Start-up Strategy: To Change the Game, Change the Economics of How It’s Played (photo: laffy4k) Several weeks ago, I found myself in the passenger seat of a car going nowhere fast. My friend, Peter Sims, who had earlier introduced me to the Stanford D.School, was leading the charge into the unknown, hurtling us (hopefully) towards dinner in exotic Burlingame, where people from SF and Palo Alto compromise to break bread. The “us” included Alan M. Webber, whom I’d never met. He sat behind me, and — as getting lost tends to promote — we ended up talking about nothing in particular and everything in general: publishing, the game of business, Mr. Alan was co-founder of Fast Company magazine and former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review. More specifically related to this post, Alan developed a very interesting habit more than 20 years ago, when he began to carry a supply of 3 x 5 index cards wherever life took him. His new book, Rules of Thumb, is a collection of 52 truths he’s culled from these notes specifically related to winning in business. So What?
The Benefits of Letting Others Recast Your Problem At the recent Spigit Innovation Summit, MIT professor and leading Enterprise 2.0 thinker Andrew McAfee related the crowdsourcing story of Foldit, about which he also blogged. Foldit is an online game where rank amateurs can try their hand at folding proteins. And they do well! Quick background first. Our cells produce a variety of proteins, the building blocks for our body. Enter Foldit, an online game created by a team from the University of Washington. The UW scientists ran a test of how the best participants did against the computer programs on ten different proteins. Those alone are fascinating results. Are the scientists themselves the ones playing Foldit? The story of Foldit is more than man-versus-machine, it’s also a story of how crowdsourcing allowed a tough problem to be recast to find a solution. Different Perspectives vs. Breakthroughs occur when a person restructures the problem, thereby recognizing that one is exploring the wrong space. Don Norman, Design without Designers
Common Mistakes that Every Young Entrepreneur Should Avoid Skip Advertisement This ad will close in 15 seconds... Young Entrepreneurs Today's Most Read 9 Proven Ways to Get People to Take You Seriously 4 Intangibles That Drive CEOs What It Takes to Go From Dead Broke to 6 Figures in 6 Months The Mentality of a Successful Career 4 Big Challenges That Startups Face These Siblings Are Cooking Up America's First Meatless Butcher Shop Kim Lachance Shandrow 3 min read News and Articles About Young Entrepreneurs Failure 6 Stories of Super Successes Who Overcame Failure They're perfect examples of why failure should never stop you from following your vision. Jayson DeMers Podcasts Top 25 Business Podcasts for Entrepreneurs Podcasts are as easy to use as old-school radio but as specialized as blogs. Murray Newlands Entrepreneurship Programs Saxbys and Drexel Team Up to Promote Entrepreneurship Saxby's founder Nick Bayer talks about the one-of-a-kind program and why he wishes there was one for himself years ago. Carly Okyle Presented by Young Entrepreneurs Laura Entis Fear
As CEO, there is never enough time to gather all... - bijansabet.com As CEO, there is never enough time to gather all information needed to make a decision. The CEO must make hundreds of decisions big and small in the course of a typical week. The CEO cannot simply stop all other activities to gather comprehensive data and do exhaustive analysis make that single decision. The Margin Manifesto: 11 Tenets for Reaching (or Doubling) Profitability in 3 Months Profitability often requires better rules and speed, not more time. (Photo: Jetta Girl) I wrote this “margin manifesto” several months ago and somehow neglected to post it. These are the principles I review whenever facing operational overwhelm or declining/stagnating profits. The financial goal of a start-up should be simple: profit in the least time with the least effort. Based on my interviews with high-performing (using profit-per-employee metrics) CEOs in more than a dozen countries, here are the 11 basic tenets of the “Margin Manifesto”… a return-to-basics call that gives permission to do the uncommon to achieve the uncommon: consistent profitability (or doubling of it) in 3 months or less. 1. 2. 3. 5. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Did you enjoy this post?
Minimum Viable Product: a guide One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product. Its power is matched only by the amount of confusion that it causes, because it's actually quite hard to do. It certainly took me many years to make sense of it. I was delighted to be asked to give a brief talk about the MVP at the inaugural meetup of the lean startup circle here in San Francisco. First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. Some caveats right off the bat. Second, the definition's use of the words maximum and minimum means it is decidedly not formulaic. Without further ado, the video: Slides are below:
WTF is Traction? A 6-Step Relationship Guide to VC This is part of my ongoing series on Raising VC. You’ve pitched several angels and VC’s. Everybody seems to like you but nobody seems to be getting out their checkbooks. Most of them are telling you that they just need to see a bit of traction before they’d be prepared to invest. Your friends and advisers tell you that this means you need revenue because in this economy VC’s will only fund businesses with revenue. The “more traction” feedback is a very typical scenario is a down market economy like the one we’re in. So if it’s not necessarily revenue that’s preventing an investment, then WTF is traction? Now there are some firms that have strict rules about not funding pre-revenue companies – that’s different. Traction really is about building a relationship with a VC over time and showing them that you can move the ball forward. Fund raising is an ongoing process and not an event on a workplan. 6 Steps to Building a Relationship with VC’s and Solving the Traction Problem: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
The 7 Habits Of Highly Successful Startups Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy October 2008 The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. When Microsoft and Apple were founded. As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. If we've learned one thing from funding so many startups, it's that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders. Which means that what matters is who you are, not when you do it. So if you want to improve your chances, you should think far more about who you can recruit as a cofounder than the state of the economy. But for any given team of founders, would it not pay to wait till the economy is better before taking the leap? Of course, the idea you have now won't be the last you have. That doesn't mean you can ignore the economy. Investors are more of a problem. You'll have to adapt to this. (Those are both good things to be. What if you quit your job to start a startup that fails, and you can't find another?
256 Must-Read Content For All Tech Entrepreneurs | Stanley Tang – The Journey of A Young Tech Entrepreneur Over the past few months, I have been reading a lot of articles and gathering tons of information about tech startups as I set to launch my first one this fall. I’ve saved many of my favorites and, rather than keeping them to myself, I decided to share my bookmarks to the public. The list I’ve compiled below have been filtered and I’ve only selected to publish the best of the best articles and videos. I urge all entrepreneurs who is serious about starting their own tech startup to read those articles as there are tons of golden nuggets to be taken away from them. This list isn’t meant to be consumed all at once. * Highly recommended Entrepreneurship General Startup Advice The Idea Product Strategy Running The Company Startup Culture Assembling Your Team Sales & Marketing Business Model & Monetization Venture Capital, Funding & Equity Legal Miscellaneous
- This is going to be BIG! - The Value of Getting KnockedAround Last night, my ZogSports softball team, the Lousy Shirts (so named b/c we won last year and all we got were these…), won our second championship—back to back after winning the Spring/Summer league. In the earlier league, we went 9-0, absolutely crushing most of the teams we played along the way. We were scoring at least 15 runs a game, and had one of the best pitchers in the league to go along with a very tight defense. Then, we ran into some trouble, losing two out of the last three to finish 10-2—still the first seed but going into the playoffs a little less certain about our inevitable destiny. So what happened? When we were beating up on other teams, we occasionally got sloppy, swung at pitches we shouldn’t have, and didn’t necessarily play our best. We basically repeated the same pattern in the Fall.