Both Sides of the Table

JULY 12, 2011

Chris Dixon is one of my favorite people in tech and writes one of the few blogs I read religiously. If you don’t read it and you care about tech & entrepreneurship, you should. He’s thoughtful about markets, investors, products and is always very well reasoned in his arguments. I’ve also found him to not be dogmatic either. He and I once took different sides of an debate about whether “VC signaling&# in early-stage deals is a serious problem or not.

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This is going to be BIG.

JULY 18, 2011

I'm not a lean startup zealot, but there are obviously lots of aspects of it that can lead to a ton of insights about your business. Talking to customers is, of course, a good thing. I'd never argue against it. I have seen, however, the customer development process wind up looking like a street corner salesman selling watches out of the inside of his coat.

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Berkonomics

JULY 23, 2011

There are five major classes or niches a company should examine and make its own in calculating positioning in the marketplace. They are: Price. Quality. Service. Innovation. Elegance. Companies that compete on price rarely compete against others who emphasize service or quality. Internet resellers have a better chance to combine price and quality than those with much more fixed overhead occupying a bricks-and-mortar physical presence in the community.

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innovation strategy communities capital 79

Derek Sivers

JULY 8, 2011

Having no funding was a huge advantage for me. A year after I started CD Baby, the dot-com boom happened. Anyone with a little hot air and a vague plan was given millions of dollars by investors. It was ridiculous. Most business owners I knew would tell you about their businesses by talking about their second round of funding, their fancy encrypted replicated load-balancing database server, their twenty-person development team, their nice midtown office with a pool table, and their weekly promot

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investing investment development 61

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strategy

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 4, 2011

July 4th. The funniest experience I ever had on July 4th (US Independence Day) was in 1999. That was the year I spent July 4th in Tokyo, where I was living for 6 months. I had been living in Europe since the start of 1995, most recently in London. I have always had a strong affinity for Japanese culture, perhaps because I grew up in Northern California.

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Both Sides of the Table

JULY 15, 2011

This article originally appeared on TechCrunch (this version is slightly different). Most web publishers measure where their traffic is coming from using an analytics package such as Google Analytics, Omniture or Core Metrics. These were good packages in the pre social media world at helping figure out who was driving your traffic. Today they’re wrong.

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Both Sides of the Table

JULY 5, 2011

I’m excited to announce that we silently launched our new website last week. Like a startup we took a very “version 0.9” approach. What I would love to do with this post is tell you our goals and solicit reactions for what you like and what you don’t like. What you’d like to see added, removed or changed. What text resonates? What do you think of the design elements?

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real estate investing investment entrepreneurs 260

This is going to be BIG.

JULY 7, 2011

Do you have friends that have really top notch experience, are thoughtful about their industry, and whip smart? Are they about a billion times more insightful than your average tech blogger? Does it kill you that more people don't know them? Unfortunately, if you look at the people who actively self-promote, it's a pretty adversely selected pool versus the pool of people who don't bother.

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leadership media communities 344

This is going to be BIG.

JULY 5, 2011

Imagine that one day, Facebook decides to put all its engineering effort into creating the best spreadsheet program you've ever seen--ten times more powerful than Microsoft Excel and way simpler to control and navigate. Can you imagine trying to convince people around the office to use Facebook Spreadsheets? There's no way you could convince anyone that you were actually doing real work because of the Facebook branding.

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networking media venture capital technology 341

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startup

This is going to be BIG.

JULY 19, 2011

It’s important to properly measure the size the market in which you hope to compete. Without this information, it’s very difficult to raise funds, understand how much you can/should spend on product development and marketing, evaluate the success of your marketing efforts, etc. In the following video, I offer five suggestions that can help you define the size of a market for a startup business.

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This is going to be BIG.

JULY 25, 2011

This past weekend, I attended the wedding of a guy I played t-ball with in the summer of 1985. That fall, we were seated across from each other in first grade. A year ago, I went with him to pick up the ring and two days ago, I was in his wedding party. Their relationship and the event made me think a lot about partnership and building something special--topics that are top of mind in my day to day job as a venture investor.

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Both Sides of the Table

JULY 25, 2011

This article originally ran on TechCrunch. tl;dr version: If you’re an entrepreneur or VC or will be working in this industry - buy this. read it. live it. When I first started as a startup CEO in 1999 there were no guides on raising venture capital. There were no explanations for all of the confusing details outlined in a term sheet. Drag along rights?

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VC entrepreneurs advice venture capital 304

This is going to be BIG.

JULY 26, 2011

This is just a theory, but it feels to me that there's a talent gap in the marketing space--or a few of them. To begin with, there seems to be a serious shortage of customer acquisition experts--particularly given how hot subscription services have gotten. Fab.com (First Round portfolio company) just announced a new round of funding and that they reached 350,000 subscribers.

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peer-to-peer media strategy communities 283

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financing

This is going to be BIG.

JULY 31, 2011

Did you also know that if you let your kids go on MySpace, they're going to get molested? Using Facebook will prevent you from getting a job if you're a college kid, btw. Also, bedbugs are EVERYWHERE! It's true. What you don't know will kill you or your loved ones, and to find out how to stop it, read this blog post, or watch the news tonight at 11.

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hospitality disruption advice media 280

This is going to be BIG.

JULY 11, 2011

I always liked Heath Bell--thought the Mets shouldn't have gotten rid of him. He once avoided arbitration because he said he didn't want to have to wear a suit and a tie. Today, he showed what a great mindset he had that struck a good balance between being a team guy, but also being a standout all at once. "ESPN reports that Padres closer Heath Bell told reporters in Arizona, where he will pitch for the National League in the All-Star game, that he would be willing to serve as a setup reliever f

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Derek Sivers

JULY 23, 2011

I started CD Baby focused on the importance of making a dream-come-true perfect world for musicians. Along the way I learned the importance of making my business a dream come true for myself, too. Business is as creative as the fine arts. You can be as unconventional, unique, and quirky as you want. A business is a reflection of the creator. Some people want to be billionaires with thousands of employees.

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Berkonomics

JULY 30, 2011

Here is a phenomenon I discovered over time when dealing with many small start-ups in their early revenue period. A very predictable series of rotating crises seemed to befall most every one of these young companies. These became so predictable that I could accurately label them as occurring about every $3 million in gross profit (or revenue for service companies).

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health capital founder development 89

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technology

Berkonomics

JULY 9, 2011

What a powerful set of three questions. These are so succinct, so well defined, so precise that everyone in sales and everyone involved in marketing must be able to answer these three questions without pause, and convincingly. Turning these into statements instead of questions provides a framework for the sales presentation from the highest levels of collateral materials and marketing support, to the salesperson on the front line.

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frameworks energy support 89

Berkonomics

JULY 19, 2011

Here’s a phrase I created in the early 1980’s to describe what I clearly saw as the last chance to make high margins on the sale of computer hardware to businesses. In the day of the mainframe and then the minicomputer, margins for manufacturers exceeded 35% and dealers were granted a 35% margin as well. Even with the usual discount of 10%, the margins on hardware were high, especially when applied to prices that exceeded $30,000 per sale. .

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networking board technology 73

Derek Sivers

JULY 16, 2011

When you make a business, you’re making a little world where you control the laws. It doesn’t matter how things are done everywhere else. In your little world, you can make it like it should be. When I first built CD Baby in 1998, every order resulted in an automated email that let the customer know when the CD was actually shipped. At first this note was just the normal “Your order has shipped today.

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Derek Sivers

JULY 17, 2011

If you find even the smallest way to make people smile, they’ll remember you more for that smile than for all your other fancy business-model stuff. Here are some things that made a huge difference on the CD Baby website: Because we shipped FedEx at 5 p.m. each day, customers would often call and ask, “What time is it there? Do I still have time to get it sent today?

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Derek Sivers

JULY 6, 2011

For the first time in my life, I had made something that people really wanted. Before that, I had spent twelve years trying to promote my various projects. Trying every marketing approach. Networking, pitching, pushing. It always felt like an uphill battle, trying to open locked or slamming doors. I made progress, but only with massive effort. But now.

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pitching networking 45

Derek Sivers

JULY 22, 2011

Delegation doesn’t come naturally to any of us. But I was trying really hard to be good at it. I knew how important it was to get into the delegation mindset. I was trying to empower my employees — to let them know they could make decisions on their own, without me. When they asked, “How should we organize all the rooms in the new office?” I said, “Any way you want to do it is fine.”.

health 40

health 40

Derek Sivers

JULY 21, 2011

After your business has been up and running a while, you’ll hit an interesting crossroads. Everyone assumes that as the owner of the company, you’ll be the traditional CEO, having fancy lunches with other high-powered CEOs and doing all the big business deals. But what if you don’t like doing that? What if what you love the most is the solitude of the craft?

media 40

media 40

Derek Sivers

JULY 20, 2011

Since I was 14, I was determined to be a great singer. But my pitch was bad, my tone was bad, and everyone said I was just not a singer. For 11 years, I took voice lessons, and practiced at least an hour a day. I was always the lead singer of my band, doing a few shows a week, getting as much real-world experience as possible. The whole time, people kept telling me I was just not a singer — that I should give it up and find a real singer.

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