Startups
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How to write a killer deck, and get funded
Immad Akhund is the CEO and co-founder of Heyzap, the leading Social Games distribution platform beyond Facebook. Heyzap has raised $3.5 million to date and is Immad’s third Startup, He will be writing a series of articles for Lessons Learned. I have advised a number of Web companies on their way to raise money. I am often mentally ‘face-palming’ as they stagger through their initial pitch. Helping entrepreneurs is something I am passionate about. Knowing how to comfortably raise funding removes the distracting worry of money.
My partner and I are having trouble determining pricing models for big businesses. We've gotten in touch with businesses that have expressed early interest and have annual revenues of ~10+ billion. Does anyone on HN have big business customers or have any valuable experience behind dealing with them? We don't know how much to charge or how often to charge (monthly, annually, etc) we just have a good product that they have expressed slight interest in.
Hacker News | How much to charge a big business?
I’ve been working on a few big projects recently, and became frustrated with the inertia built into launching anything big. Sometimes it seems like things will never be ready; like there’s just too much to do. For some reason, I’m most motivated by absurd goals. Could I really find a market, pick a niche, and build a product in a single day? And what about marketing? I decided that a single day wouldn’t afford any time for marketing, and so decided to just focus my efforts on finding a simple market inefficiency.
How I Built a $600 / mo Product In One Day | kpkaiser.com
I'm Ivan Zhao, currently in my mid-20s. In my university years I set my mind on becoming a cognitive scientist. However, after working in academia for several years, I have recently redirected my attention to the web. I like design, especially design with clarity. It doesn't necessarily imply minimalism, as human vision systems have evolved to handle messy environments. Instead, I think the goal is to build a clear path between the screen and the viewer's perception - an information highway you may say.
Ivan Zhao, web & iOS hacker, UI/UX/visualization designer, photographer, Vancouver
Don't get smart at job interviews - Daily Business Update - The Boston Globe
Globe Staff Looking for a job? Then here's a bit of advice: Try not to look too smart at your next job interview - or at least not as smart as your prospective boss. That's a conclusion that could be drawn from new research coming out of the MIT Sloan School of Management , where Professor Robert Akerlof has looked into the question of "How Bosses Stay in Charge" and determined that one way they do is by hiring people who are not as bright as they are.
This past October I was invited by Steve Blank to speak at Stanford for their Enterprise Thought Leader (ETL) series. The topic I chose to speak about was “lessons on starting a company” but I created the sub-title in class “a Silicon Valley heresy” since my goal was to slay many of the myths I believe exist right in the heart of Silicon Valley! The truth is that I love Stanford, Palo Alto and the Bay Area in general. I grew up in NorCal and I formerly lived in Palo Alto. But I think that the “group think” that can sometimes form there creates a sense that there is but one way to skin a cat.
Is it OK to Want to Make Money? Slaying Some Silicon Valley Myths | Both Sides of the Table
Jason Fried is the co-founder and president of 37signals. Are you in the software business? I bet most of you would answer no. So let me put it another way: Do you have a website?
How to Kill a Bad Idea
Fixed income attribution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fixed-income attribution refers to the process of measuring returns generated by various sources of risk in a fixed income portfolio , particularly when multiple sources of return are active at the same time. For example, the risks affecting the return of a bond portfolio include the overall level of the yield curve , the slope of the yield curve, and the credit spreads of the bonds in the portfolio. A portfolio manager may hold firm views on the ways in which these factors will change in the near future, so in three separate risk decisions he positions the assets in the portfolio to take advantage of the expected forthcoming market movements. If all views subsequently prove to be correct, then each decision will generate a profit. If one view is wrong, it will generate a loss, but the effect of the other bets may compensate. The overall performance will then be the sum of the performance contributions from each source of risk.
For DecorMyEyes, Bad Publicity Is a Good Thing - NYTimes.com
In moments, she found the perfect frames — made by a French company called Lafont — on a Web site that looked snazzy and stood at the top of the search results. Not the tippy-top, where the paid ads are found, but under those, on Google’s version of the gold-medal podium, where the most relevant and popular site is displayed. Ms. Rodriguez placed an order for both the Lafonts and a set of doctor-prescribed Ciba Vision contact lenses on that site, DecorMyEyes.com. The total cost was $361.97. It was the start of what Ms.
Cash Cow Disease: The Cognitive Decline of Microsoft and Google
Watching the recent product retraction of Google Wave convinced me that Google is fully infected with the same protracted, end-stage wasting disease that has consumed Microsoft for years: cash cow disease. Cash cow disease arises when a public company has a small number of products that generate the lion's share of profits, but lacks the discipline to return those profits to the shareholders. The disease can progress for years or even decades, simply because the cash cow products produce enough massive revenues to distract shareholders from the smaller (but still massive) amounts of waste.
Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition | For Entrepreneurs
In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key factors: team, product and market, with particular focus on the importance of product/market fit. Failure to get product/market fit right is very likely the number 1 cause of startup failure. However in all these articles, I have not seen any discussion about what I believe is the second biggest cause of startup failure: the cost of acquiring customers turns out to be higher than expected, and exceeds the ability to monetize those customers. In case you are not familiar with the importance of Product/Market fit, Marc Andreessen has a great blog post on this topic: The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters . In this blog, Marc argues that out of the three core elements of a startup, team, product, and market, the only thing that matters is product/market fit.Last week, Top Hat Monocle had the pleasure of hosting the “design thinking” station at the EdTech Meetup with our friends from Evernote ! What is design thinking, and what does it have to do with education? Design thinking is a human-centered approach to problem-solving, encouraging people to tackle the world’s messy problems with a collaborative, hands-on approach. Using its framework and the smorgasbord of tools associated with it, it cuts across disciplines and cohorts, proving effective for everyone from kindergartners to senior execs. It offers a methodology for innovation, encouraging students from all fields to personalize, internalize and work through the process in order to uncover innovative solutions.
How I met our first investors - Top Hat Monocle
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Startup Marketing Lessons Learned Part 3: Scaling Up To Massive Traffic « insight.io blog
This Thanksgiving it might seem that there’s a lot less to be thankful for. One out of ten of Americans is out of work. The common wisdom says that the chickens have all come home to roost from a disastrous series of economic decisions including outsourcing the manufacture of America’s physical goods. The United States is now a debtor nation to China and that the bill is about to come due. The pundits say the American dream is dead and this next decade will see the further decline and fall of the West and in particular of the United States. Let me offer my prediction.
When It’s Darkest Men See the Stars « Steve Blank
One of the more common critiques I receive from friends and colleagues is that I’m too self-deprecating. Too quick to point out my flaws or talk about challenges I’m facing. Too “humble”.