How to Embody a #Startup Winner' by @kristihedges. Inside FI gives you exclusive access inside the training sessions of the Founder Institute. To get updates when we release new videos, follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. When you run a business, all eyes are watching. Entrepreneurs must embody why they are a good bet for investors, customers, partners, and employees. At times, a founder's presence is all he or she has to build followership. So how do you train yourself to communicate in a way that inspires commitment -- especially when it matters most? Kristi Hedges, Founder speaker and CEO coach, shows how anyone can build a leadership presence, but most go about it the wrong way. Instead of focusing on pure stylistics, entrepreneurs should build presence from the inside out -- part mental game, part interpersonal connection, and part communication aptitude. Kristi Hedges is the author of the just released book Power of Presence: Unlock your Potential to Influence and Engage Others.
Sean Parker. Y Combinator Is Getting One Submission Per Minute. Bloomberg TV Everybody wants Y Combinator to fund their startup. Paul Graham, who founded the popular startup accelerator, just tweeted that Y Combinator is now getting one application every minute. That's more than 1,000 applications per day, assuming some slowdown in the pace during night hours. (Although maybe not -- the global economy never stops.) Today's the deadline for their Winter 2012 application round, which is the reason for the flood. So how do they choose which ones to fund? Asana.
Groupon CEO Andrew Mason Sorry For Osechi Snafu: “We Really Messed Up” Andrew Mason, founder and CEO of social commerce sensation Groupon, has apologized to Japanese customers in a video today. If you’ve been following Groupon with eagle eyes, like we have, you’ll know that this is in relation to a New Year’s deal that went horribly wrong. Mason is renowned for his great sense of humor, but in this video he shows his serious side. In a message to Groupon’s Japanese customers, spoken in English but subtitled in Japanese, Mason acknowledges that the company had “really messed up” the deal in question and outlined steps it was taking to rebuild its image in Japan, and beyond. Mason says they’d successfully featured the food delivery business of Bird Café in the past, but that the Japanese restaurant was unable to process the volume of orders for a New Year’s deal after Groupon sold 500 coupons for an “osechi” meal.
Many dishes were delivered too late, while others were in “terrible condition”, Mason acknowledges. (Via Hacker News) And You Think YOUR Startup Had It Rough... The launch party. Ask any successful entrepreneur or investor what attributes are critical to building a successful business, and it's a safe bet that "perseverance" will be near the top of the list. And there's no better illustration of this than the stories of two of the country's original successful startups -- the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies.
In those days, of course, "surviving" as a startup meant something different than it means today. In those days, surviving meant, well, surviving. The Jamestown settlement was sponsored by venture capitalists of the Virginia Company of London, who were hoping to cash in on the presumed riches of the new world (the dotcom bubble of the day). Jamestown launched in 1607, after several other US colonization ventures had failed. Then came the winter of 1609-1610, in which a combination of drought, the delayed arrival of a convoy of supply ships, and a breakdown in trade negotiations with the Indians devastated the colony. And then there was Plymouth. How We Knew When to Launch Our Startup. Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit.
Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter. From a PR perspective, I like to think of the internet as an ocean full of schools of fish. There’s the TechCrunch school, the NY Times school, Lifehacker school, HackerNews school and thousands of others. When one of these services feature your startup, their respective school of fish will suddenly and dramatically swim directly towards your startup.
And, as fast as they come, they will swim by you even faster. You are a fisherman, your startup is your net and your goal is to catch as many of these fish as possible. If your net (your startup) isn’t well-built and ready for them, the fish will swim right by you and they’ll never come back. But, some startups have built a good net and they overnight acquire thousands of new happy users. “Net” Strategy Depends on Your Stage Stage 0 and Stage 1: Create Splash Page.
5 Free Annotation & Collaboration Tools for Web Projects. Specific, contextual feedback is crucial for teams collaborating online, which is why it's so important to make receiving it as fast, effici December 16, 2010 Specific, contextual feedback is crucial for teams collaborating online, which is why it's so important to make receiving it as fast, efficient and easy as possible. Asking for feedback can be tedious and is often done out of context, for example, via e-mail. However there are numerous tools available to make the task of gathering and giving feedback for web projects simpler and swifter. Here are five of the best free tools to annotate and collaborate on the web. 1. MarkUp lets you express your thoughts and ideas quickly and easily on any webpage. When you click the publish button and slide to confirm, you will receive a unique URL with the image and notes captured, making it easy to share with anyone, seeking feedback where necessary. 2.
Bounce is a lightweight application for giving quick feedback on a web page. 3. 4. 5. Does an Entrepreneur Need a College Degree? - Ndubuisi Ekekwe - The Conversation. By Ndubuisi Ekekwe | 7:51 AM December 14, 2010 Two points: PayPal founder (and billionaire) Peter Thiel is offering grants to 20 students under the age of 20, luring them to leave school and become entrepreneurs. He thinks that getting teenagers to start thinking big early will help them become innovators. Rather than take on education debt, Thiel wants these kids to get $100,000 from a mogul and start a business. In a Bloomberg Businessweek ranking of CEOs of S&P 500 companies, those without college degrees tied with University of California system graduates as running the most businesses. Last month, Stephen Greer asked Does an Entrepreneur Need an MBA? He showed that while an MBA may not provide all the ingredients to become a successful entrepreneur, it does equip entrepreneurs with the skills that can make them more effective.
But what if the entrepreneurs are not even college graduates? Some dropouts become legends and create industries. Mr. With a Little Help From His Friends. In early 2001 he tried to launch his own Internet company, and to redeem himself. “It had to have the potential to be as big as Napster,” he says. “Otherwise it wasn’t interesting to me.” He realized his electronic address book was getting out of date.
Maybe everyone could use help keeping theirs current. Eventually, Parker and some partners managed to land some seed money from Sequoia, the prestigious Silicon Valley venture-capital firm. He began to hang around with some of his newfound San Francisco friends, including night owl Jonathan Abrams, a programmer who had launched Friendster in 2002, in part to help people hook up. One day—in a scene fictionalized in The Social Network—Parker saw Thefacebook, as it was then known, on the computer of his roommate’s girlfriend, a student at Stanford.
Matt Cohler, who joined Thefacebook shortly after Parker, is awed when he thinks about that pivotal e-mail. Yet again, Parker’s undisciplined ways would prove his undoing.