A Fundraising Template Every Entrepreneur Can Use. Raising massive rounds these days is so commonplace that most of us tune out fundraising news altogether.
The fundraising environment has changed so dramatically over the past four years, it’s almost incomprehensible to those of us who lived through it. A lot has been made of how ridiculous late-stage rounds have gotten, as well. Bill Gurley penned one of the best pieces I’ve read on the subject recently; to raise late-stage rounds, startups go through far less diligence and scrutiny than they would if they decide to go public. As a result, a lot of late-stage startups lack the operational discipline necessary to go public. I would argue that trend trickles down all the way to the earliest stages of venture-backed companies and really starts there. Early-stage CEOs are practically taught to not even put a financial model in any of their fundraising decks until they get to their Series B.
Sales for Hackers - Stormpath User Management API. Just like everyone should learn to program, everyone should learn to sell.
I started my career as a software developer but through some odd twists and turns I one day found myself in enterprise sales, wearing a suit, and carrying quota. It was a big transition and I freaking loved it. Soon I built a strong reputation as a top salesperson and closed over $100M in revenue while at IBM. Sales is awesome but unfortunately it has a bad reputation: bad sales people come across slimy, obnoxious, pushy, and selfish. And for n00bs, it’s daunting because they assume sales success is an intrinsic personality trait – you’ve either “got it” or you don’t. Slides: The Ultimate Guide to Customer Growth by Sean Johnson. How Quora, StackOverflow And Yelp Create Sustainable User Contribution Systems With A Simple Hack. Platforms that are dependent on user-generated content (UGC) constantly face a challenge to be sustainable.
A key metric for such platforms is the ratio of producers to consumers. Very often, production of content on such platforms occurs around certain seeds. A few examples of seeds are: Facebook's Growth Hacker on how they put Facebook on the Path to 1 ... Chamath Palihapitiya - how we put Facebook on the path to 1 billion users. Startup Metrics for Pirates. Five Questions Every Leader Should Ask About Organizational Design - John Beeson. By John Beeson | 11:00 AM January 23, 2014 A few years ago Dave Ulrich, a management thought leader from the University of Michigan, made a comment I found both insightful and profound: “Every leader needs to have a model of organization design.”
Typically a graphic depiction of the organizational components to be addressed in a redesign (for example, McKinsey’s 7S model, which includes strategy, structure, systems, staff, skills, and so on), every consultant and his brother flogs an organization design model. 5 High Value Lead Generation Strategies. Lead generation is the lifeblood of most companies.
The number of platforms, brokers, agencies, and websites dealing with lead generation attests to how important and how much money is at stake when it comes to generating leads. LinkedIn alone lists over 1,000 lead generation related groups. In this blog post, we look at using Big Data to rise above the noise to improve your lead generation programs. If you already know who your best leads are, then you should be focusing your marketing efforts on generating more leads like them. Creating personas is a great way to help you focus on targeting your messaging and lead generation activities. You can create detailed personas of your best prospects by enhancing your database with demographic, social, professional, and interest data (There are plenty of 3rd party solutions, including Pipl’s, to help you with this).
If you know who you’re marketing to and what’s important to them, it’s much easier to decide where and how to market. courtesy Ant Mace. 3 Traits of Successful Crowdfunding Projects. For an increasing number of startups, crowdfunding is a way to get their companies off the ground when traditional avenues, such as a bank loan, are not an option.
Crowdfunding is a way to raise money by getting small donations from a large number of people, and sometimes the end result is big. For example, the Pebble watch that synchs with your smartphone raised over $10 million on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Wondering if your business idea would be backed by a crowd of investors? Consider these three traits of successful crowdfunders, according to by Brian Meece, the CEO and co-founder of RocketHub.com, a New York City-based crowdfunding platform. Business Incubation Toolkit. InfoDev.org/ idisctoolkit Activity File A live resource for Business Incubators' Managers in Developing Countries Summary info Dev's Incubator Support Center (iDisc.net) is a virtual networking and knowledge-sharing platform for incubators and technology parks leveraging ICT to facilitate entrepreneurship and new business creation in developing countries.
Background The info Dev Business Incubation Toolkit is a live resource for business incubator managers. Innovation Excellence.
Three Steps to Generating Social Gravity - Mark Bonchek. Strategy. Are You Solving a Puzzle or a Mystery? Innovation is all about coming up with new solutions to solve problems.
But here’s an interesting question: is the problem that you’re trying to solve a puzzle or a mystery? The distinction was made by Gregory Treverton and highlighted by Malcolm Gladwell in a piece he wrote on Enron a few years ago. Mindmapping. Advancing Great Ideas. HR. Management. Lean Canvas. Venture Capitalists on Twitter - VCs, Angels, Investors and more - Venture Maven.
Keys To Flawless Execution of Your Business Strategy. 1m1m – One Million by One Million. Sales. Blogs. OPEN Forum.