This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 5, 2012

Raising money is hard. VCs give out money for a living and put their email address next to it, so that should give you a sense of what their inboxes look like. So how do you get in front of them? Once you do, how much badgering is ok? Is it persistence or annoyance? Here are a few things I recommend but remember that every investor is different so there may be some disagreement. 1) Please stop introducing yourself in self-effacing ways.

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VC pitching disruption advice 308

Gust

DECEMBER 2, 2012

Image via Facebook.com. Every entrepreneur needs to be honest about their strengths and weaknesses, and realistic about their reasons for choosing the startup route. For any entrepreneur, even the best business opportunities, if entered for the wrong reasons, will likely fail. Some of these reasons seem obvious, so forgive me for restating, but I still hear them too often.

peer-to-peer 181

peer-to-peer startup entrepreneurs health 181

Berkonomics

DECEMBER 6, 2012

How often do you take the time to rate your employee-associates? Is it really worth the time and effort when measured from the perspective of the company and of the employee? First, like any important process, the metrics used to measure effectiveness and progress are so important to a successful outcome, that a good manager will spend time reviewing those metrics used by others and create an appropriate set of measurements for your company that reflect the most important attributes of the empl

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board development investing investment 61

Tomasz Tunguz

DECEMBER 4, 2012

I rowed crew in college. I walked on to the team and fell in love with the sport the very first time we pushed the boat from the dock and took a stroke. Looking back on those four years, I often draw parallels between rowing and entrepreneurship. My freshman year, Joe Holland, who had raced for the national team in the eighties had taken a sabbatical to coach the freshmen team.

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entrepreneurship culture 40

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technology

This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 3, 2012

Apparently, venture capital is a cruddy asset class where you can't get returns over the long term. Not only that, but there's a "Series A Crunch" that we've been talking about since October of 2011 where good companies can't seem to get to their next round of funding. And tech journalists talk about these things as if they're some kind of structural problem or at least a trend with the asset class.

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real estate venture capital entrepreneurship creativity 282

Derek Sivers

DECEMBER 1, 2012

You can focus your time locally or globally. If you’re local, you focus on your community, doing things in-person. But this means you have less time to focus on the rest of the world. If you’re global, you make things for the whole world. But this means you have less time to be part of your local community. Neither approach is right or wrong, but you need to be aware of the trade-off.

communities 46

communities 46

Tomasz Tunguz

DECEMBER 3, 2012

When going to market, startups tend to pursue one of two sales strategies, either education sales or execution sales.These sales strategies are substantially different. They demand different sales cycles, pricing and market positioning - potentially even different team members. The Education Sale. If your customers don’t know they need your product yet, then the sales process is an education sale.

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education consulting strategy pitching 40

Gust

DECEMBER 6, 2012

It depends on the quality of the idea. I’m a firm believer in Derek Sivers ‘ calculus, which goes like this: AWFUL IDEA = -$1. WEAK IDEA = $1. SO-SO IDEA = $5. GOOD IDEA = $10. GREAT IDEA = $15. BRILLIANT IDEA = $20. The real value, of course (as other answers here have noted), comes from executing on the idea. And to see how that calculation works, check out Derek’s classic, seminal article on the subject: [link].

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investing investment entrepreneurs startup 150

Tomasz Tunguz

DECEMBER 2, 2012

In this month’s HBR, Clay Christensen and Maxwell Wessell published an article targeted to the CEOs of large companies on how to prevent disruption to their businesses. They point to five major barriers to competition in a market listed in increasing order of difficulty to assail. Instead of reviewing the incumbent’s strategy, I’m going to flip these around to reverse engineer these defenses and build a startup’s playbook for disruption with examples from our portfolio.

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disruption incumbents real estate startup 40

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development

Tomasz Tunguz

DECEMBER 6, 2012

Over lunch last week, a good friend who is an entrepreneur and I were brainstorming about the features of his optimal initial target market. His product hasn’t yet launched so he still had some decisions to make about which users and use cases to target. We wondered if there were a rule of thumb about initial target customer segments. We took out a blank sheet of paper and came up with this: Ideal Customer = max (DAU / MAU).

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enablement communities entrepreneurs development 40

Tomasz Tunguz

DECEMBER 5, 2012

Jeff Bezos appeared on Charlie rose two weeks ago and spoke about Amazon’s history, future and best of all, its culture. In the interview, Bezos discussed Amazon’s core values: We are willing to be misunderstood. We are obsessed with customers, not competitors. We are long term thinkers. While all of them are critical to Amazon’s success, my favorite is the first because it combines three critical concepts for startups.

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culture strategy technology startup 40