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Business leaders have many tasks to accomplish and prioritizing stuff can be hard. Yesterday I wrote about the need to “ do fewer things, more often ” in which I described that frenzied world we live in and why the shiny objects and distractions stop us from living up to our true potential. Today I’d like to give that advice in more tangible terms and with a framework to think about your tasks – the funnel.
So your business has begun to take off. You’ve figured out your channels of distribution, pricing model and how to support your growing list of customers. Don’t be alarmed by this next statement. That’s relatively easy. You can be the one to develop a product or service, promote it, and support it when you are a small operation. But what if you need to repeat the process of positioning, selling, and supporting your product ten thousand or more times as often as you do today?
Santa Monica-based online pet sitting marketplace DogVacay said Monday that it has named Deborah Sharkey as the company's n ew Chief Operating Officer. Sharkey was most recently VP of Local Marketplaces at eBay, where she had spent more than a decade. The company also said it has added Jason Finger and Bob Antin to its board; Finger is at Oxygen Capital, and Antin is the Chairman and CEO of pet health care services provider VCA.
A version of this article previously appeared in the Wall Street Journal. During my 15-years as a startup executive, I relished being proven wrong. Knowing that I was had made a mistake empowered me to make the correct decision. Being wrong is much preferred to erroneously thinking you are right and relentlessly executing a losing strategy. Effective entrepreneurs reject dogmatism and embrace doubt.
Office leases are one of companies’ largest expenses, and if your whole team is working from home with no clear end in sight, you may be wondering what to do about your lease.
Three years ago, I got the news that my investor was unable to fund and my 11 year old company would miss it’s first payroll. It was a Sunday, around noon. When the news arrived, I moved fast and did all I could to start the process of acceptance. What would happen next was I supposed expected, but impossible to really understand. I’m not going into the details of what happened but you can read that story here and it’s called Never Make the Same Mistake Twice.
Many entrepreneurs still don’t understand that building a business culture today of doing good, like helping people (society) and planet (sustainability), is also a key to maximizing profit. Employees and customers alike are looking for meaning, not simply employment and commodity prices. Every company needs this focus to attract the best minds and loyalty in both categories.
We are experiencing a frenetic time. I rarely talk to any startup entrepreneur or VC who doesn’t feel it and somehow long for simpler times despite the benefits we all enjoy from increased enthusiasm for our sector. For entrepreneurs there’s too much money sloshing around. One would think entrepreneurs would never want less available cash – until such time as their competitors ridiculously and unnecessarily all raise $50 million in the name of a “land grab” thus mak
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We are experiencing a frenetic time. I rarely talk to any startup entrepreneur or VC who doesn’t feel it and somehow long for simpler times despite the benefits we all enjoy from increased enthusiasm for our sector. For entrepreneurs there’s too much money sloshing around. One would think entrepreneurs would never want less available cash – until such time as their competitors ridiculously and unnecessarily all raise $50 million in the name of a “land grab” thus mak
If you could predict a crisis within your business before its occurrence, wouldn’t you move to prevent or reduce its impact? Making such predictions is a skill that can be developed, and here’s one method of doing so. There are five basic kinds of internal risks than a business faces over time. Of course, there are external risks that cannot be controlled or predicted, but can be planned for as well –. natural disasters, sudden political or economic events that rattle the entire economy, and mo
New York-based mobile ad platform developer Jun Group is expanding in both Orange County and Los Angeles, saying it is looking to tap into a hotbed of engineering talent in Orange County. The company, which focuses on native, brand-safe video ad placements, serves such clients as Chevrolet, McDonald's, Purina, Microsoft, and others. The company said it will open up a new Orange County office focused on software development, led by Jeremy Ellison, and also including a number of developers.
A version of this article previously appeared in Forbes. It sounds crazy to offer unlimited vacation time to your startup employees. Something to the left of socialism. Yet that is exactly what Richard Branson announced this past Fall. According to Branson, “We should focus on what people get done, not on how many hours or days worked. Just as we don’t have a nine-to-five policy, we don’t need a vacation policy.”.
I know you aren’t feeling well. I know you’re bored in that hospital bed. I know you are on meds. I know it hurts. I know she broke your heart. I know you failed. I know you got rained on. I know you hate that. I know you are tired and your kids are bugging you. I know you have challenges. I know you’re broke. I know you missed your flight.
I don’t like when people say: “I’m just not creative”. It doesn’t make me mad, but that’s my least favorite phrase in the world because I think it’s a cop out. I’m here to tell all of you out there who think creativity is some grand, innate talent that it’s not: it’s entirely learnable, and you’re all creative – you just don’t know it yet. There’s a team of Los Angeles entrepreneurs who would agree with me on that, and they launched their platform Kadenze to help people tap their creativity.
Over the years I’ve written extensively about the downsides of convertible notes for startups such as here , here and here. The truth is that I’ve been warning about convertible notes since 2010 it was first declared that “convertible notes have won.” Today I want to talk about how a VC thinks about equity pricing on your round and particularly if you’re coming off of a convertible note.
By Frank Peters. Our guest insight this week is from Frank Peters, well-known in the angel and in the bicycle worlds for his podcasts and passion. His personal story is full of lessons for us all. – Dave. We’ve all heard the modern day mantra: Fail Fast. It’s good advice; the theory being that entrepreneurs can discover the flaws in their business models sooner, make course corrections and move in a more favorable direction.
Fans of the huge advances being made in robotics will not want to miss the finals of the three year long, DARPA Robotics Challenge , which is happening this weekend at the Pomona Fairplex. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) says it will be running the final competition for $3.5M in prize money, to spur the creation of robots which can assist humans in responding to natural and man made disasters.
A version of this article previously appeared in Forbes. With top-ranked accelerators Lauchpad LA closing its doors and Y Combinator rebranding itself as a seed fund, it seems fair to ask the question, “Are Accelerators Dead?”. Good news: a quick review of TechCrunch’s March 2015 List of Top 20 U.S. Accelerators , which includes two LA-based accelerators in the Top Ten ( Mucker Lab and Amplify LA ), proves that the overall health of the Accelerator landscape is sound.
I’m a big fan of clean fingers. As I type this I can see my fingerprints forming on my iPhone screen. It makes me nuts. The line to the bathroom at the car wash is too long to deal with, or I’d go wash my hands. I wish I had a moist towelette in my pocket, but I don’t. The age of the touchscreen is upon us. We tap, tap, slide all day, everyday.
The best part of being an entrepreneur is having the independence to make your own decisions, the flexibility for a better work/life balance, and personal satisfaction from driving change. But nobody said it would be easy. The road to business success is filled with challenges and frustrations that most aspiring entrepreneurs never even imagined. In my role as advisor to many startups, I try to prepare them for the inevitable bumps in the road ahead, as well as to provide practical guidance on h
I recently interviewed Matt Mazzeo of Lowercase Capital. By now most of you know that Chris Sacca invested in what is now thought to be one of the best performing VC funds of all time having invested an $8.4 million fund in: Uber, Instagram, Docker and Twitter, amongst others. He then went on to build perhaps the largest single shareholding in Twitter.
This week, our guest post is by David Steakley, a past President of the Houston Angel Network, and a reformed management consultant. David is an active angel investor, and manages several angel funds in Texas. . I have a positive fetish for recurring revenue. When I hear a company pitch a business model which I believe has the potential to acquire a customer once, and keep the customer paying for a multi-year period without further marketing expense, my ears perk up.
Los Angeles-based CapLinked , which develops virtual data room software for managing deals, said last week that it has launched a new, Live Document Editing feature for its software. The company said the new feature lets users update and edit all of their documents while working within the software. CapLinked's software is used to manage and organize due diligence and other deal paperwork for financing and other transactions.
A version of this article previously appeared in Forbes. Facebook recently joined Google and Twitter by offering a click-to-call functionality in its ads, giving consumers an option to call businesses directly, versus emailing them or completing an online form - effectively making the plain old phone one of the most powerful on/offline marketing tools of the coming decade.
When it comes to any major sporting event, would you rather watch a recording of it or would you rather watch it live? It’s a pretty simple answer: nothing beats a live broadcast. For a long time though the power to broadcast live to a big audience has been strictly in the hands of TV stations and media conglomerates. But then some entrepreneurs got an idea: let’s put the power of the live broadcast directly in the hands of the people.
Traditionally, the majority of entrepreneurs have been logical thinkers, problem solvers, with full attention to details. These are the stereotypical left-brain engineers. Yet I see a big shift from the knowledge age, with its left-brain foundation, to a critical focus today on visualization, creativity, relationships, and collaboration, which are more in the domain of right-brainers.
I’ve heard many investors and some executives repeat the mantra, “Never offer exclusive deals,” and since this blanket statement is generally bad advice I thought I’d offer the less conventional but I believe more practical version of why exclusive deals can actually be a huge bonus for a startup and why I actively encourage them.
By David Steakley. This week’s insight comes from David Steakley, who has contributed several great posts to Berkonomics this year. David is an active angel investor in Texas and is a former management consultant, where he obviously plied his trade well. – Dave. Companies can strike it rich by finding an element of business operations which many companies need, but few have the capability or expertise to execute with excellence – and then aim to supply that element.
Los Angeles-based Boingo (www.boingo.com) is one of longest standing Internet companies. The company recently moved into brand new, 50,000 square foot headquarters in Westwood, so we thought it would be great to catch up with Boingo CEO, Dave Hagan , to learn a little bit more about the company's journey from startup to publicly traded company over the past 14 years.
Advertising technology is hot with the rise of mobile, evidenced in part by Verizon’s merger with AOL valued at $4.4 billion, and on a much smaller scale, Undertone’s recent acquisition of mobile ad provider Sparkflow. Until recently, three legacy providers (Sizmek, PointRoll and Google’s DoubleClick) have dominated the rich media market. But that’s changing with a new crop of rich media platforms disrupting the ecosystem with new mobile and non-standard rich media ad formats, one of which R
The technological world we live in affords some pretty unique and awesome opportunity, like drone aerobatics. However one of the often underestimated, or potentially overlooked, trends is the customization and personalization options we get because of tech. All of us at Tech.Co have covered this topic. In fact, I wrote about a company recently that lets you design, choose, and print customized vinyl decals for your car – it’s super cool.
Every culture and community puts pressure on its members to follow the norms. Even young people who start out wanting to be different are called “freaks,” and most are slowly bent back into the norm by the time they “grow up.” Maybe that’s why so many entrepreneurs struggle with building a disruptive new business, where breaks from the norm are the key to success.
*. What does it mean to be a leader? It’s relatively easier to answer that question when you’re a founder & CEO and have total control over hiring & firing. If your company is successful and valuable people generally do what you ask. It can sometimes create confusion about whether or not you’re truly a great leader or whether people feel they must just follow your orders.
I’ve been reflecting on what it was like each time I started a new venture. We were brimming with excitement, passion and energy. We knew what we were creating was going to disrupt the media industry and make it better, faster, smarter. But maintaining that high has been difficult. Eight years after starting Rubicon Project, I’ve found that our excitement, passion and energy comes in waves.
Lee Schneider is the author of a new book, Chronicle of a Startup Town: Los Angeles , which delves into the people and reasons on why Los Angeles has become one of the epicenters of the startup and technology industry. The book--which was just published last month--profiles the major players, startups, venture capitalists, and others here, in an attempt to understand how and why Los Angeles has become a major force in startups.
It’s no secret – digital marketing is the big brand battleground for most companies. Especially for small or medium-sized businesses, most of your time, effort, and potential reward are all going to be web-based, and getting your digital marketing strategy right is often a sink-or-swim proposition. But what exactly does that entail? Digital marketing is a vast, vast world, and one remarkably short on silver-bullet solutions.
There is a conflict in many startups that no one seems to write about–the clash that can occur between the founder and the professionals they bring in to help build their companies. It was highlighted for me by a conversation with a friend this week who had just joined a young company in the Bay Area as as a CFO. He remarked that with just a few tweaks in the business model, he thought the team could get to an exit in 18-24 months.
Entrepreneurs and startups often ask if they should select only social media for marketing, or stick with digital media, or just count on traditional media. The answer is yes to all, and the challenge is how to choose how much of each, and how to integrate them for maximum impact and the least cost. None should be considered competitive mutually exclusive to any other.
Many people don’t know that I actually became Chairman of my first company and relinquishing the CEO role before the company was sold. It’s a topic I’m well versed in personally and I understand the difficult emotional decision of whether to hand the reigns to someone else of the baby you’ve struggled so hard to launch into the world.
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