Sat.Jan 25, 2014 - Fri.Jan 31, 2014

article thumbnail

Putting Tom Perkins Comments into Context

Both Sides of the Table

'Tom Perkins is one of the founding members of the venerable venture capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins. He just had his Mitt Romney moment and his name will forever be etched in the collective consciousness of the tech community for this terribly insensitive and tone deaf letter to the Wall Street Journal. The headline of Mr. Perkins letter to the WSJ?

education 417
article thumbnail

Which angel investing journals are the most useful, either online or in print?

Gust

'There are actually no angel investing ‘journals’ per se, because there simply are not enough active, professional angel investors to make a market. There are, however, quite a few blog posts on the subject, although most are written for an entrepreneurial audience, rather than angels themselves. And there is one really excellent weekly podcast to keep you up to speed.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

The Best Times of Year to Raise Capital for Your Startup

Tomasz Tunguz

Aside from a startup’s internal considerations about the right time to raise money, founders should weigh the seasonality of the fund raising market when planning their raise. There’s a rule of thumb batted around the valley that the worst times to raise capital are in the dog-days of summer and after Thanksgiving. As it turns out, this aphorism is only a half-truth.

capital 78
article thumbnail

The Rules of Inclusion

This is going to be BIG.

'I was talking to a female engineer turned product manager last week about her experience as one of the few women at a hackathon. While she didn''t experience anything particularly negative, she still didn''t feel particularly welcome. When you''re one of only a few people who look like you in a place, if the event is a free-for-all, it''s tough to break into new groups and connect with strangers.

article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

Ready, aim, fire. Really?

Berkonomics

'You’ve surely heard the variations on this theme. “Ready, fire aim” was popular in the 1990’s, accredited to any of several authors. I used the term to describe my efforts in the artificial intelligence field, experimenting with new devices, the lisp programming language, and our first trial installations. It seemed an ideal way to describe a scrappy, entrepreneurial activity.

More Trending

article thumbnail

The Go-To-Market Challenges of B2D Companies

Tomasz Tunguz

Last week, I spent some time at HeavyBit , the community for developer focused companies in SoMa, chatting with a few companies reaching scale. Across a handful of meetings, a recurring theme surfaced for these B2D (business-to-developer companies). How should their sales and marketing apparatuses be built? Do the field sales models of infrastructure companies or the inside sales models of software companies apply when the initial user is a developer?

SaaS 41
article thumbnail

As an investor, what are the most important items that a startup must have for you to invest?

Gust

'Large and growing market. Real domain expertise. Provable product need. Scalable business model. Competitive advantage. Platform/partnership/bizd ev/API strategy. External validation (ideally traction and/or passionate customers). Viable business structure and cap table. Reasonable valuation. Proven team (tech/product/design/mark eting/sales/domain/etc.).

investing 119
article thumbnail

5 Keys To Effective Entrepreneurial Team Mentoring

Gust

'Richard Branson photo via en.wikipedia.org. I’ve always wondered why every executive meeting has to be one hour in length, or longer. That’s probably a tenth of your day spent on one issue. It better be a critical one, because you have a hundred others waiting. I believe you can be much more productive, as well as a more effective leader, if you approach most meetings as mentoring opportunities, and limit them to five minutes.

article thumbnail

Which angel investing journals are the most useful, either online or in print?

Gust

'There are actually no angel investing ‘journals’ per se, because there simply are not enough active, professional angel investors to make a market. There are, however, quite a few blog posts on the subject, although most are written for an entrepreneurial audience, rather than angels themselves. And there is one really excellent weekly podcast to keep you up to speed.

article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

The Technology that's Taking Data Science by Storm

Tomasz Tunguz

Given all the momentum of the NoSQL movement, it would be easy to write off SQL-based technologies as forgotten, or simply standing still. But there’s a tremendous amount of innovation occurring in SQL databases. Amazon’s Redshift, an elastic data-warehousing solution launched in late 2012 is the most salient example. Redshift’s ability to process huge volumes of data is breathtaking.

article thumbnail

Military Strategy Applied to Startups

Tomasz Tunguz

OODA was a technique coined by John Boyd, one of the leading military thinkers of the last 100 years, based on the German’s Blitzkrieg-style warfare which prioritized speed and surprise over the traditional win, hold and grind attrition techniques of trench warfare. After @pmarca tweeted about the concept, I read one of the books on the topic called Certain to Win.

article thumbnail

The Maximum Viable Churn Rate for a Startup

Tomasz Tunguz

?. An entrepreneur asked me the question, what is the maximum viable churn for a startup? Within that question, a few others are embedded. How should a founder think about trading off efforts to grow revenue and mitigate churn? What is the impact of account growth on net churn? Startups must walk a tight-rope to balance growth, churn and cash. Below is the framework I use for working through maximum viable churn. ?.

startup 40