Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 6, 2012

This article originally ran on TechCrunch. Chris Anderson wrote a really influential book some years ago called “ The Long Tail ” that shaped how many people think about emerging Internet markets. If you haven’t read it you should consider adding it to you library. It was especially influential in my mind in thinking about media. At the simplest level you can think about markets in terms of the number of times media is consumed and/or purchased by people plotted against the tot

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This is going to be BIG.

JUNE 13, 2012

The news just came out that SinglePlatform is being acquired by Constant Contact--up to $30 million of the $100 million deal in incentive based awards. If you've ever met Wiley, you know you can bank on him maxing out that additional $30 million. You don't give a sales team like that a target without expecting him to crush it. I first met Wiley Cerilli on April 23, 2010.

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Gust

JUNE 19, 2012

Blog. Thoughts on startups by investors that fund them & entrepreneurs that run them. Subscribe by email. RSS Feed. Invested Interests. Who Makes the Money on an Inevitable Shoe Dropping? Last weekend I caught Mashable announcing that Ebook Sales Surpass Hardcover in the U.S. , something I’ve expected since I first bought a Rocket ebook reader about 10 years.

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For Entrepreneurs

JUNE 6, 2012

Pacific Crest, an investment banking firm with a strong focus on SaaS, has surveyed a 70 SaaS companies with very interesting results. There is some great data on topics such as growth rates, cost of customer acquisition, churn/retention, expense models, capital efficiency, etc. The full survey, which was put together by David Spitz and his team [.].

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strategy

Berkonomics

JUNE 15, 2012

One important element of positioning a company is pricing strategy. There are five niches you can chose when defining your positioning strategy: price, quality, service, innovation, and elegance. And although many positioning efforts cross the lines between these, great companies play to the strength of just one. And within that slice of differentiation, to make any sort of impact and lasting company, the difference between you and your competitor cannot be incremental.

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strategy innovation creativity personalized services 59

abovethecrowd.com

JUNE 25, 2012

“Well I was born in a small town And I live in a small town Prob’ly die in a small town Oh, those small – communities” — Small Town, John Mellencamp While “Social-Mobile-Local” is certainly an overused buzz phrase, most of the attention has been placed on the “social” and “mobile” parts of the phrase. In social, [.].

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This is going to be BIG.

JUNE 19, 2012

The other day I wrote a post about the lack of Enterprise Software disruption coming out of NYC —and a lot of people responded that I wasn’t citing Buddy Media. Buddy Media was an amazing exit, but I never really thought of it like “enterprise software” I thought about it more like an agency that had developed off the shelf social tools around its service solutions.

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Gust

JUNE 17, 2012

Money to build the business is the number one challenge for most startups. Don’t believe the urban myth that you can sketch your idea on a napkin, and professional investors will throw money at you. In reality, only 3 out of 100 companies who apply are successful with Angels, and the success rate with VCs is even lower. A large percentage of startups never apply to either.

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This is going to be BIG.

JUNE 8, 2012

I haven't done this in a while because I don't really subway nearly as much as I thumb. I'm standing on the 77th Street R stop in Brooklyn.waiting. If you take the R, that's what you do. You wait. I wonder what these other people are doing on the platform.the intraborough midday subway commuters. I feel like it might be all old people going to doctor appointments.yet I normally assume most elderly doc runs are done on the bus.

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entrepreneurship 210

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startup

Gust

JUNE 19, 2012

Last weekend I caught Mashable announcing that Ebook Sales Surpass Hardcover in the U.S. , something I’ve expected since I first bought a Rocket ebook reader about 10 years. And in January I saw that digital music overtook physical media for the first time in 2011, something I expected since 1998. In both cases what surprises me is not that it happened, but how long it took.

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Gust

JUNE 3, 2012

Many entrepreneurs I know feel guilty about not quitting their day job when initiating their startup, worrying about not giving their all to an employer, juggling the multiple roles, or even a legal conflict of interest. I’ll try to offer some guidelines to address these issues, but I generally recommend you keep the day job until your new company is producing real revenue.

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Gust

JUNE 28, 2012

This was one of the primary subjects for discussion at Venture Forward 2012 ( ventureforwardconference.com ). The answer to that question at the pre-conference speaker’s dinner implied unanimous agreement (from a group consisting of many of the top angels, VCs, lawyers, and pundits in the industry), that “direct, equity-based, common stock crowd funding as envisioned by the JOBS Act” would absolutely, positively preclude future investment by any serious professional investor, e

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ventures capital VC investing 143

Gust

JUNE 10, 2012

I come from a high-tech software background, and only a few years ago, it would cost at least a million dollars ($1M) for a team of professionals to produce any commercial software product. Now, with open source software components, and low-cost development tools, the same job can be done by one good hacker for a few thousand dollars. Even for low-tech startups, the scope of information available on the Internet, and its global reach, has had a similar financial impact on the many other challeng

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startup consulting entrepreneurs networking 139

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financing

Gust

JUNE 24, 2012

Face reality. As an entrepreneur, you should assume none of your customers is like you, yet I find that most entrepreneurs assume just the opposite. Customers don’t have your technical base, the passion, and interest in your solution. In fact, even if they did, they couldn’t find you in the clutter. An underrated portion of every startup effort must be about communication and marketing.

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Gust

JUNE 26, 2012

Most of us know not to complain about the previous employer during a job interview. Fair or not, it just doesn’t work, right? The new job never want to hire somebody with that kind of chip on a shoulder. More so with investor pitches. I was at one once, as an investor member of a local angel investment group, when this happened. The pitch had been intriguing, the product/market fit looked attractive, and the guy in charge seemed to know his stuff.

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pitching angel investing investing investment 121

Gust

JUNE 13, 2012

If you’re doing investment pitches, you should read this book. If you’re doing a pitch I’m going to see, I want you to have read this book. And if you’re a startup CFO, finance lead, bean counter, or presentation slide deck preparer, then you should read this book. Painting with Numbers , by Randall Bolten. And it has a subtitle that exactly explains why I recommend it: .

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pitching finance financing investing 121

Gust

JUNE 5, 2012

Nothing tells a truth better than a good story. Especially when it’s true. Read Mark Suster’s Never Negotiate Piecemeal. Here’s Why on his Both Sides of the Table blog for a good read and a good lesson. He tells the story of his baptism by fire in startup-dom, a series of negotiations including office rent, sublet, getting people on board, getting the media to care, dealing with recruiters, dealing with the tech prima donnas, and (a favorite of many) “dealing with pesky VCs.&

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technology

This is going to be BIG.

JUNE 2, 2012

On the heels of his successful anti-smoking campaign in NYC, Mayor Mike Bloomberg made a move to start banning extra large sugary soft drinks to combat obesity, particularly in children. Basically, you'll hear one of three utterly ridiculolus arguments against it. 1) Sodas aren't the only thing that makes you fat. Totally true, but does that make the soda ban a bad idea?

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health 290

This is going to be BIG.

JUNE 20, 2012

A new friend of mine sent me a poel that was inscribed on the wall of Mother Teresa's children's home in Calcutta. Whether or not you believe in God, I think everyone can take something from this. Competition is an illusion. The race is most often with yourself--and you have to be confident that you're going as hard as you can and doing it in a way that allows you to be honest with yourself and happy with who you see in the mirror.

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This is going to be BIG.

JUNE 4, 2012

The person who is sitting across from you in the conference room, more and more often, doesn't look like you. Neither does the person who gets off at your subway stop. The PTA Board is changing, too. This doesn't sit well with most people, but not because they're bad people. It's because we are pattern matchers. If you live in a city, you're probably more used to this change than most--but you would be lying if you have never, ever in your life had a moment where you paused because someone was d

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This is going to be BIG.

JUNE 18, 2012

Yammer just got sold to Microsoft for over a billion dollars. Jive Software, the leader in "social software for the enterprise" is another Valley company, and it's worth over a billion, too. Salesforce, Successfactors, Netsuite. go down the list of Enterprise SaaS companies and not a single one of them is in New York City. But isn't New York City the center of crappy enterprise IT experiences?

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opportunity

This is going to be BIG.

JUNE 7, 2012

Here's the thing you have to realize when you're just one user. . You're just one user. I know I'm not a typical Foursquare user. I've been rabidly checking in from the beginning, no fatigue at all, and I love sharing where I am and seeing where everyone else is. I also didn't really count on it for recommendations that often. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty awesome for reqs and if I do want one, I go to Foursquare, but I'll depart from the NYC norm and admit that I'm not really a foodie.

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This is going to be BIG.

JUNE 15, 2012

It's June 15, 2019. The air is a little cool for a summer night and I'm biking home. I'm eyeing the flashing red LED of the bike ahead of me. I make her bike ahead of me because seeing her makes me feel like I'm somehow keeping an eye on her--even though she's become just as comfortable biking in the streets of NYC as I am. We're making our way down the West Side Bikeway at a pretty good clip because we don't want to be late for the ferry.

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Berkonomics

JUNE 30, 2012

We have grown more than a bit weary of most advertising, no matter in what form. We are constantly bombarded by ads in multiple types of media, to the extent that we most often tune them out unless particularly entertaining from the first moment. Dave’s book: Positioning. In my keynotes on trends in technology, I often lead into one of the trends with the proposition that we have left the information age and are solidly within the age of recommendation , pointing to the fact that 69 perce

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Berkonomics

JUNE 7, 2012

I am constantly surprised when speaking with entrepreneurs and CEO’s who act puzzled and a bit flustered when I ask, “So what is your mantra? Tell me about your company in ten words or less.” Almost every one begins a long explanation of their business that is nearly impossible to follow, let alone recall a few moments later. And each lost an opportunity to tell their story in a memorable way that has power and boosts their enterprise value in the minds of the listener.

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