September, 2018

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How to Rock a Short "Office Hours" Meeting

This is going to be BIG.

Whether you’re going through an accelerator or you’re at some kind of speed dating event, short “office hours” meetings present both an opportunity and a problem for investors. It’s a great way to get out from behind the e-mail and actually meet people face to face. However, it’s a terrible way to get your whole pitch in. There’s just not enough time to convince someone to invest and have a productive back and forth.

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A Scorecard: Should a decision be fast, or slow?

A Smart Bear

We all know that startups should make decisions quickly. Fast decisions leads to rapid action, which accelerates the loop of production and feedback, which is how you outpace and out-learn a competitor, even one that already has a lead. But some decisions should not be made in haste, like a key executive hire , or how to price , or whether to raise money, or whether to invest millions of dollars in a new product line.

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Simone Musgrave - Grit, Sales, and using Femininity in business.

Startup Grind

Aneme Dlamini of Startup Grind chats to Simone Musgrave of Musgrave Gin about perseverance, building an actual business, and bringing your femininity as a force to be reckoned with in the business world. Aneme = A, Simone = S A : Welcome! S : Thanks. A : So, I am not going to go with the traditional ‘background story’ (laughs), I am sure you’ve been asked that many times.

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20 Women Entrepreneurs Changing Their Industries (and the World)

Entrepreneurs' Organization

While women have long contributed to and led businesses , it wasn’t until the 20th century that we saw women taking their place alongside men in the working world in greater numbers. From wartime icon, Rosie the Riveter, to small screen working woman, Carol Brady of the Brady Bunch , women steadily became seen as a critical component of the workforce, today founding and leading many of the most important companies on earth.

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15 Modern Use Cases for Enterprise Business Intelligence

Large enterprises face unique challenges in optimizing their Business Intelligence (BI) output due to the sheer scale and complexity of their operations. Unlike smaller organizations, where basic BI features and simple dashboards might suffice, enterprises must manage vast amounts of data from diverse sources. What are the top modern BI use cases for enterprise businesses to help you get a leg up on the competition?

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A university’s role in an emerging startup community and other conversations

Startup Catalyst

I’m Rosie Odsey and I interviewed Rowena Barrett from QUT in late August 2018. A quick note: My words are in italics. Rowena’s are in regular font. Headings, hyperlinks, and images have been added for effect but the words are ours. Meet Professor Rowena Barrett. Professor Rowena Barrett is Head of the School of Management in QUT’s Business School. Anyone within the school will tell you that she is super approachable, but outside of the university people just think of her as QUT’s ambassador.

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Do you have to bankrupt yourself to start a company? How all in is all in?

This is going to be BIG.

I started a company back in late 2007. We raised $550k in seed funding and, despite a lot of hard work, things didn’t work out. It turned out I wasn’t such a great product manager, the technical things we were doing were about two years too early—about to be made orders of magnitude easier by a lot of cloud and big data tools, and, oh, yeah, Lehman went under when I was pitching VCs for money in 2008.

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When “fits and starts” is the most efficient path

A Smart Bear

You roll down the windows and wear a helmet when you take your car to the track. This does not make me less terrified of a fiery death. The American Autocross champion was sitting in my passenger seat screaming at me to not let my foot off the pedal until I bounced off the RPM limiter. She was properly intense. I didn’t know what I was doing, but it’s fun to power through curves in a high-speed tenuously-controlled skid in my Mini Cooper S (plus Cooperworks).

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Behind the scenes: The challenges of building an EdTech startup

Startup Grind

Are you thinking about building the next big thing in EdTech? Well, I have to say that the journey is really amusing but extremely challenging at the same time! Many have tried to revolutionize education and failed. That’s why you need to make sure you are up to the challenge and ready for a very long journey and not in it for a quick exit! I want to share with you some of the lessons I learnt (and still learning) while building Knowledge Officer , a career-oriented learning platform for profess

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Monday Motivation: Bumper Sticker Edition

Entrepreneurs' Organization

A version of this article originally appeared on the EO Melbourne blog. The content has been edited and reprinted here with permission. When the traffic flow is slow-going, how do you amuse yourself? Do you ever find yourself reading the bumper stickers on the cars around you? Some bumper stickers are funny. Others are political. Plenty are inspiring, and a few are confrontational.

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How Top Tech CFOs Solve Annual Planning’s Biggest Challenges

Gearing up for 2025 annual planning? Our latest eBook from the Operators Guild is your ultimate guide. Discover real-world solutions and best practices shared by top CFOs, drawn directly from discussions within OG’s vibrant online community. Learn from senior executives at high-growth tech startups as they outline financial planning strategies, align CEO and board goals, and coordinate budgets across departments.

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Childcare in a Coworking Space? Here’s How Some Companies are Making it Work

Turnkey Office Space

Flexible and remote jobs have broad appeal in today’s economy, but they’re especially enticing to parents. This demographic values the ability to make their own schedules so they can accommodate their children’s naptimes, doctor’s appointments, and school pickups. However, working from home can be isolating, and these parents usually still need regular child care to … Continue reading Childcare in a Coworking Space?

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Access is the Scarcest Commodity in Startupland

Tomasz Tunguz

The SEC announced last week that it wants to find ways to let Main Street investors access stage private venture companies. This news item underscores an important trend that is reshaping the industry. Today in Startupland, startup access is the scarcest commodity. Everybody wants an allocation, an opportunity to invest in the very best companies. The SEC story highlights how much has changed in Startupland.

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Conviction, Diversification, and Portfolio Construction

Haystack

Sometime within the last 48 hours, I tweeted about a potential test for an investor’s true conviction in a company he or she invests in. Specifically, I wrote: Investment “conviction” is a really overused term. If you want to test it, most investors’ LPAs permit them to invest 10%, in some cases 20%, and for some funds, no restriction, into one startup.

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The 2018 State of Coworking Spaces

Deskmag

Coworking spaces are growing. Each year they offer larger workspaces and serve more members than the year before. These findings are not new. But what does a detailed view of coworking spaces look like presently? In this article, you will learn not only about membership numbers, but also how they divide their expenditure and revenue, how many locations they operate, where they are located, or what internet speeds they offer.

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Your Fractional Finance and Accounting Team

Mighty Financial specializes in supporting the financial aspirations of small businesses and entrepreneurs. With our comprehensive bookkeeping and precise accounting expertise with decades of experience across diverse financial roles, our team offers tailor-made services ranging from essential bookkeeping to strategic fractional CFO support, catered specifically to the unique challenges of technology companies, startups, and SMEs.

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Syllabus: how to launch, manage, and invest a VC fund

David Teten VC

Over the past decade, I’ve (somewhat accidentally) put together on this blog a syllabus on how to launch, manage, and invest a VC fund. Most of my research is also relevant to private equity. I thought it would be helpful to compile my past articles in one place. I break the process down into 10 steps: 1) Launch. The first issues to think about are org chart, incorporation, financial structure, and so on.

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Tech Tools for Building Employee Retention

Entrepreneurs' Organization

Written for EO by Anand Srinivasan. A 2018 study published by Mercer, one of the leading human resources consulting firms in the world, found that over one-third of all employees surveyed expressed an intent to quit their current job within the next 12 months—despite the fact that the vast majority of them also reported being satisfied with their jobs.

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Should You Try For a Spot in a Business Incubator? The Pros and Cons

Turnkey Office Space

Business incubators can be very enticing for new entrepreneurs. They promise things like an instant mentorship network, camaraderie with other startup owners, shared resources like office space, and even the potential for funding. However, before you dive into the application process for any business incubator, there are several things to consider. First of all, although … Continue reading Should You Try For a Spot in a Business Incubator?

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In Early Markets, Services Can Be a Competitive Advantage

Tomasz Tunguz

In early markets, customers prefer entire solutions, not best in class point products. These solutions often include significant professional services and education. At the beginning of a new wave, most customers don’t understand the technology well. So, they seek experts to guide them. Companies that provide services and education often win the early market.

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Digitalization: 5 Tech Updates That Will Help You Survive The Recession & Thrive

Lack of digitalization decreases business competitiveness. To thrive, embracing modern solutions becomes essential. The approach to digitalization often aligns with a company's business model. This shift not only boosts productivity but also automates processes and improves security. The tech market offers a wealth of technologies tailored for management, planning, and forecasting, replacing outdated pen-and-paper methods.

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Putting The Money To Work

Haystack

About two years ago, when I was starting to raise Haystack IV, I sat down with one of my VC mentors at The Upfront Summit in LA to get his quick feedback on my slides. He ended up focusing only on 2-3 slides and then we got into a discussion about his own fundraising history. As we were walking back into the sessions, he asked me how I was balancing the act of fundraising for a fund with investing the capital from a previous fund.

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Operators & Staff Members: The People Behind Coworking Spaces

Deskmag

Who is actually working for coworking spaces? Predominantly women, however, they generally earn less income than men. Even female founders and owners earn less and are more likely to rate their income negatively. They more often operate smaller coworking spaces. In this article, you’ll learn about staff in coworking spaces, how many people are working for them, and the ratio of staff to members.

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How to Break into a Senior Business Position at a Growing Startup

This is going to be BIG.

You’ve got a great resume. You went to top schools, trained at a prestigious bank/consulting firm/etc, and you’ve succeeded in the corporate world doing some important and impactful stuff. Now you want to take that skillset over to the startup world and you’ve got a lot to offer. You can bring some serious business chops to a company that is going up and to the right but needs to take it to the next level.

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5 Lessons I Learned as a Start-up Entrepreneur—That You Don’t Have To

Entrepreneurs' Organization

Written for EO by Will Dugdale, CTO and co-founder at Zipcube. The only fact you can reliably say about being a start-up entrepreneur is that you will be surprised, regularly, by things you have not—and could not—anticipate. As a CTO of an e-commerce, I have discovered many things that would have been useful to know earlier in my journey. Some of these are technical—concerning code and architecture—but most of these lessons concern people who you work with, and rely on, every day. 1.

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PE Mastery: CAPTARGET's Playbook for Quality Lead Flow

CAPTARGET presents a masterclass in M&A deal sourcing. Learn to cast a wide net, embracing seller self-identification. Consistency is the linchpin: keep the origination process steady for a reliable flow of opportunities. Diversify your tactics, employing various tools and vendors. Tech matters! Understand DNS settings, domain authority, and brand presence for optimal outreach.

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Another personal story: Timing is everything in a sale.

Berkonomics

Almost anyone who has sold a company has a story to tell about their good deal, the problems with the buyer, a last-minute change of terms, or more. I have saved this next story until now because it is one of my favorites, and certainly illustrates the point about timing being a combination of luck and skill as well as anything I could devise from fiction.

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Elastic S-1 Analysis - Another Open Source Monster

Tomasz Tunguz

Last week, Elastic filed their S-1 to go public. Elastic is a Dutch company founded in 2012. Just five years later, the company generated $159.9M in revenue. Elastic commercializes open source software called the Elastic Stack, a set of different products that enable users to search and store data in many different sources and formats. This software is used for application search, website search, enterprise search, application performance monitoring, and analytics for business and security data.

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Rolling Closes Versus Synchronous Closes

Haystack

Earlier this week, in the wake of Y Combinator’s Demo Day, I saw a tweet go viral and generate lots of chatter. The tweet was written by YC’s President, Michael Seibel. I’ve never met Seibel (yet) though, of course, have heard amazing things about him from everyone I know and admired his style from afar. His tweet reads: New weak investor move.

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Onboarding your first Sales Hire as an Entrepreneur

For Entrepreneurs

In today’s blogpost I would like to introduce my partner for Zero to 100, Stephanie (Schatz) Friedman. Stephanie has been an executive in 3 successful startups and was most recently the SVP of Sales and Customer Success at Xamarin which has since been acquired by Microsoft. Stephanie joined Xamarin as its first non-engineering hire in.

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How to Stay Competitive in the Evolving State of Martech

Marketing technology is essential for B2B marketers to stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital landscape — and with 53% of marketers experiencing legacy technology issues and limitations, they’re researching innovations to expand and refine their technology stacks. To help practitioners keep up with the rapidly evolving martech landscape, this special report will discuss: How practitioners are integrating technologies and systems to encourage information-sharing between departments and pr