September, 2017

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Work Like You Mean It: Why I backed Wethos to change the future of work.

This is going to be BIG.

If economists tried to measure the cost of the malaise that the election of 2016 left, we'd undoubtedly see billions, if not more, lost in worker productivity. At the same time, I don't think I've ever seen more political engagement in my lifetime--and not just political engagement, but all sorts of action around causes they care about. These two realities are linked.

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6 Pillars of Authority Marketing

Entrepreneurs' Organization

I keep a Post-It on my wall with a quote from a professor at my alma mater, Harvard Business School: “Strategy is about setting yourself apart from the competition. It’s not a matter of being better at what you do?it’s a matter of being different at what you do.”. As chair of the entrepreneurial practice at Forbes Books, a former director of an entrepreneurial center and a tech entrepreneur, I drill this philosophy into aspiring entrepreneurs.

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Are you mentally equipped to depend upon others?

Berkonomics

Close. I guarantee that there comes a time when growing businesses outgrow the original span of control of the entrepreneur. It is a critical period, and is a test of the entrepreneur’s desire and ability to delegate. And I found from experience – after investing in many other entrepreneurial businesses over the years – that this stage typically occurs first at about twenty employees or $3 million in net revenues (or gross profit) for most any kind of company.

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Med Tech startup gel-e has developed revolutionary technology that can almost instantaneously stop…

propel(x)

Med Tech startup gel-e has developed revolutionary technology that can almost instantaneously stop bleeding, even for severe wounds Stephen Hawking had good reason to call gel-e “a top innovative product of this decade.” The Propel(x) alumnus company is poised to deploy a revolutionary technology to rapidly stop bleeding in diverse emergency, trauma, surgical and even everyday situations.

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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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How Much Should A SaaS Startup Invest in Sales & Marketing?

Tomasz Tunguz

How much should a SaaS startup invest in sales and marketing at different stages of the business? This is a very nuanced question, but benchmarks do provide some guidance for what is reasonable. Sales and marketing investment depends on many different factors including establishing product market fit, the business’s sales model (inside, field, freemium), and not least, cash balance and fundraising capacity.

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More Trending

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Why the Former President of Nickelodeon Joined mitú as CEO.

Both Sides of the Table

Why the Former President of Nickelodeon Joined mitú as CEO. (Hint: 60 million US Latinos driving US growth engine) I am beyond excited to announce the Herb Scannell has agreed to move from NYC to Los Angeles to take on the role of CEO at mitú, the fast growing Latino digital media company, serving more than 100 million monthly unique viewers. Herb is a Puerto-Rican American media executive who was previously the President of Nickelodeon.

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3 Questions to Ask Yourself at Your Midyear Review

Entrepreneurs' Organization

Written by Ty Kiisel, editor at OnDeck. At the beginning of the year, you set goals for your business. At roughly halfway through the year, it’s a good time to revisit those goals, evaluate how you’re doing and decide whether you’re on track or if you need to revise your plan. Annual goal setting is usually based on assumptions about the market, the products or services offered in the market and your ability to deliver.

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Fire fast, not last.

Berkonomics

Close. Here is one that takes a real leap for a younger manager or CEO to believe. After hiring someone with all the attendant enthusiasm followed by the training and learning curve, if an employee shows signs of weakness in the job or problems dealing with contemporaries, it is the natural tendency for most of us to go first into coaching mode, and reset the observation clock to see if our excellent coaching does the job.

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Introducing Petal, Providing Access to Credit to Thin File Consumers

This is going to be BIG.

One of the biggest fears about the future of data is that everyone will turn into a number--that algorithms will turn everyone's personal experience into a single score that will decide whether or not you get what you want, a job, a house, a car, financing for a new business etc. or whether you get shut out. Actually, you don't have to wait for that to happen.

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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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Shopify S-1 Analysis - Smiling All the Way to $10B

Tomasz Tunguz

Shopify is an exceptional business. There are not many software companies who can nearly quadruple their enterprise value in two years. But Shopify has grown from $2.7B in enterprise value to more than $10B. What are the metrics behind this behemoth? First, let’s describe the company a bit. Shopify provides e-commerce infrastructure to merchants.

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The SaaS Founder’s Journey – What Matters At Each Stage

For Entrepreneurs

As anyone involved with startups will tell you, focus is key to success. But, it can be very hard when there is a huge overload of topics clamoring for a startup CEO’s attention. In order to achieve the necessary focus and understand what you need to accomplish to ensure success/survival, you need to truly understand.

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#machdeinkreuz #waehlengehenistwichtig #mitmir90prozent.

Thomas Grota

#machdeinkreuz #waehlengehenistwichtig #mitmir90prozent #waehlengehen #btw #bundestagswahlen #demokratie #nichtwaehlenistauchkeineloesung #liebedeinestadt #liebedeineheimat.

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In Love, In Partnership: How One Couple Finds Success at Home and at Work

Entrepreneurs' Organization

EO Atlanta member Kelvin Slater and his wife, Mandy, have launched several restaurants during their marriage. It’s true that you should treat your business partnership like a marriage. After all, it’s important whom you select and no matter who that person is you’ll have to work hard at it. It’s also good advice to treat your marriage like a business partnership, in that both require commitment, communication and a shared view of values and goals.

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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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Hire as if your survival depends upon it.

Berkonomics

Aside from visionary management, this is your most important job. Close. Many of us go through the motions of hiring to fill a position, trying to use our intuition and skills to find the best candidate for the job. Sometimes we use consultants or recruiters; often we use internal talent to fill most positions. And over the years, we students of business success have learned that there is a science to the hiring process that continues through the life of an employee’s tenure with the company.

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Thinking of Home: Dickinson, Texas

abovethecrowd.com

For those of you who have moved away from the town where you grew up, the few times that you see your hometown in the national news creates an enormous sense of pride. Over the past few weeks, the town I grew up in, Dickinson, Texas, has been front and center in the national news, but for all the wrong reasons. Dickinson, a small town southeast of Houston on Galveston Bay, has been one of the hardest hit communities by Hurricane Harvey.

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The Challenges of the Platform Go To Market

Tomasz Tunguz

One of the most difficult go-to-market strategies for startups is platform. Platform go to markets mean selling software that can do many things, depending on the customer need. Selling a platform is challenging for five reasons. First, most customers buy software to solve a particular and immediate problem. When pitching a platform, the potential buyer has to imagine what the platform can do for them.

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Diversity, why international startups love NY, and why NY VCs love international startups

David Teten VC

?. New York is now the second-most-active tech ecosystem in the US on all key metrics, after the Bay Area. One of the drivers for that growth is that for European, Israeli, Latin American, and Eastern Canada-linked companies, the East Coast is much closer than California. New York venture capitalists like me recognize this trend, and more and more of us are opening our doors to invest in startups with international roots.

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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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Strategic Activities for a Company Retreat

A Smart Bear

I am planning a company retreat. What are some great questions we can work on as a company? cc @RNeivert @robwalling @asmartbear. — James Kennedy (@JamesKennedy) July 15, 2017. I happened to be sitting on the tarmac, delayed. In the confines of six square feet of personal space, I sent a few answers. As James later said, these are useful exercises even if it’s not a retreat!

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When’s the Best Time to Start Meditating? When You’re Too Busy.

Entrepreneurs' Organization

By Rob Dube, an Entrepreneurs’ Organization member in Detroit, is the author of D o Nothing, The Most Rewarding Leadership Challenge You Will Ever Take , set for release in late 2017. He is president and co-founder of imageOne , a document lifecycle management provider and a 2017 Forbes Small Giant. . There’s a Zen saying, “You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day.

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Careful about equity and options in early stage businesses

Berkonomics

Close. This post is longer than usual. For those negotiating equity allocations it covers some of the most complex issues to address in the process. I just couldn’t reduce it to far fewer words… Dave. Here is the warning: The execution of partnership equity allocations and of a good incentive program using equity is often mismanaged, damaging the corporate capitalization structure and even affecting the outcome of subsequent investment into the company.

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Not Just Any Given Sunday #takeaknee

This is going to be BIG.

Posted this in what used to be my tech newsletter, and what has lately been about more. Yesterday wasn't just any given Sunday, was it? I would imagine most of the NYC-based readers of this newsletter don't take the position that "these athletes should just stick to sports" nor do they feel that way about Jimmy Kimmel and his recent conversations around healthcare.

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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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Ownership - A Defining Trait of a Leader

Tomasz Tunguz

One of the hardest things for me is to admit is when I’m wrong. It’s hard first to admit it to myself. But harder yet is to admit the error to others. It could be my wife or my colleagues. Most challenging of all is owning the error in a public forum. But admitting mistakes is a key defining attribute of a leader. Owning the mistake accomplishes one critical thing.

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The Case For & Against Cryptocurrencies (for those tired of all the noise)

Both Sides of the Table

In more than a decade of writing about the Internet and tech-enabled businesses I’ve learned that mobs don’t do nuance well. If you read the headlines or talk with zealous friends you may well think cryptocurrencies are either our savior from bureaucratic, ossified governments or are purely speculative Ponzi schemes. The reality is that cryptocurrencies can be both and can be liberating and corrupting at the same time.

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How Hurricane Irma Defined My Minimum Viable Life

Entrepreneurs' Organization

By Davide Frau, an EO South Florida member. I recently survived Hurricane Irma as she unleashed all the fury of a Category 5 storm on South Florida. Despite the mandatory evacuation order, I chose to stay through the storm, riding it out on the 9th floor of my Miami condominium building. I made it through better off than many of my fellow Floridians.

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8 Common Hiring Mistakes

Entrepreneurs' Organization

Hiring a new employee comes with risks. The right hire can drive your company forward to greater success. Invest in the wrong person, however, and you can cause real damage to company culture and productivity. Startup CEOs, in particular, should be wary of making common hiring mistakes. 1. Hiring constantly. A common misstep made by startup entrepreneurs is hiring too often or hiring for a quick fix.

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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.