TechEmpower
JULY 12, 2023
A Fractional CTO bridges the gap between founders and developers to help keep your tech strategy aligned with your business goals. This helps your startup stay agile and competitive in a fast-paced marketplace.
Berkonomics
DECEMBER 21, 2023
Allowing small problems to escalate into big ones is simple. Just ignore the signs for long enough and the job is done. It takes far more energy to regularly review the key performance indicators you’ve established for each individual and yourself. But a small excursion caught early and corrected saves massive corrective resources later. Here’s an example: Take for example the manufacturing company with a small quality problem in one component, resulting in a test failure rate above the norm.
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TechCrunch LA
OCTOBER 24, 2023
Less than a month after Waymo’s Los Angeles County expansion, labor organizers and an LA lawmaker are calling for new autonomous-vehicle regulations. On Tuesday, the office of LA Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez said he will introduce a motion “urging officials in the state to address public safety concerns around autonomous vehicles and reign in the expansion […] © 2023 TechCrunch.
Tech.Co
DECEMBER 29, 2023
2023 hasn't been an easy year to be a startup. While the market isn't short of spritely, innovative entrepreneurs, harsh economic headwinds combined with a pullback in investor spending have made it harder than ever for budding businesses to break through. In fact, according to Crunchbase more than 212 startups closed their shutters in the third fiscal quarter alone – the highest number recorded in the firm's history.
Advertiser: Aggregage
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.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 29, 2023
In my experience in large businesses as well as years of advising startups, I see far too much focus on product skills, and too little on people and process skills. In my view, this focus on the wrong skill set is the primary reason why over half of new businesses fail in the first five years, and only one out of a hundred startups get their requested funding from professional investors.
Startup San Diego
AUGUST 31, 2023
The Startup San Diego team caught up with the 2022 Startup Week Heavyweight Pitch competition winner and Startup Incubator Program Alumni, James Hamet, Founder and CEO of Vistim Labs, to find out how the startup has been doing since the victory and their plans for the future. Vistim Labs Vistim Labs, is an AI software […] The post Catching Up with SDSW Pitch Competition Champion & Incubator Alumni, James Hamet, Founder & CEO of Vistim Labs appeared first on Startup San Diego.
Southern California Tech Central brings together the best content for technical professionals in Southern California from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
TechEmpower
JULY 24, 2023
At TechEmpower, we frequently talk to startup founders, CEOs, product leaders, and other innovators about their next big tech initiative. It’s part of our job to ask questions about their plans, challenge their assumptions, and suggest paths to success. The conversations are interesting and varied because they’re about new, exciting, different things.
TechEmpower
NOVEMBER 15, 2023
We’re pleased to announce Round 22 of the TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks! The TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks project celebrates its 10th anniversary, boasting significant engagement with over 7,000 stars on GitHub and more than 7,100 Pull Requests. Renowned as one of the leading projects of its kind, it benchmarks the peak performance of server-side web application frameworks and platforms, primarily using tests contributed by the community.
TechEmpower
OCTOBER 9, 2023
Artificial Intelligence (AI), and particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), have significantly transformed the search engine as we’ve known it. This presents businesses with an opportunity to enhance their search functionalities for both internal and external users. With Generative AI and LLMs, new avenues for improving operational efficiency and user satisfaction are emerging every day.
Berkonomics
OCTOBER 5, 2023
First, think about your time as money! We’ll get to my heartbreak in a minute. But first… There is a relationship between time and money that is more complex than most managers think. Fixed overhead for salaries, rent, equipment leases and more make up the majority of the “burn rate” (monthly expenses) for most companies. Since this number is budgeted and pre-authorized, managers tend to focus upon other things such as sales, marketing and product development issues.
Berkonomics
AUGUST 24, 2023
This statement could be considered controversial. We have previously made the case that professional investors demand more in the form of restrictive covenants and lower valuations. Now we explore the other side of that coin. Professional investors usually bring “smart money” to the table, defined as money that comes along with good advice and great relationships for corporate growth.
Berkonomics
AUGUST 17, 2023
Preparing for the game… If you have been following our recent insights, you’ll be up to speed knowing that professional investors negotiate tough terms, from provisions of control over asset acquisition, eventual sale of the company, future investments, forced co-sale when others attempt to sell their shares and more. And yet, in an earlier post, we spoke of the problems that come when taking unstructured investments from friends and family.
Berkonomics
AUGUST 3, 2023
How important is this issue for your business? The subject of raising money is critical to many businesses and a passing option to others, depending upon the capital efficiency of the enterprise. Some businesses require very little capital and the founder can self-finance the enterprise and retain 100% of its ownership and control from ignition through liquidity event (startup through sale).
Berkonomics
MAY 4, 2023
Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. “My job as a (newspaper publisher telephone installer, stockbroker, travel agent, retail store manager) writer, poet, commercial artist – is safe as this economy continues to grow.” Yup. Thought so. We are in a decade of creative destruction that will affect most everybody. And the prime motivators of this massive destruction are the same class of entrepreneurs and innovators that have done it before.
Berkonomics
AUGUST 10, 2023
Setting your expectations Taking in angel or venture money requires a setting of an entrepreneur’s expectations that may come as a shock at least at first. From the moment such an investor looks seriously at your company, the investor or VC partner is thinking of the end game, the ultimate sale of the company or even of an eventual initial public offering.
Berkonomics
JULY 20, 2023
Hold it! These are confusing terms. When does a budget become obsolete? Do we rely upon constant changes and call it a forecast? So, let’s spend a few moments defining this sometimes-confusing set of terms. This is a budget: A budget should be created each year after a series of negotiations between departmental managers and their superiors all the way yup to the CEO, all in support of the next year’s tactics previously agreed upon (which in turn support the longer-term strategies leading to the
Berkonomics
JANUARY 12, 2023
Some types of businesses generate more and more recurring revenues over time, often growing to a size where recurring revenues pay all of the overhead of the company – an enviable position. The surprising recurring revenue trap. There is a phenomenon I have observed time after time with mature companies receiving over 75% of their revenues from recurring sources.
Berkonomics
JUNE 22, 2023
Your success must be based upon data that is solid and sometimes flexible enough to pass several critical tests if it is to guide a business enterprise to greatness. Here in brief are ten tests for your business success. Try these on for size, and test yourself for attractiveness to the marketplace, to investors and to history. Ten tests for your business success: Is your market identifiable and accessible?
TechCrunch LA
JANUARY 3, 2023
The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, or HACLA, has confirmed it is investigating a cybersecurity incident shortly after the LockBit ransomware gang claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on the agency. HACLA, which provides affordable housing to more than 19,000 low-income families across Los Angeles, was added to LockBit’s dark web leak site on December 31.
TechCrunch LA
NOVEMBER 2, 2023
Mayor Karen Bass says Los Angeles — not a state agency — should have the power to decide how robotaxi companies expand in the city. The impact of the mayor's calls may extend well beyond LA. © 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
TechCrunch LA
OCTOBER 25, 2023
Robotaxi oversight is now a priority at Los Angeles City Hall. At a press briefing on Wednesday, Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez told Waymo and Cruise that their robotaxis are not welcome. “The purpose of this press event is to send a very clear message about robot taxis, and say that they do not belong in the […] © 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved.
TechCrunch LA
FEBRUARY 27, 2023
Waymo will begin testing its autonomous Jaguar I-Paces without a human safety operator in Los Angeles in the next couple of weeks. This is the company’s next step on its path to commercializing robotaxi services in its second California city. To start, only employees will be able to hail rides in the driverless robotaxis. While Waymo has been mapping several LA neighborhoods, including Downtown, Miracle Mile, Koreatown and Westwood, since 2019, the company will start its rider-only testing
Tech.Co
JULY 24, 2023
A group of researchers in Australia have been awarded just over $400,000 (USD) in government funding to study the possibilities of merging AI with human brain cells, a research project likely to bring a number of AI-related ethical and existential questions to the fore. The team, working in collaboration with Monash University and Melbourne-based Startup Cortical Labs – is the same group behind the DishBrain project, which involved teaching a group of human brain cells how to play the retr
Startup Professionals Musings
JANUARY 30, 2023
Over my many years of mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs and business professionals, I often hear a desire to start a new business, with a big hesitation while waiting for that perfect idea and perfect alignment of the stars. From my own experience and from the best entrepreneurs I know, I always offer some basic business realities, and assure you that conditions will never be perfect.
Startup Professionals Musings
JANUARY 21, 2023
The average length of a funding pitch to angel investors is ten minutes. Even if you have booked an hour with a VC, you should plan to talk only for the first fifteen minutes. The biggest complaint I hear from fellow investors is that startup founders often talk way too long, and neglect to cover the most relevant points. Or they get sidetracked by a technical glitch due to poor preparation.
Tech.Co
OCTOBER 27, 2023
You’ve probably heard of both Bard and ChatGPT by now. However, another highly capable chatbot burst onto the scene earlier this year called Claude. It comes courtesy of Google and Amazon-backed startup Anthropic, which was only founded in 2021. Claude is definitely one of the most impressive chatbots to be launched in the last 12 months. More than 350,000 people signed up to the waitlist to use Claude 2, the most recent version of the language model.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 22, 2023
Most of the entrepreneurs and aggressive business owners I meet in my consulting practice are focused on finding new disruptive solutions and killing competitors as the key to success. If you are one of these, you may be missing win-win opportunities to incrementally expand existing markets, create new ones enabled by new technologies, or do good for society in this new age.
Startup Professionals Musings
APRIL 10, 2023
If you are one of the new age of entrepreneurs who hates the thought of doing a business plan as a first step in starting your new venture you will love this message. More and more professionals agree that a better strategy is to explore and fine tune your assumptions before declaring a specific plan with financial projections based only on your dream and passion.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 26, 2023
Every one of you business owners I know periodically introduces new products and services to sustain growth, fight off competitors, or take advantage of new technologies. Often, despite your passion and expectation, customers don’t immediately see the value and need that you see, and you have no idea why the initiative is stuck , and what could be the real customer issue or fix.
Startup Professionals Musings
JANUARY 13, 2023
Every business professional and entrepreneur believes they are good communicators, but how do they know? It’s really the perception of the recipients that counts, and poor communicators are almost always poor listeners, so they don’t hear the shortcomings. Warren Buffet once told a class of business students that better communication could boost their value by fifty percent.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 27, 2023
The days of leadership without engagement are gone. With interactive social media and video everywhere, everyone needs to feel they have a relationship with their leaders, and every brand needs leader personification for customers to relate. Soon you won’t be able to name a business as one of your favorites if you can’t personally visualize and relate to company leadership.
Startup Professionals Musings
JANUARY 25, 2023
No matter how well your business seems to have worked for you up to this point, you can be certain that it will need to be heavily transformed for tomorrow’s new world-wide economy and no industry sector boundaries. New digital technologies, business models, and regulatory rulings are forcing all of us to think outside of our silos and rethink what it means to operate effectively.
Startup Professionals Musings
FEBRUARY 15, 2023
If you really want to start a business your way without a boss or professional investor hovering over you, then just fund it yourself or through friends and family, and grow it organically. It’s more possible to bootstrap today than a few years ago, as the cost of entry continues to go down. According to Investopedia , over 90 percent of successful businesses currently start this way.
Startup Professionals Musings
APRIL 21, 2023
As a startup advisor in this age of the entrepreneur, I see many more startups, but innovation is still hard to find. The most common proposals I hear are for yet another social networking site ( 200 on Wikipedia ), or another dating site/app ( over 1500 in the USA ). Startups which display real innovation, such as alternative energy sources and new medical treatments, are still rare.
Startup Professionals Musings
FEBRUARY 10, 2023
Even though the color of their money is always green, all startup investors are not the same. Struggling entrepreneurs are often so happy to get a funding offer that they neglect the recommended reverse due diligence on the investors. Taking on equity investors to fund your company is much like getting married – it is a long-term relationship that has to work at all levels.
Startup Professionals Musings
JANUARY 22, 2023
In my experience, the Silicon Valley startup model, focused on disrupting established industries, has treated the USA well and created some great global businesses. Yet many of you are telling me that we are all missing big opportunities by not recognizing the unique challenges faced by startups in developing countries , where infrastructure is lacking, and talent is not so concentrated.
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