February, 2015

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Here Are the Details About Upfront Ventures’ Newest EIR – @Chamillionaire

Both Sides of the Table

'Five-and-a-half years ago I first met Chamillionaire at a tech conference in LA. I saw him on stage at the event talking about how he used social media to engage audiences. This was 2009 and his understanding of audience engagement was far beyond anything I was hearing from most people at that time. I reached out after the event to learn more. We started hanging out a bit and discussing technology and entrepreneurship.

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The Art of the Business Model

Guy Kawasaki

A good business model forces you to answer two simple questions: “Who has your money in their pockets?” And “How are you going to get it into your pocket?”. These questions may lack subtlety, but making money isn’t a subtle process. More elegantly stated, the first question involves identifying your customer and the need that she feels. The second question creates a sales mechanism to ensure that your revenues exceed your costs.

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Please don’t pitch a venture capitalist without this checklist

David Teten VC

I’m surprised at how many funding pitches I get which lack some of the basic information which investors require before funding. I think this stems from two causes: 1) Lack of basic knowledge of the information investors require. But I would hope that a reasonably competent founder could easily educate herself about what information an investor wants with some basic research. 2) A desire to hide important information which you think might be perceived badly , e.g, you raised $9m but are pivot

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Why You Need to Stop Hating Self Promotion

This is going to be BIG.

'I counsel a lot of job seekers looking to get into the startup world. Very quickly, I lay out the fact that getting a job comes down to two very simple things: 1) Do you know what you do? 2) Does everyone else? That''s it. If people had a clear concept of what value you bring to the table and lots of people understood that value, all you''d have to do is tweet that you were a free agent and the opportunities would come to you.

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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Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business.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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The Data Behind the Rule of 40%

Tomasz Tunguz

In “The Rule of 40% for a Healthy SaaS Company,” Brad Feld shared a simple rule of thumb growth investors often apply to judge the attractiveness of a $50M business. “The 40% rule is that your growth rate + your profit should add up to 40%.” I was curious if this theory were broadly true, applicable for growth stage companies Brad mentioned, but also early stage companies.

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More Trending

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Be Careful About Being a Meddling Startup CEO

Both Sides of the Table

'*. I recently wrote a post talking about how some VCs meddle in operating company decisions or some executive teams are too reliant on VCs to jump in and make hard calls for them. Fred Wilson also wrote on a similar topic in his usual more succinct manner , with a great quote being: “One thing I know for sure is that those who advise and invest in startups cannot and should not meddle in the day to day decision making.

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Help your employees to grow through their position.

Berkonomics

'When we accept the work commitment from a person we hire, we make a pact with the new employee that often stops at agreeing to pay for service rendered and to provide a safe working environment. There should be more than that. With some people you hire, you know you are just renting their services as they pass through your organization, aimed at a higher calling.

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Set the Context For Your Investors

Fink About It

I recently recorded a Podcast for Gavin McCully’s The Pitch Deck – Episode #53. Gavin offers a number of other great episodes. Enjoy Ep #53: Jeffrey Finkle, Angel Investor/Coach, ARC Angel Fund – Set the Context For Your Investors Joining me today on The Pitch Deckpodcast, our guest brings an amazing new perspective, which I don’t believe [.].

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The #vcbcc List

This is going to be BIG.

'Two things ain''t nobody got time for: 1) That. 2) Keeping track of all of the various criteria and foci of the hundreds of potential co-investors you could have in a seed round. Especially not as a one partner fund. Given that I often help my companies finish fundraising by introducing them to other investors, I wind up making a lot of intros. Keeping up with who does extra stage, what defines too early, who will only do B2B, consumer, etc., is a huge pain in the ass.

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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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Modeling Your SaaS Startup's Revenue Growth Effectively

Tomasz Tunguz

Once a startup has found an initial product market fit, the business must evolve the way it models its growth. Before product market fit, a startup’s financial projections focus on costs. The company has no visibility into their revenue growth. So, the management team should minimize costs, maximize cash and lengthen runway to provide as much time as possible to find that product market fit.

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Sales Predictability Through Data, Science, and a little bit of Glengarry Glen Ross (The ABC’s of selling)…

For Entrepreneurs

'The following is a guest post by Tim Bertrand. I have the pleasure of knowing Tim since the late 1990’s when we worked together at my last startup. Tim now heads up world wide sales and field operations at Acquia, the company behind Drupal. In this post, he offers some great advice for how to get consistent […].

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Some Career Advice for Aspiring Tech CEOs

Both Sides of the Table

'A shortened, better edited and with nicer pictures version of this post first appeared on TechCrunch. But if you want it in it’s full V1 glory read on … You’ve never been a CEO but might like to be one some day. But how? Nobody sees you as a CEO since you’ve never been one? I wrote this conundrum and the need to take charge of how the market define your skills in my much-read blog post on “ personal branding.” If you don’t create the message about your

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Do you tell your direct reports HOW to do a job?

Berkonomics

'Unless your job is to teach, attempting to tell your direct reports HOW to do the job you’ve asked or ordered them to do will be a disincentive, will remove some of the authority you’ve delegated, and definitely reduce their motivation to act and lead. Think for a moment of sometime in the past where someone directed you to do a job, then launched into a lengthy explanation of how you should do it.

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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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Investors Beware: Today’s $100M+ Late-stage Private Rounds Are Very Different from an IPO

abovethecrowd.com

'[An edited version of the following blog post originally appeared in a modified form in the pages of the weekend edition of the Financial Times last Saturday. ]. Every successful technology company raises money throughout its lifecycle, perhaps starting with a seed investment and progressing through Series A, B, C, late-stage investments, and, for the most successful companies, an IPO.

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The Board Before the Board

This is going to be BIG.

'Forming a board. It''s what the best performing companies do once they take on outside investors. Board members can provide useful feedback, help to focus the founding team, and provide a network of contacts. . Unfortunately, many companies don''t get financing--because they don''t get any of the above. They don''t get the feedback they need, especially around priorities.

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Creating the Strangely Familiar

Tomasz Tunguz

In The Shape of Things to Come , the New Yorker profiles Sir Jony Ive, the man they call Apple’s greatest product. Ive is iconic. His products have been sold 1.5 billion times. For all of his success, Ive’s personality isn’t well known. Neither is his personal history. Or how he manages the Apple Design Lab. The New Yorker article reveals some of these three things.

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The Story of a Million-Dollar Etsy Business

Guy Kawasaki

Interesting story of how Alicia Shaffer sells $1 million of fashion items via her Etsy shop. It’s fantastic that Etsy has created a market like this–democratizing commerce and crafts! [link]. There is some controversy about whether her products are handcrafted “enough,” but there are marketing lessons to learn from her success, nonetheless! The post The Story of a Million-Dollar Etsy Business appeared first on Guy Kawasaki.

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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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Taking My Hat Off to @Shervin and His Hyperloop Ambitions

Both Sides of the Table

'*. Shervin Pishevar. Many of the articles I’ve read about him over the last several years have a listing of his biggest successes – mostly Uber – and a tinge of cynicism about his close connections with celebrities or self promotion. Not this one. I’m going to write a pure admiration piece. A “hats off” (see what I did there?

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You are watched more closely than you think.

Berkonomics

'Ever had a manager above you who said one thing and did another? At least once? Or in a pattern of repeats? Well, you’re not alone. Did you think less of that person for it? Would you follow that manager to the ends of the earth? Well, almost everyone has had multiple such experiences with a senior manager. And most people think less of that person than before.

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The Three Dimensions of Content Marketing Strategy for Startups

Tomasz Tunguz

If I were asked to create a content marketing strategy for a person or a business from scratch, I would craft a strategy with three dimensions: customer segments, customer lifecycle stage and content type. **Customer Segments: **Product managers/marketers are responsible for identifying the most important customer segments a startup will pursue. Picking the right customer segments increases profitability , maximizes market size and prioritize the most attractive customer for the business.

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The 4 Types of Customer Success Organizations

Tomasz Tunguz

Each quarter, Zendesk releases a Customer Satisfaction Benchmark to help companies build more effective customer support teams. The Q4 2014 differs from the previous in an important way. Instead of comparing companies in the same industry, for example, Education, Zendesk clustered companies with similar customer support characteristics, including ticket volumes, product support complexity and a few others, which revealed some important conclusions.

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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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Benchmarks for Employee Stock Based Compensation in SaaS Startups

Tomasz Tunguz

How much should your startup budget for its employee stock option pool? One way of answering this question is a blanket addition per year, say a 2% renewal. Another way is to look at the cash based cost of the stock based compensation. We’re going to examine the second one today by looking at the basket of 50+ SaaS companies. The chart above shows the average stock-based compensation (SBC) per employee by years since founding across the basket of publicly traded SaaS companies.

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You Can’t Rely on a VC for Your Hardest Decisions

Both Sides of the Table

'*. What is the role of a VC for entrepreneurs? I suppose it can be different for every founder and for different VCs but I’d like to offer you some context on what I think it is and it isn’t. I was recently contacted by an entrepreneur who was consider a few different business models for his company. I barely know the guy (or his markets) but he wanted me to weigh in one “which market I thought he should pursue.” I responded. “I can’t tell you that one approa

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Why Most Online Video Companies Will Fail

Both Sides of the Table

'I live in LA and fund startups. So you can imagine that I see a lot of video startups. Most will fail. I repeat the same mantra to every one I see. “You can’t build a large online video company. You have to build a large online tech company that distributes video.” I try to explain this to every team I see and I’m not being flippant.

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Don’t manage with “what” without “why!”

Berkonomics

'Empowering your direct reports with the reasons for your orders gives them incentive to act, motivation to accept authority, and purpose behind action. I try to teach this with the simple phrase that is the headline of this insight. Think of the last time someone above you in your business or personal life gave you an order to do something that seemed either illogical or of low priority – to you.

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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