Waiting for the Accelerator Bubble to Pop Since Paul Graham launched Y Combinator in 2005, the field of startup incubators and accelerators has exploded in the U.S. and overseas, with new entries emerging in all manner of oddball shapes and sizes, from a 80,000-square-foot space in San Jose, Calif., dedicated to tech companies hoping to do business in China, to a program that offers entrepreneurs cash to develop their business in Chile. There are accelerators for green tech, health tech, ed tech, the cloud, and every other tech flavor du jour, and accelerators everywhere from Baton Rouge to Durham, N.H., as cities across the country lay claim to the title of the Silicon Valley of [insert industry here]. There’s Unreasonable at Sea, a 100-day program on an ocean liner, which encourages entrepreneurs to “combat the greatest challenges of our time” while sailing among ports in 13 countries. The result is that venture capitalists have begun to predict that accelerators are going to fail. There are already signs of paring back.
Want to Work for a Startup? Start Something First So, you want to ditch the corporate life and go work for a startup. Cool! But do you really understand what that would mean? Steve Blank, one of the fathers of the Lean Startup revolution, defines a startup as "an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model." What does that mean? Translation: Working at a startup is nothing short of chaos. Given all of this insanity that goes on, how do you prove to a hiring manager at a startup that you have what it takes? It's pretty simple, actually: Start something first. Starting something is hard work and pretty thankless most of the time. But that's exactly the point. So, if you haven't experienced the fear, stress, and frustration of starting something, then get to work! Not sure where to start? 1. With platforms like Meetup, it's easier than ever to organize a group around your area of interest, whether it's cooking, coding, or college basketball. 2. Contrary to popular belief, blogging is hard work. 3. 4. 5.
Being a Full Stack Developer The barrier of entering the web development industry as a web developer is still low, but it’s getting increasingly complex. The dynamic nature of the whole industry makes requirements shift often to the most popular and “next best thing” tools and programming languages. Gone are the days when only one programming language or a very specific process was required from a developer. Nowadays programmers must know a range of technologies across multiple platforms in order to do good work. What does a full-stack developer mean? The term full-stack means developers who are comfortable working with both back-end and front-end technologies. To be more specific, it means that the developer can work with databases, PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and everything in between, also, venturing as far as converting Photoshop designs to front-end code. What full-stack meant in 2000 and what it means now? 2000 was a long time ago, in that year PHP 4.0 was released. System administration: Web development tools:
Digital & Mobile in 2014 The astonishing growth of all things digital continues to gather pace around the world, as We Are Social’s new Social, Digital & Mobile Worldwide report on the key social, digital and mobile stats from around the world demonstrates. It should come as little surprise that much of this growth is being fuelled by connected mobile devices, but this year’s data do reveal some interesting trends and anomalies, especially in relation to Japan and Korea. You’ll find the complete story in the SlideShare deck above, but we’ve pulled out some of the highlights below. UPDATE: We’d like to thank the lovely folks at GlobalWebIndex for allowing us to use the data in their premium Active Usage: Social Platforms data pack in this report – you can get more info on this by clicking here. Internet Adding up all the users in individual countries around the world, there appear to be around 2.5 billion global internet users today – roughly 35% of the world’s population: click to enlarge click to enlarge
Winter Is (Probably) Coming (Soon) Duck everyone. It’s a bubble. Or something close to one. And the good times are going to slow down. Probably soon. That’s the gist of a recent interview that venture capitalist Bill Gurley gave. Making money is better than losing money, but losing money — burn — can be the prudent and responsible thing to do. But not all burns are equal: Your burn isn’t my burn or their burn. Gurley isn’t the only venture capitalist who is irked that some startups are spending like Croesus while generating newspaper-like revenues. We have multiple portfolio companies burning multiple millions of dollars a month. Yes. Gurley points out that losing millions per month is the new normal. It’s Groupon’s early days all over again. Gurley hits on the idea of risk repeatedly. The underlying point of Gurley’s and Wilson’s respective riffs is that many companies will have to reduce their burn in the future. Cash is the oxygen of business. This works precisely until it doesn’t. Again, this works until it doesn’t.
Here’s How Spotify Scales Up And Stays Agile: It Runs ‘Squads’ Like Lean Startups What’s the secret to staying fresh, lean and mean when you’re a hot tech company on a fast growth trajectory? A fascinating document brought to our attention today today by Andrew Mager, hacker advocate at Spotify, answers that question in some detail by telling us how the music streaming juggernaut does it: by dividing up its business into small clusters — which it calls ‘squads’ — and running each like a startup in its own right. We’ve embedded the document below. The information here is all the more relevant since this week we saw that Spotify is now finally making a move on to the web. Written by Henrik Kniberg, an agile development consultant with Crisp, and Anders Ivarsson, an agile coach at Spotify, the document details how the company has restructured its organization over the last year to help the company scale better. It’s also a nice complement to another insight into startup scaling we came across some months ago, from Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram. Image: Flickr
The Rise And Fall Of The Full Stack Developer Editor’s note: Peter Yared is the founder and CTO of Sapho and was formerly the CTO/CIO of CBS Interactive. It seems as though everyone in tech today is infatuated with the full-stack developer. Full stack may have been possible in the Web 2.0 era, but a new generation of startups is emerging, pushing the limits of virtually all areas of software. From machine intelligence to predictive push computing to data analytics to mobile/wearable and more, it’s becoming virtually impossible for a single developer to program across the modern full stack. When I first started programming computers as a kid in the pre-mobile, pre-web late 1970s/early 1980s, a single person typically wrote a complete software program from start to finish, and there weren’t many other layers of software between the programmer and the hardware. By the mid-2000s, creating virtually anything — from simple websites to next-generation SaaS services — became prohibitively expensive. Rest in peace, full stack developers.
Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2014 ORLANDO, Fla., October 8, 2013 View All Press Releases Analysts Examine Top Industry Trends at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2013 October 6-10 in Orlando Gartner, Inc. today highlighted the top ten technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2014. Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. “We have identified the top 10 technologies that companies should factor into their strategic planning processes,” said David Cearley. Mr. The top ten strategic technology trends for 2014 include: Mobile Device Diversity and Management Through 2018, the growing variety of devices, computing styles, user contexts and interaction paradigms will make "everything everywhere" strategies unachievable. Mobile Apps and Applications The Internet of Everything Cloud/Client Architecture
What To Look For In A Company Board At any company level, the board of directors has a direct impact on the organization’s product strategy, hiring, fundraising and much more. And startups have to be very selective in choosing board members who will advise the company in the right direction. In the big company realm, both the media and the company’s shareholders have questioned Yahoo’s board, which continues to employ a floundering Carol Bartz as CEO and supports a bizarre product and business strategy. Then you look at Facebook, where founder Mark Zuckerberg has strategically assembled an all-star board to help the company grow as a public company and expand into new directions. Most recently, Facebook added Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings to its board, joining Marc Andreessen, Jim Breyer, Donald E. Graham, Peter Thiel and Zuck himself. As we saw with HP, even huge, established companies need to make changes in board structure as a company’s strategy shifts. Photo Credit/Flickr/Gibffe
The 3 Revolutions (Agile, Lean, Lean Startup)
Some very important ratios here: about 0.5% of funded startups become large companies (unicorns) of wich only 2% reach Google-like scale (superunicors). Which give the amazing ratio of 1 Google-like companie for every 10.000 funded tech startups.
In other word, the answer to the classical question "how do you pick the next Google?" is pretty straithforward: "you should invest in 10.000 (good) tech startups" by Patrice Dec 20