of the listener.

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Define your story before anyone else does.

Berkonomics

It is an old warning in the entertainment industry. Define your persona the way you want others to view you – before someone else defines you by comparing you to someone not as flattering as you would like. I have a friend in the music business who worked hard to gain introductions to, and become mentored by, several known names in the business. One well known informal mentor called him the “Stevie Wonder of Hip Hop.

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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