2019

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industry and university collaboration: how partnership drives innovation

Venture Well

Industry and university collaboration produces groundbreaking research and innovation that solves complex problems, drives economic growth, and creates a more skilled workforce. The post industry and university collaboration: how partnership drives innovation appeared first on VentureWell.

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Why Has Seed Investing Declined? And What Does this Mean for the Future?

Both Sides of the Table

Seed investments are down by any measure (funds, deals, dollars) over the past 3 years in deals < $1 million AND in deals between $1–5 million. What gives? Over the past month a colleague ( Chang Xu ) and I sifted through data on the venture capital industry (as we do every year) and made a bunch of calls to VCs and LPs to confirm our hypotheses.

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The Achilles Heel of Startup Ecosystems

This is going to be BIG.

Across the world, various economic development organizations, government agencies, and non-profits are putting in admirable and well-intentioned efforts to develop startup ecosystems. They’re building campuses, districts, buildings, spaces, as well as running new educational efforts and contests—basically anything they can think of to foster the growth of new and innovative companies.

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How to Craft an Exceptional Update About Your Startup

GAN

Each week, I receive dozens of updates from startups—everything from founders I’ve just chatted with briefly, to founders I’ve mentored, to companies that have asked GAN Ventures for funding. The purpose of updates from founders is to get their community of investors, mentors, and friends excited about the work they’re doing and to create additional fans who are bought into the company’s vision and plans.

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The B2B Sales Leader's Guide for Any Economic Environment

When economic headwinds pick up, sales leaders are the first to sound the alarm — and chart a new course. Longer sales cycles, larger buying committees, increased price pressure, and smaller teams can quickly combine to reduce your margin for error and increase the urgency to find a solution. To thrive in a challenging environment, sales teams need a rock-solid grasp of the fundamentals and the biggest force-multipliers they can get their hands on.

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Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast

Entrepreneurs' Organization

By Miranda Naiman, accidental entrepreneur, motivational speaker, member of the EO Tanzania chapter and founder of Empower Limited , a Tanzanian human capital consultancy firm. It is mind-boggling how much time and money is invested in “strategy” at many companies—with some larger organizations even hiring a full-time person or team to oversee “strategy and innovation.

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More Trending

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4 Strategies to Integrate Ethics into Entrepreneurship Education

Venture Well

We interviewed three leaders in entrepreneurship education about several ways to teach tomorrow's entrepreneurs about ethics. The post 4 Strategies to Integrate Ethics into Entrepreneurship Education appeared first on VentureWell.

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Startup Business Funding: 5 Business-Breaking Misconceptions

Dream It

I've been an alum of Dreamit twice. The first time, back in 2012, I joined as part of a mobile gaming company. We didn't have a live product, but we had an insane buzz around us, with a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign and 'The Next Angry Birds' quote from Techcrunch. We spent most of that summer developing the product while carving out time to meet investors and try to raise funding.

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Lighting the torch of change: Youth volunteering in Haiti

Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative

By Elise Kemp. As a part of the YLAI Network’s mission, community involvement in fostering development is critical. Hearing about the impact that our networkmembers are making in their own communities is a real privilege and helps us see how impactful it can be to volunteer locally. Lifting up others in your community. Jimmy Regis. YLAI Network member Jimmy Regis, the public relations manager of ADIVAH (Association for Integral Development of Haitian Values) in Haiti, is a lifelong advocate of l

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What Happened In The 2010s

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

My friend Steve Kane suggested I take a longer view in my pair of year end posts this year: What, no decade end/decade ahead posts? — Steven Kane (@stevenkane) December 26, 2019. And so I will. Here are the big things that happened in tech, startups, business, and more in the decade that is ending today, in no particular order of importance. 1/ The emergence of the big four web/mobile monopolies; Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

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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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The Future of Startup Ecosystems Across the Globe

500

The idea of being a founder has never been so popular around the world, so how is that going to change industries and entire regions? This year we dove headfirst into the rise of corporate venture capital, the changing nature of venture capital education, and the important task of startup ecosystem building. Fast Growing Corporate Venture Capital With headlines from Softbank, Google Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and more, corporate venture capital is growing faster than ever.

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Rule #1 in Angel Investing - It’s All About the Team

The Seraf Compass

Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Living in the Boston/Cambridge area, we are surrounded by some of the most innovative researchers in the world working at institutions like MIT and Harvard. I’m pretty confident when I say, in Boston, hardly a day goes by when some graduate student or professor doesn’t invent a new product, discover a new molecule or create a cool app.

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11 angel investing lessons

Venture Hacks

Spearhead asked me to write a post on angel investing when they first launched. Here’s a slightly updated version—most of the wisdom is from Naval. Charlie Munger says investing requires a latticework of mental models. Here are 11 lessons for your angel investing lattice: If you can’t decide, the answer is no. Proprietary dealfow means ‘they want you’.

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Lessons from a Diverse Venture Capital Portfolio

This is going to be BIG.

Brooklyn Bridge Ventures , the pre-seed and seed stage VC fund I run in NYC, has invested in 64 companies in the last six and a half years. Twenty-five of them have at least one female co-founder. Fifteen had co-founders over 40. Five have LGBTQ+ founders. Three teams have African-American founders. Three of the founding teams are married couples. All were backed based on the sole criteria that they had the potential to make my limited partners a lot of money.

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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.

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Pittsburgh: A City Fueled By a Culture of Innovation and Community

GAN

We just finished the first leg of the GAN Momentum Tour in Pittsburgh. It was the first of five trips we’re making around the world where accelerators, corporate partners, and startups come together around one purpose: Helping startups who are operating in unique places around the world (“everywhere else” places—the cities that might not be considered major tech hubs) gain more momentum, wherever they call home.

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Innovation in Sustainability: From Trash to Textiles

Entrepreneurs' Organization

Monique Maissan is an Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) member in Shanghai, CEO of Vision Textiles, and founder of Waste2Weave. Monique has been a pioneer in sustainability in the notoriously environmentally unfriendly textile and fashion industry for more than 20 years. We asked Monique about her journey with sustainability and the challenges she’s experienced.

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Quickly Unpacking Spotify’s Acquisition Of Gimlet Media

Haystack

I’ve been traveling all week, digging out of email, and closing two deals and — hence — have been pretty quiet online. As I was scrolling through Twitter today and saw the rumors around Gimlet, the podcast media company, being acquired by Spotify for $200M in cash, I knew I had to stop, write this post, and share some thoughts on what’s going on.

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Rethinking Pitch Competitions: Create Value, Not a Spectacle

Venture Well

VentureWell Director of Venture Development, Eli Velasquez offers insights on how to develop pitch competitions that provide maximum support to startups. The post Rethinking Pitch Competitions: Create Value, Not a Spectacle appeared first on VentureWell.

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Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in

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The Greg Main Distinguished Scholar Award

Innovation 2 Enterprise

Application. About Greg Main. As his children were growing up, Greg Main would often ask them around the dinner table, “What have you done you to distinguish yourself today?” An excellent role model, Greg distinguished himself throughout his life. He grew up in Lansing, Michigan, married Barbara in 1963, graduated summa cum laude from Michigan State University in 1970 with a degree in urban planning and received an honorary doctoral degree from St.

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Advice from an entrepreneurship expert, with Professor Michael Goldberg

Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative

The YLAI Network hosted Michael Goldberg , a professor of entrepreneurship and an expert in international business development, for a Facebook chat in November for Global Entrepreneurship Week. Michael answered questions from network members requesting advice for their entrepreneurial endeavors. Many themes came up, such as overcoming issues with funding, navigating unstable governments, expanding your business, and dealing with competition.

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Why Positive Cashflow Matters

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

Venture backed companies have a strange relationship to positive cashflow. Because they have financial backers who can and do finance losses, they tend to operate in the red for a long time. In the early days it makes sense to burn cash. If you do not have revenues, you can’t generate cash. And if you can’t grow your revenues without investing out ahead of income, then you also need to be able to operate in the red.

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The Value of the 500 Seed Accelerator in 2019

500

Going into 2020, 500 will be entering it’s tenth year of operation. It’s been a crazy journey for us from a small first batch of startups in our Silicon Valley Accelerator to running accelerators across the globe and investing in founders from over 76 countries. While we have undoubtedly matured as a company, we continue to strive to make our Seed Accelerator one of the top programs to support founders and help them build companies at-scale.

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The Startup Funding Gap

This resource discusses the gap between early funding from friends/family and the more substantial rounds from angel groups and VCs. Why does this gap exist and what can be done about it?

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Oxygen, Aspirin or Jewelry: Which Makes a Better Investment?

The Seraf Compass

Entrepreneurs fall in love with their products. It’s no surprise… their product is their idea and as they nurture it, it becomes like a child to them, and who doesn’t love their child!? How many times have you sat through an entrepreneur’s pitch and learned practically every detail about the product, but almost nothing about the business opportunity.

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10 Ways to Increase Customer Loyalty

Smart Hustle Magazine

Gaining customers is the first step, and a big one at that! But the next step — keeping those customers coming back — is ongoing work. Your customer base can act as your cheering squad as long as you keep them feeling good about your brand. Sure, they might need your products, but there’s a good chance they can get them from a competitor. So, you need to stand out and also stay top of mind. .

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The Potential for Fraud Caused by the Unnecessary Mystery of the Family Office World

This is going to be BIG.

About a year ago, I received a LinkedIn connection from Richard Briggs—a Brooklyn Law Grad who spend 25 successful years at Lehman and was operating his own family office. He knew a bunch of other VCs in NYC and seemed like a great potential Limited Partner connection. There was only one problem. Richard Briggs didn’t exist. No Richard Briggs ever attended Brooklyn Law and none of our mutual connections had ever met him or interacted with him.

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Six Reasons We Love Investing in Founders in Small Cities

GAN

No matter where you run a company, you’re probably making trade-offs. There are pros and cons to operating anywhere, for sure. But, I know that operating your company in a smaller city can feel really, really hard. You face a lot of challenges—anything from your commute time, to finding great talent, to landing big investments, to connecting with your target customers (fashion and beauty companies come to mind, for instance).

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The ABM Benchmark Survey

ABM gets better with age — but unfortunately, marketers don't have the luxury of pouring it into an oak barrel for a couple decades to let it mature. In a recent survey with Demand Gen Report, we found 59% of experienced practitioners (those with ABM programs more than a year old) indicated their ABM programs are meeting or greatly exceeding their expectations, while only 45% of novices (those with ABM programs less than one year old) could say the same.