This is going to be BIG.
JANUARY 2, 2011
Back in the 60’s, JFK make a bold proclimation that we were going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The details of exactly how this was going to happen were a bit sketchy, but having a big hairy audacious goal galvanized the innovation community into achieving something spectacular. In today’s world, one of the bottlenecks we have to innovation is the lack of software development talent.
Both Sides of the Table
JANUARY 31, 2011
This post originally appeared on TechCrunch. One of the most common questions that entrepreneurs who meet me for the first time like to ask is, “Do you miss being an entrepreneur? Aren’t you ever tempted to go back and do it again?”. The obvious answer is yes. When it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood. I guess it’s kind of like crack (not that I know from experience).
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Berkonomics
JANUARY 24, 2011
Reduce the emotion; reduce the threat of lawsuit. You’ve certainly experienced the angry outburst from an associate or employee who has just learned of an event that the person took as “unfair”, no matter how rational the explanation by the decision maker. Most emotional responses to decisions in business are generated not because the person making the response feels the decision was unwise, but rather unfair.
For Entrepreneurs
JANUARY 13, 2011
An interview with Lesley Young, who was the VP of worldwide Sales for MySQL, and then head of sales for the MySQL division within Oracle. Few products are as well known as the ubiquitous MySQL database. The company behind the database was also one of the great success stories in the Open Source world, and [.].
Advertisement
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 The tech market offers a wealth of technologies tailored for management, planning, and forecasting, replacing outdated pen-and-paper methods.
This is going to be BIG.
JANUARY 1, 2011
This year, I’ll attend my 10 year college reunion. My oldest friend, of 25 years, is getting married. My parents will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. I will be competing in my third triathlon and aiming to break 2:30—10 minutes faster than 2010. I will start the year on the board of a yet to be announced investment and as an observer on four other companies.
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
JANUARY 13, 2011
I recently filmed a show for This Week in Venture Capital in which I talked about how to prepare for a VC meeting: whom you’ll meet, who should attend from your side, what materials you should bring and how you should run the meeting. I wrote the summary notes in this blog post. That notes only told part of the story. Bijan Sabet – investor & board member in some small companies you might have heard of like Twitter, Tumblr, Boxee & OMGPOP – took issue with the whole n
This is going to be BIG.
JANUARY 12, 2011
Let’s face it: Sales are the bastard stepchild of the startup world. While everyone was buzzing about the Verizon iPhone, there was a short mention (Thanks Peter!) about a New York company called Salescrunch that we funded. It was an order of magnitude smaller funding than what Formspring raised to take yet another crack at the Q & A Holy Grail, and much less than what Klout raised to measure influence in the Twitter ecosystem, so it didn’t get a lot of buzz.
This is going to be BIG.
JANUARY 28, 2011
Texting has become an integral part of mobile communications for most people--so much so that it has replaced a lot of voice calls. Why call when you can just send a quick text? Yet there are signs that texting's days are numbered. To be clear, the desire to send and receive short messages isn't going away--but the need to send them via the SMS protocol may become extinct.
This is going to be BIG.
JANUARY 9, 2011
Five years ago, I started nextNY with the idea that it would be participant driven--that the community would take an active role in managing itself. I think that we've done a decent job with that, and we have a number of examples of individuals who have used it as a leadership platform, but it isn't as much of a leader factory as I had hoped. With that in mind, I tried to come up with a structure and set of incentives to make it easier for new up and coming faces in the crowd to step up and make
Advertisement
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.
This is going to be BIG.
JANUARY 5, 2011
I’m sure danah and Alice can talk about this more intelligently, but I was thinking yesterday about the way people grow up and how that affects their perception of strangers. dahah has written a lot about “ stranger danger ” and how it relates to use of the internet and I’m a big believer that we’re making younger generations fear the outside world to their own detriment.
Both Sides of the Table
JANUARY 22, 2011
This post originally appeared on TechCrunch. One of the most common questions that entrepreneurs who meet me for the first time like to ask is, “Do you miss being an entrepreneur? Aren’t you ever tempted to go back and do it again?”. The obvious answer is yes. When it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood. I guess it’s kind of like crack (not that I know from experience).
This is going to be BIG.
JANUARY 3, 2011
In Where Good Ideas Come From , Steven Johnson writes about expanding your possibilities simply by moving forward: “Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Those four rooms are the adjacent possible. But once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original star
Both Sides of the Table
JANUARY 6, 2011
It’s clear that if you use Twitter wisely it can have an impact on how you physically experience your world. You have to put effort into building meaningful connections and contributing back but if you do the rewards can be handsome. Here’s my story. Every year I spend the December holidays in Annapolis with my in-laws. My second son Andy’s birthday is December 28th so we spend his birthday Back East every year.
Advertisement
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.
Berkonomics
JANUARY 17, 2011
It can take 18 months from initial concern about a critical employee to getting a replacement up to speed. This insight is not mine, although I have experienced it several times with key employees since becoming sensitive to the concept. An old friend, Dick Tanaka, gets credit for this one. He observed that the process we follow to be humane in our handling of underperforming employees, manage the risk of future lawsuit, finally then move to separate the employee, define the open position, rec
Both Sides of the Table
JANUARY 17, 2011
Creativity. I’ve always believed it’s been one of the most important attributes of business success yet something very few business leaders talk about. So I thought I’d write a post about how I drive my personal creativity. (A slightly shorter version of this post originally appeared on TechCrunch ). As a practitioner of creativity rather than as an instructor of it I’m certain that there are many ways to get the creative juices flowing and how to release more creativit
This is going to be BIG.
JANUARY 11, 2011
I was having a great conversation with Jason Schwartz the other night about Quora --how the current Quora community feels a lot like Twitter did in the early days. Conversation is of high quality and it's really easy to find thoughtful contributors. We both agreed that the overall quality of what we find on Twitter is down from where it was. Don't get me wrong, Twitter is still a big part of my communication infrastructure and a valuable resourse, but I now have to use a myriad of tools to use t
This is going to be BIG.
JANUARY 4, 2011
I feel like some kind of a social media-enabled product wiki should be able to help with this, but until then, I’ll do this here. About a year and a half ago, I bought a used Trek 1000 for like $250. I would say that it was about two or three years old at the time. I used it in my triathlon and 4-5 days a week as my commuter bike. Basically, I’ve beat the hell out of it.
Advertiser: ZoomInfo
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
Both Sides of the Table
JANUARY 18, 2011
What a sweet feeling it was last week to see the launch of the photo sharing site Pose , whose application targets shoppers of apparel. If you don’t know it and own an iPhone (soon Android) please check it out. What I’d like to do is tell you the story of how the investment came to be, what my thesis is / was and share some thoughts on macro trends.
This is going to be BIG.
JANUARY 21, 2011
NYC - Mindrelic Timelapse from Mindrelic on Vimeo.
Both Sides of the Table
JANUARY 11, 2011
If you want a very quick primer on all the stuff nobody ever tells you about raising venture capital check out this video where Mark Jeffrey & I break it down on This Week in VC. A summary of what we discussed is below: Not 100% in order of the video, but close. All of this is covered in more detail on the TWiVC video above (and much of it is covered in text on this blog on the “ Raising VC &# tab). 1.
Both Sides of the Table
JANUARY 20, 2011
I was having a chat with an entrepreneur who I really like and who I try to mentor from time-to-time. He has an interesting business and one that has a viable shot at being an innovative & profitable business. One problem. He’s struggling to raise money. This is extra frustrating in an era in which all you read about is how frothy the VC / funding market is these days.
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
This is going to be BIG.
JANUARY 24, 2011
Yesterday, First Round had its annual CEO Summit. One of the cool things about being a fund that works with so many early stage companies is that bringing the whole portfolio together in one place results in a lot of collaborative learning opportunities. One of the topics that was discussed in a breakout session was recruiting. From what I've seen, most companies simply don't get enough people in the top of the funnel.
Both Sides of the Table
JANUARY 28, 2011
Lately the topic of leadership & teams has been coming up a lot in my daily life. Some investors are team focused, others market focused, others seems to look for product / market fit. I’m in the team centric sphere so every investment decision I make first & foremost centers on this plane. Only then can I even care about product, market or their nebulous “fit.&#.
Berkonomics
JANUARY 3, 2011
Almost all laws dealing with employment are designed to protect the employee, not the company. Minimum wage laws, workplace safety, independent contractor tests, minimum hours required for benefits, worker compensation insurance requirements and more are examples of such laws. Notice that every poster that is required to be displayed in a company public area (usually the lunch room) is posted for the benefit of the employee to inform him or her of rights granted by law.
Berkonomics
JANUARY 31, 2011
Funny how good messages come back in new forms after years of languishing out in the ether. Dr. Laurence J. Peter in The Peter Principle : Why Things Always Go Wrong , wrote in the early 1960′s of the “lateral arabesque”, describing how companies promote incompetent employees sometimes by sending them to another department or division to get them out of the way of progress.
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.
Expert insights. Personalized for you.
294 
Let's personalize your content