Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 27, 2010

Yesterday I wrote about how to talk to investors about your competitors. In short, acknowledge they exist, be transparent about strengths & weaknesses and use your differences to talk about how you want to position yourself in the market. But forget talking about them, how should you actually treat your competitors? Conventional wisdom in most companies is that “the competition is the enemy&# – it’s the rallying cry to dig deeper, get more features out the door, issue pres

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This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 21, 2010

Personally, I find pitch events to be a little bit contrived. It’s not how I want to encounter a company—I’d rather just sit across the table from someone and chat about their business and their vision. However, the innovation community seems to be in love with this format, so you can’t be a VC without watching a bunch of them. For the most part, while the companies may be interesting, the actual pitches are usually so-so.

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pitching VC technology communities 327

For Entrepreneurs

DECEMBER 6, 2010

Provides SaaS entrepreneurs with an Excel spreadsheet model and graphs that show the cash flow trough that happens to SaaS or subscription businesses that use a sales organization.

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SaaS entrepreneurs 168

Berkonomics

DECEMBER 6, 2010

Use stock options and warrants to pay for service only rarely. Earlier, I stated that stock options are the currency of early stage business. This truth is obvious when a start-up has no cash. For this insight, we will assume a business is perhaps well beyond start-up and growing, but that cash is tight, used for growth and for working capital as earned.

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strategy

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 16, 2010

I sit through a lot of presentations. It’s usually people wanting to raise money and/or persuade me of something. Many of these are not as effective as they could be. 1. Understand Personality Types – One of the benefits of working for a big company (Accenture) was that we had lots of speakers come in and train us in topics like leadership, creativity, presentations, strategy, etc.

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VC entrepreneurs creativity leadership 358

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 20, 2010

It surprises me how many really smart people I meet still doubt the power of Twitter. It seems the urge to be a naysayer of Twitter is really strong for some. I think some of this stems from the early days of Twitter when it was presumed that it was a technology to tell people what you ate for lunch. Twitter never seemed to really take the offense in PR and marketing.

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Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 26, 2010

Competition. Unless you’re Microsoft selling an OS for a PC you probably have some. And even then Microsoft has substitute products as anyone who has taken Econ 101 will tell you. So if you’re raising money – from angels or VCs – you’re going to have to address the question of whom you’re competing against. And the reality is that if you have no competition it will likely be perceived as a negative, not positive.

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Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 5, 2010

This blog post originally appeared in serialized form here on TechCrunch. This version is the shorter, ADHD version. If you came here via a direct link you might want to check out the more detailed full version on my blog, which is here. Social Networks: Past, Present & Future. I recently spoke at Caltech at the Caltech / MIT Enterprise Forum on “the future of social networking,&# the 30-minute video is here and the PowerPoint presentation is here on DocStoc ).

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Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 2, 2010

Many of us have the ability to change the trajectory of other people’s lives. Sometimes we don’t even realize it. This is a story of one person who had the power to change my life – and did so. It’s the story of persistence in entrepreneurs. And it’s the story of “paying it forward.&#. The person who changed my life was Cory Van Wolvelaere , who passed away two years ago this week after a long battle with cancer.

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consulting peer-to-peer advice entrepreneurs 352

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startup

This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 29, 2010

New Yorkers love to hate—the second anything goes less than perfect in this incredibly complex metropolis, we look for someone to blame. When your Mayor is a billionaire who went out of his way to get an exception to the rule for a third term, he makes an easy target—and the media is all too happy to pile on. As you can imagine, when you have 8 million people who all feel like their individual lives, needs, and tertiary side streets should be top priority, you’re going to wind up with a lot of u

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media communities pitching collaboration 256

This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 10, 2010

I just had the pleasure of sitting in on a SinglePlatform team development session—where everyone in the company (they have about a dozen people at the moment) sat down to work through personal styles of work and communication. They sat around a table talking personality types, how they prefer to interact with others, etc. Everyone was having fun because it was clear that they were all working towards making a better and more successful working environment.

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energy culture development startup 378

This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 17, 2010

This was the first time I had ever heard about del.icio.us (I still like to use the old naming convention)… note the date. This was about three months before Union Square Ventures closed an investment in the company—and a month before I actually joined them fulltime. As I look at my e-mail archive, I had already started to do some project work before my start date, looking into companies, doing some competitive analysis.

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entrepreneurs opportunity communities ventures 374

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 6, 2010

This past October I was honored to be invited by Steve Blank to speak at Stanford for their Enterprise Thought Leader (ETL) series. The topic I chose to speak about was “lessons on starting a company&# but I created the sub-title in class “a Silicon Valley heresy&# since my goal was to slay many of the myths I believe exist right in the heart of Silicon Valley!

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financing

This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 13, 2010

This is the time of year that you make a lot of lists and check them twice.or so it goes. You're planning parties, sending someecards , and buying gifts. That's why it's really important to remember one key thing: Relationships are everything. Is there a friend you've been cancelling on lately? Someone you had a fight with or just a little Twitter spat?

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entrepreneurship innovation support 218

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 13, 2010

One of the wisest people I worked with in my career was Ameet Shah. Ameet always had the quietly reflective view of “why things were&# that always came from a unique angle that I hadn’t considered. He taught me, amongst other things, the benefit of “ top down thinking &# that changed the way I analyzed markets, companies and people.

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consulting leadership entrepreneurs advice 302

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 14, 2010

I was recently speaking with some founders about their fund raising process. They had received a term sheet from a VC and were wondering whether to work with this firm. I personally had three separate data points from entrepreneurs who took money from the firm that said “never again.&# I really try to stay out of the middle of these things so I softly said to the team, “maybe you should contact these companies and see how their experience went?

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Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 24, 2010

Like many of you, for me this was the year of the unsolicited eCards from random people I barely knew. Let’s be honest, much of this has become spam. I’m not the Grinch. I’m not anti holiday spirit. But if you ARE going to get into it then you ought to do it right. Make it count. Like the team at First Round Capital always does.

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advice capital investing investment 283

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technology

This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 14, 2010

Ever try to schedule a meeting with someone in a different time zone? It probably fails half the time, mostly because your calendar doesn’t make even the smallest attempt to understand you, despite the data that it has. I could type in a location in San Francisco for a meeting and it doesn’t even so much as ask “Did you mean to schedule this for New York time or San Fran time?

networking 265

networking startup venture capital technology 265

This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Are your sales efforts going as efficiently as possible? Are they as efficient as the Huffington Post or Hubspot? How would you know? Whats sales metrics do you track? Just close rate? These two companies have built a reputation for turning their businesses into well oiled machines. Whether it's clicks or conversions, they're squeezing every last bit of ROI out of their venture dollars.

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SaaS pitching ventures founder 247

This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 26, 2010

I rarely post recaps of my life anymore, but tonight demands a notation. It’s snowing in NYC—to say the least. We’re due for about two feet of snow when all is said and done, I’m sure. Earlier tonight, it wasn’t so bad, so I decided to head out by subway to Williamsburgh via the R and G train—a rare occasion to go from Brooklyn to Brooklyn without heading into the city.

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This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 7, 2010

Call me old fashioned, but I’m more of an Overheard guy than a TextsFromLastNight fan. What I like about the Overheard phenomenon is that the bar for contribution is pretty low… I type two letters and I’m participating. That’s why I haven’t really used Bnter so much. I added one convo (a Twitter conversation, actually), but I just really don’t care that much about about sharing funny things to retype them from scratch into a website.

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networking venture capital technology capital 218

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opportunity

For Entrepreneurs

DECEMBER 16, 2010

I presented the following set of slides to the Mass TLC group as the keynote for the “SaaS Business Model Update — Creating and Managing Revenues&# event. The slides should be useful for anyone interested in learning about the key drivers for a SaaS business, including the SaaS cash flow trough, cost of customer acquisition, [.].

SaaS 167

SaaS startup 167

For Entrepreneurs

DECEMBER 7, 2010

Discusses the cash flow trough that happens to SaaS, or other subscription/recurring revenue businesses when they decide to scale their business by ramping sales and marketing. Provides an Excel spreadsheet model and PowerPoint slide deck that can be used by readers to model their own data.

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SaaS 167

For Entrepreneurs

DECEMBER 20, 2010

Slides and video on "Building a Sales and Marketing Machine", with a discussion on how to optimize your sales & marketing funnel.

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startup 164

This is going to be BIG.

DECEMBER 31, 2010

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