Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 11, 2013

'Nearly four months ago we rebranded at Upfront Ventures. You can watch the video above for a very brief overview of why we rebranded and where we see our place in the VC ecosystem along with what has changed in our industry. The link for the video is here and if you want a short firsthand view on our changes it’s a great resource. I often advise startup companies not to try and pin all of your brand equity into an announcement.

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This is going to be BIG.

NOVEMBER 11, 2013

'Yesterday, I saw this tweet come across my screen. "The venture capital game has become about branding yourself so you can get into a handful of hot deals." -- @Naval on stage with @Jason. — Brian Alvey (@brianalvey) November 10, 2013. This feels like a West Coast mentality, because deals seem to feel "hot" more often out there--I believe because of founder pedigree.

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Gust

NOVEMBER 17, 2013

'Image via IntellectualVentures.com. If you expect to succeed in the thrill-a-minute, roller coaster ride of a startup, let me assure you it takes more than a good idea, a rich uncle, and luck. In fact, the idea is often the least important part of the equation. Most investors tell me that they look at the people first, the business plan second, and only then at the idea.

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Berkonomics

NOVEMBER 7, 2013

'By David S. Rose. Described by BusinessWeek as a “world conquering. entrepreneur” and by Forbes as “New York’s Archangel”, David is a former Inc. 500 CEO, serial entrepreneur and the founder of New York Angels. He is the. founder and CEO of Gust, the angel financing platform used by over 50,000. accredited investors in 1,000 angel groups and venture capital funds to. collaborate with over 250,000 entrepreneurs in 95 countries.

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technology

Tomasz Tunguz

NOVEMBER 13, 2013

Earlier this week, I chatted with a friend of mine who has founded an incredibly successful business, which he and his co-founder have been scaling impressively. I asked him about his biggest learning over the past few years. He said before having started his company and having built the team, he perceived management as a Band-Aid, as a fix for something wrong in the organizational design, communication or day-to-day operations of the company.

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Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 27, 2013

'One of the unavoidable realities of building a startup is having to fire people. In a normal business you can often sweep bad performers under the rug and not deal with them. When you have millions or billions of dollars of revenue you can suffer a few bad performers or bad apples. You can miss a quarter’s target and not cull the inefficiencies.

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This is going to be BIG.

NOVEMBER 14, 2013

'More. That''s what people used to want. You moved from the little room that you grew up in to the little dorm room to your crappy little first apartment. Then you got a nicer apartment, which was inevitably a bigger apartment, and then maybe a bigger one after that--or maybe a house. And you filled it with stuff, like TVs. When they came out with a bigger TV, you bought it, because it was bigger.

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Gust

NOVEMBER 3, 2013

'Image via TheSocialRobot.com. Based on my experience as a mentor and an entrepreneur, if you fail on your first startup, you are about average. That’s not bad, but who wants to be average? Every young entrepreneur knows implicitly that startup success is a long hard road. Statistics show that the failure rate for new startups within the first 5 years is higher than 50 percent.

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Berkonomics

NOVEMBER 14, 2013

'By David Steakley. Our guest insight this week comes from David Steakley, a past President of the Houston Angel Network, and a reformed management consultant. He is an active angel investor, and he manages several angel funds in Texas. Hang on, David tells it like he sees it! – DB. Business plans are interesting. But, as a famous field marshal (1) said, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

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development

Tomasz Tunguz

NOVEMBER 10, 2013

Constrained by a limited budget while seeking to grow as quickly as possible, startup founders must decide how to balance growing their engineering teams with their sales & marketing teams. To help inform those decisions, I’ve benchmarked the relative sizes of the sales and engineering teams of the 36 publicly-traded SaaS companies from founding to IPO, typically 7 years later.

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Venture Hacks

NOVEMBER 1, 2013

Must be a 1-(wo)man startup. Must code. Must write good copy. Must be passionate about solving problems for our customers, not “designing.”. Must fix other people’s designs and front-end code on production (people ship whenever they want). Must help our 1-(wo)man startups with their design problems. Must force your help on them when needed. Must take the words of our founders/whomever straight to mocks without worrying about whether we’re going to build it.

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Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 28, 2013

'2013 has proved to be a wild year. Companies being created has continued to go up dramatically making managing dealflow nearly impossible. Thank you to Tasha for helping to keep me sane by managing the onslaught of meeting requests, board meetings and constant change. You’ve had a few difficult years outside of work – I feel confident 2014 is going to be a great one!

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This is going to be BIG.

NOVEMBER 4, 2013

'There are only a few times in my life where I felt like all of NYC was on the same page--sharing the same moment, and most of them were pretty bad. We all went through 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy together, but of course, we''d rather not have had to endure those tragedies, even though we were resiliant. The blackout was shared citywide, and I suppose we fared ok, taking it in stride and even having a little fun, but again, we probably wouldn''t choose to go through it again if we had to.

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communities innovation support startup 244

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opportunity

Gust

NOVEMBER 23, 2013

'Marketing strategy actually is quite important to most investors. The bottom line is that if no one shows up to buy or use your product, it doesn’t matter one whit how cool or great or innovative it is. And investors do not like top-down projections (“we’ll get a 10% market share…”). They very much want to see how you are going to get your first customer, and your second, and your third.

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Berkonomics

NOVEMBER 28, 2013

'By David Steakley. This week, David Steakley returns for another bite at the corporate apple, with just the right amount of tart comments that will keep this document legal for now. Read on! - DB. How do you judge a company’s prospects, if a corporate business-to-business sale has to be your game? If your company’s market is huge corporations, how do you convince investors you can crack the market, and how do you deliver?

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Tomasz Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

When I first started programming at a startup, I were proud even snobbish about the language we used: Java. I derided JavaScript. I couldn’t have been more wrong. JavaScript has become the dominant language of the web. Every browser, PC and mobile, understands Javascript. It is a lingua franca among computers. Some hardware even speaks JavaScript.

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This is going to be BIG.

NOVEMBER 26, 2013

'If I was going to start a venture capital fund around a theme, I''d pick something a little different. Forget Enterprise, or Mobile. It wouldn''t be "networks" or any other standard classification of startup. I''d start a fund around "Play". Play, it seems, is making a huge comeback. Sure, people have been playing things for years, but it feels like it''s mostly been about games. games that have winners and losers, leaderboards and points.

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B2B marketing

Gust

NOVEMBER 10, 2013

'Image via eesiflo.com. I still get business plans, looking for an investor, that say all too clearly that the primary “use of funds” will be to do research and development (R&D) on some promising new technology, like superconductivity or cancer cures. Entrepreneurs forget that investors are looking for commercial products to make money, rather than R&D sunk costs, so investment hopes are sunk as well.

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development technology entrepreneurs investing 148

Gust

NOVEMBER 9, 2013

'Interestingly, the large majority of venture capitalists are very friendly. It’s for the same reason that as a group, orthodontists tend almost universally to be more friendly than surgeons. ["Whaaaa?!?"! I hear you ask. Think about it for a bit, and particularly if you''ve had personal experiences with either/both groups.]. The latter profession sees you by referral from another doctor, operates on you while you’re asleep, and rarely sees you again.

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ventures VC investing investment 146

Gust

NOVEMBER 13, 2013

'Equity-based crowdfunding (that is, providing regular people with the opportunity to purchase stock in private companies) will not be legal in the US until the first quarter of 2013 at the earliest. At that time, any company planning to operate as a “funding portal” will have to comply with an extensive set of rules and regulations established by the U.S.

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Gust

NOVEMBER 30, 2013

'A vertical market is one in which all of your customers are in one particular industry, regardless of where in the food chain they are. For example, the site Noodle.org is a vertical search engine for the education industry. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking for a kindergarten class, an Ivy League college, or an adult education polka dancing course, it covers its industry top to bottom.

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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

financing

Gust

NOVEMBER 2, 2013

'Since equity crowdfunding under the recently passed JOBS Act will not be legal until some point next year, there is currently a great deal of smoke, although not necessarily a lot of fire, around new entrants into the space. But taking a look at some operating US-based companies that currently come to mind when thinking about the space ( Kickstarter , Indiegogo , AngelList , Gust , CircleUp), some of the known angels who have invested in them include: Jack Dorsey.

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Berkonomics

NOVEMBER 21, 2013

'Cash is everything to a new business. How many times do we have to say this? The days of being able to trust that there will be an investor or lender on the other end of a call or email whenever needed ended with the 2000 and 2008 bursts of those respective bubbles. It’s entirely possible that Amazon could not be created and funded today with its planned seven years until profitability.

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This is going to be BIG.

NOVEMBER 22, 2013

'In a seed or friends and family round, tough questions, in the eyes of many founders, signal an investor that will either a) never get to the writing a check part or b) be such a pain in the ass afterwards that it might not be worth taking their money. Especially if you already have the round circled, without anyone giving you a hard time, why bother stopping for that one investor who wants more detail on how you''re going to scale?

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This is going to be BIG.

NOVEMBER 15, 2013

'When I saw Coin , the all-in-one card, buying it was a no brainer. Instead of carrying three credit cards, a bank card, and a host of other random plastic in my wallet, I get to carry one card. No convincing my friends to join some social payment network. No shaking, waving, bumping, twirling or any other things I''ve never done to have to pay for anything.

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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.

strategy