How Growth Hacking Came to Be The buzz on “growth hacking” has spread all across the world. Classes on growth hacking are being taught in Singapore. Companies from San Francisco to London are recruiting growth hackers. The first Growth Hacking Conference popped up a few weeks ago. One explanation is that “growth hacking” is just a catchy way to rebrand marketers, but this begs the question as to why “growth hacking” went viral in the first place. Startups are facing growth challenges that were not apparent a few years ago. Channel instability The creation and destruction of channels is a common occurrence today. Deloitte’s Shift Index, which tracks economic competitiveness, has shown a long-run decline in a firm’s ability to retain market leadership. Firms across industries have struggled to keep pace with this instability, as new channels usually result in market encroachment. Channel saturation Paid advertising channels follow the same pattern. The best product fallacy Product-growth fit Growth hacking as a response
On historical returns and venture capital flavours Story of of the last few years in Venture Fund Land : large institutional investors concentrate money with fewer managers and flagship brands AND / OR find emerging managers. Since VC offerings have generally been undifferentiated, LP’s had little choice when it came to the plethora of venture funds knocking on their doors but to overweight historical returns in their decision making algorithms. Now the market is in radical reduction mode (speaking of the number of ACTIVE venture firms out there) and every venture firm has to answer a simple existential question : why do you even exist ? Is there a valid reason to your existence beyond the funneling of money from A to B and the siphoning of management fees ? So the LP’s have done two things: Concentrate more money with fewer managersRadically concentrate their bets into differentiated offerings You can group these offerings into four broad categories: quartiles Source: great article by Levi Shapiro interview Felda Hardymon
Business angel più bravi dei fondi istituzionali, in Italia trainano investimenti early stage Eppur si muove: l'early stage italiano, nonostante la crisi e i suoi problemi intrinsechi, ha registrato 213 nuovi investimenti nel 2011, trainato dagli angel investor che hanno chiuso 149 operazioni, contro le 64 riconducibili all'ambito di fondi istituzionali. Le società target sono invece 161, molte delle quali hanno evidentemente ricevuto più di un round d'investimento. Presentato ieri a Milano presso la sede di Bird&Bird (noto studio legale internazionale attivo nel venture capital) il primo rapporto congiunto Iban (Italian business angel network) e VeM (osservatorio Venture Capital Monitor) relativo all'early stage in Italia. La ricerca ha coinvolto anche Aifi (Associazione italiana del private equity), Sici (Sviluppo Imprese Centro Italia SGR), Università Liuc, la società Dedalus. Ecco i dati. Per entrambi l'ICT rimane il settore più attraente, la regione più attiva la Lombardia, la provincia Milano. "Attenzione ai tempi!
Startup Advisor I serve as an advisor to couple startups and get calls asking about advisors -who should be one, how to compensate them, what to expect of them, how to go about finding an advisor etc etc etc. My advisors:First, I had an amazing set of advisors for my first startup Coola, without whom I could not have taken off. They helped me find the enterprenuer in me. I am so thankful for them.I cannot even list all of them here. Three people who helped me from start to finish were Paul English(then GM of Intuit Boston), Piyush Patel (CEO of Cabletron) and Ashish Gupta(VP of Amazon).All of them were enterprenuers who built companies and sold to a large company.All of them were very busy people who cared and found the time for me, who did not intimidate me for my dumb questions and set a high threshold for me to strive for, most important they have set role models for being an enterprenuer and a startup advisor.Who were not my advisors:I had my share of people who were patronizing.
The Care and Feeding of Startup Advisory Boards | VentureArchetypes Blog: Seed Stage Capital A recent post on Vator.TV got me thinking about startup advisory boards. This is an often-overlooked, under-utilized, or completely neglected strategy for early stage companies. But it needn’t be so; setting up a startup advisory board can bring benefits well beyond the cost (in terms of time and equity) required. A brief primer: Why, When and Who To begin with, let's start with a basic question: why bother? Advisory boards have the most relevance and bring the most 'bang for the buck' for startups that are very early stage—generally, when the company is just 2-3 founders, pre-launch or recently-launched, and trying to gain initial market share and/or raise money. After the first round or two of funding, an advisory board can still be quite helpful, but by that point there are usually enough people around the table—new senior-level hires, investors, etc. In a typical situation, a startup will put together a group of 3-5 people to turn to for counsel. Sample Scenario Recruiting Advisors
Best practises for writing defensive publications « vizZzion.org :: sebas' blog So with the Apple vs. Samsung case drawing to a close, we’re all being reminded how bad patents are, for developers, for innovators, and also for consumers. I’ve written about Defensive Publications as a means to fight the war on patents before, and while reading the news this morning, it’s probably time to give everybody around a few hints how to best write a defensive publication so that, at least that idea, cannot be patented and used in the war again. A defensive publication is a technical document that describes ideas, methods or inventions and is a form of explicit prior art. A defensive publication typically consists of the following: a descriptive titlea few paragraphs documenting the idea including how the idea would work. one or two (or more) diagrams describing control flow, interaction, network flow or communication between components possibly an example or two Things to watch out for when writing defensive publications: don’t use technology specific terms, like program names.
Defensive Publications « vizZzion.org :: sebas' blog Software patents are an evil thing which should die a horrible and painful death. Until that moment, recording prior art in a way that is understood by the system is an effective way to fight patents. By recording prior art in the form of defensive publications, we can make it much harder for a patent to be granted — and it does not have to be hard at all to do so. Yesterday at FISL, I attended a panel on software patents in Brazil, the discussion revolved around the why and why nots. Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of good reasons why not, and very little pro. It’s an interesting topic, especially since I lately dived a bit deeper into this topic. Patents are valid for a ridiculously long time. So, software patents are bad, really, really bad. The process of creating a software patent is, very roughly: You come up with a new idea, you write it down in a formal way, you register it with a patent office, the patent is reviewed and rejected or granted.
Startup e Spinoff in Svizzera « Goodbye Mamma! Un solare buongiorno a tutti, Un po’ di info sul sistema Svizzera e link utili, prendete ciò che più si addice alle vostre esigenze! Ogni anno, startup.ch lancia il concorso “TOP 100 STARTUP AWARD”. Da piu di 100’000 giovani compagnie, le 100 piu innovative e promettenti startup Svizzere sono selezionate e aiutate con un pool di esperti. Swisslicon-valley ha un nome evocativo e mantiene un fondo di 103 milioni di franchi, questo sito e’ molto appetibile per il lancio di startup. Altri Venture Capitals li trovate qui: Invece per accedere a un prestito agevolato per startup,allora rivolgetevi alla Credit Swiss Un altro Start-Up Research Group per start-ups/spin offs e’ ETH, a Zurigo