My 2010 Mentors I was going through my reader this morning and it occurred to me; I learned a lot from a lot of smart people in 2010. There were a number of people I looked to for brilliance, insight and perspective. These people are smart, funny, energetic and definitely worth following and reading in 2011. My mentors of 2010: Rosabeth Moss Kantor – Leadership and Business Fred Wilson – Start-ups and Entreprenuership Paul Dunay – B2B Marketing David Brock -Sales Mark Suster – Sales, Start-Ups, Entreprenuership Seth Godin – Marketing, Personal Development, Leadership Jill Konrath – Sales Steve Chihos – Change, Change Leadership, Organizational Change S. Wally Bock – Leadership Dan Waldo – Passion, Energy, Life Tibor Shanto – Sales Seth Levine – VC, Start-ups TechStars Companies and Founders – Pure Grit, Passion, If there are folks you found super valuable in 2010 share them in the comments.
HOW TO: Attract Early Adopters to Your Social Startup Shane Snow is a technology journalist in New York City. Follow him on Twitter at @shanesnow. One of the main challenges for social networks stems from a question ancient philosophers have debated for centuries: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In social media, the dilemma often takes the form of, "We need users for our network to be useful, but users won’t join the network unless it’s useful." The second great challenge in social networking is spreading to new users at a fast and sustainable pace, i.e. viral growth. This month, a social startup called Hashable (no relation!) How does a new site like Hashable get past the chicken dilemma, when others can’t? How Facebook Did It: Start Small and Exclusive When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in 2004, he positioned his social network as private and exclusive. Facebook was able to gather thousands of users — half the Harvard undergraduate population — in less than a month. How Tumblr Did It: Make It Useful Even If You’re Alone
10 Sure Fire Ways Young Entrepreneurs Set Their Ideas Up For Failure I had a conversation awhile back with a young entrepreneur that frustrated me beyond belief. It went something like this… “I’m looking for some advice on this amazing idea I have but I can’t tell you anything about it. All I can say is we will be competing with sites like eBay and when this idea gets out everybody is going to try and take it. I mean seriously its amazing and there is nothing like it out there where it’s a win, win, win for everyone involved. Now I’m not saying this kid doesn’t have a brilliant idea or he isn’t the next Mark Zuckerberg but a conversation like this sets off a million alerts in my head. 1. You may think you have the greatest idea in the world and if you even give a single hint at what it is everyone is going to steal it. Now there may be certain parts of your idea that make it special but that doesn’t mean you have to give it all away. 2. The best thing you can do when starting out is seek all the advice possible. 3. 4. You have to launch! 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Failing well Failure sucks. Nobody wants to fail. But in the start-up world, most people are doing just that. Thank your investors for their faith and confidence in both you and the mission, and express how truly sorry you are that it didn’t work out.Work hard to leave on good terms with all other key constituencies - co-founders, employees, service providers, etc. While it’s poetic to say “do it again,” maybe that’s not necessarily the right thing for everybody to do. Dear Facebook, Please Return Our Social Networking Space The following is a guest post by David Dalka. Dalka is a digital business strategist and keynote speaker who was a member of BlackRock (BLK) during its hyper-growth phase of 80 to 800 people. He is a top ten contributor to CrunchBase, strategist to senior executives on how digital marketing tactics are transforming business strategy and revenue generation, blogger and is currently working on a nonfiction business book proposal. According to TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington, Dalka currently lives in a location of “horrendous weather eight months out of the year”. (Editor’s note: Maybe you can entice him to move somewhere else? Seriously, we really do pity him.) About a month ago there was a loud outcry when Facebook inexplicably introduced a smaller font size to its News Feed. This conversation is about much, much more than Facebook. It appears that the changes in screen real estate usage are between the old Facebook profile and the new Facebook profile are significant.
It’s the CEO’s job to email the first 1000 signups Until you’ve passed a thousand signups, the CEO should be personally emailing every new user. I’m going to cover: PracticalitiesHow to mess it upCommon objectionsGoals, perks & benefits The signup thank you note It’s not a big message. Hey Jackie,Thanks for taking the time to check out STK. The specifics (like the footer) are just my personal preference[1]. What I hope you’ll extract from the example is the casual tone and brevity. How to mess this up There are only two ways to mess this up and they’re both easy to avoid. The first is to be demanding. You’re just politely putting your hand up and saying: Hey, here I am. The second way to mess up is by forgetting common courtesy. Also, make sure you do it every day. I’ve seen some intros come through with a survey, which I [personally] find to be fairly disrespectful toward your new users’ time (aka my time). Common objections This is an easy list to make because I rattled it off to my investors practically every Friday for a year.
Tools New Presentations From creating story and design concepts to developing entire presentation templates and systems, Duarte can make sure your presentation makes the right impact on your audience. Existing Presentations Using the building blocks you already have in place—your content, presentation system, and visual assets—Duarte can enhance, revise, or redesign your existing presentations. Device-Based Presentations Your content must be compelling on all platforms. Multimedia Sometimes your idea is best showcased and shared through multimedia, including motion graphics, videos, and animated demos. Events Duarte has been part of hundreds of company events, doing everything from creating the theme and message strategy to crafting presentations for keynotes and break-out sessions.
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Conflicting Advice Joe Heitzeberg, AKA Aquaman (@jheitzeb) is a 500 Startups SuperMentor and Chief Piston at MediaPiston, a new crowdsourcing platform for content projects (pre-launch). Prior to MediaPiston, Joe was the CTO at WhitePages.com and co-founder and CEO of Snapvine.com (acquired by WhitePages.com in June 2008). Congratulations! One of the best parts? One of the challenges? I polled some friends and fellow entrepreneurs and they all agreed — you’re going to receive 180-degree conflicting advice on just about every aspect of your company. So here it is: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Conflicting Advice! #1) Remember, it’s your companyYou’re the rainbow-chasing entrepreneur. Nobody knows your business better than you do. #2) Be goal-drivenThere is no recipe for how to get a startup off the ground. Most advice can’t be followed like a recipe. #3) Get fanatical supporters (not advice-givers)This blog post isn’t about how advice is useless, or that you should go it alone. Here they are…. Fundraising
“Venture Assistance”: A Philosophical View Of What Boards Should And Should Not Do Editor’s note: Legendary investor Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures. You can follow him on Twitter @vkhosla. Most VCs pitch their venture firms as value added to a company’s entrepreneurial founders. Personally, I think leading VC firms do a pretty good job of being supportive of their companies, and most entrepreneurs funded by good funds like their investors. But, on the question of “value added,” most venture capitalists, even among the leading firms, are pretty passive and ineffective when it comes to assisting companies. A lot of VCs, especially those from the more financially oriented firms, do more harm to startups than good when they get themselves on company boards without ever having built a company themselves, or seeing one from the inside. Keith Rabois Our belief in bringing the best resources to our companies is why we’re very excited about the newest addition to the Khosla Ventures team: Keith Rabois. I often talk about my lessons from years of screwing up.
How to Keep Your First 1,000 Users Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter. So, you have a startup idea. It’s going to be big. You can see it now. The only problem is that your vision is based on having hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of happy users and, currently, you have zero happy users. If your startup plan is directly based on this vision, you will struggle. You need a different plan; a plan that doesn’t assume millions of happy users. You need a first 1,000 users plan. Unfortunately, looking at how successful startups are currently executing (Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare) doesn’t help because their growth plans are based on the fact that they already have millions of users. You have to look at their history. Focus on a Niche. On your way to millions of users, don’t forget you have to get 1,000 happy users first.
5 reasons start-ups are entering a golden age (Editor’s note: Scott Albro is CEO of Focus.com. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.) Are start-ups entering a new golden age?Ask a venture capitalist or banker that question and you’ll probably get “no” for an answer – and given the lack of recent IPOs, as well as the changes we’re seeing in the venture industry, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Ask an entrepreneur, though, and a very different picture emerges. There seem to be five key drivers for this: The velocity of good ideas – There has been a lot of talk recently about “lean start ups” and “pivoting”, but if you don’t have a good idea to start with, all the pivoting and lean thinking in the world won’t amount to anything. In the early days of a business, the power of a good idea, no matter how rudimentary, is what gets you started down the right path. The Internet – and more specifically the communities of entrepreneurs that connect on the Internet – have brought the gestation period for good ideas from years to months.
How To Build a Web Startup – Lean LaunchPad Edition If you’re an experienced coder and user interface designer you think nothing is easier than diving into Ruby on Rails, Node.js and Balsamiq and throwing together a web site. (Heck, in Silicon Valley even the waiters can do it.) But for the rest of us mortals whose eyes glaze over at the buzzwords, the questions are, “How do I get my great idea on the web? What are the steps in building a web site?” My first attempt at helping students answer these questions was by putting together the Startup Tools Page - a compilation of available web development tools. So today, I offer my next attempt. How To Build a Web Startup – The Lean LaunchPad Edition Here’s the step-by-step process we suggest our students use in our Lean LaunchPad classes. (Use the Startup Tools Page as the resource for tool choices) Step 1: Set Up Team Logistics Step 2. Write down your 9-business model canvas hypothesisList key features/Minimal Viable product planSize the market opportunity. Step 4: Website Logistics
The VC Pitch – Confusing the Destination with the Journey Too often we are so preoccupied with the destination, we forget the journey.Unknown Entrepreneurs hear that VC pitches ought to be short, 10-20 slides. What most don’t know is that there is no way they can deliver a presentation that short by just “writing” the slide deck. You Got to be KiddingAn entrepreneur I’ve known for a long time came by the ranch over Thanksgiving break to show me the first pass of his new startup slide deck. My eyes were glazed by slide 9. My first reaction was, “you got to be kidding.” Then I remembered, every slide deck I ever wrote started out just like this. The Slide Deck As A Brainstorming ToolMost startups ideas are not built in an afternoon, typically they are the sum of seemingly disparate and discrete pieces of information, and a pattern recognition algorithm continuously running in a founders head. What I was seeing was an entrepreneur using a slide deck as a way to collect his thoughts. Lessons Learned Listen to the post here: Download the Podcast here