Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 25, 2016

If you can’t provide a memorable customer experience, your startup won’t survive very long these days. You now need more than loyalty from your customers -- they need to be your best advocates. Here are some key ideas to get you started: It all starts with the right people on your team.

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Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 25, 2016

Many startup businesses – tech or otherwise – fail. Trying outrageous new things or even trying mundane things but in new ways but with extreme quality & innovation is what fuels the tech startup industry. But today I want to give you advice on how to decrease your odds of failure in a startup.

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InfoChachkie

AUGUST 8, 2016

It may seem hard to believe, but even in 2016, there remain a number of successful consumer brands that are not sold online. I thought it would be interesting to understand the challenges and concerns of entrepreneurs who began selling online for the first time in 2016, so I sat down with Heidi Muther, COO at Z S upply , LLC.

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TechCrunch LA

MAY 19, 2020

After wrestling with recalcitrant homeowners, husbanding their parcels of land to keep their property values high, the state’s leadership passed a law that increased the availability of new rental units and put more money into homeowners’ pockets in 2016. When you can match that latent supply with latent demand.

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Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 28, 2016

Steve Jobs was a one-in-a-million entrepreneur who seemed to violate many conventional rules of starting a business and dealing with people, yet undeniably achieved great success. As a result, I don’t recommend to aspiring entrepreneurs that they try to emulate his style as a model for their first startup.

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Tech Zulu Event

MAY 6, 2016

Customization is a BIG TREND for millennials. All their lives, millennials have been customizing the things closest to them. First, there were polyphonic ring tones to customize phones. Then there was Myspace to customize teenage angst and loneliness. Now YoShirt is the next step in a long line of evolving customization.

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Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 5, 2016

In my experience as an advisor to aspiring entrepreneurs, I often encounter the myth that an initial startup requires investors. Outside funding is not a startup entitlement. Entrepreneurs who don’t have someone else’s cash for outsourcing come up with the more innovative and creative approaches to get things done.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 3, 2016

I find that this type offers the most value to new entrepreneurs or startups in the early idea stage. Most incubators start their program with some aptitude and business acumen tests. The best ones also charge an up-front participation fee for services provided. Direction, mentoring and resources required.

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Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 2, 2016

Starting a new business is not an informal process, and should never be treated like a hobby between friends. Unfortunately, as a startup advisor and angel investor, I’ve seen too many ventures with great potential get destroyed or set back by legal and other shortcuts that should never have been allowed to happen.

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socalTECH

NOVEMBER 2, 2017

We caught up with Fuel50 founder and CEO Anne Fulton to learn more about the startup. Anne Fulton: Fuel50 is a career pathing startup, part of the HR technology landscape. How did you start the company? Even when I had babies, I started a company making baby clothing with designers for a few years. What is Fuel50?

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Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 22, 2016

While thinking about the parameters of traction, and how to measure it, I was impressed with a new book, “ Scaling Lean: Mastering the Key Metrics for Startup Growth ” by Ash Maurya, a serial entrepreneur, and creator of the one-page business modelling tool Lean Canvas. Customers and investors alike measure traction by your formal advisors.

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Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 30, 2016

Many companies do this to explore opportunities for growth outside their normal domain, and compete with conventional startups, to penetrate new markets and profit from the next big thing. A third reason would be to mingle and learn from the startup culture. The parent company never really relinquishes control.

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Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 5, 2016

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. Storytelling and projecting a vision are foundational skills that are required from the first moment in starting a business. It’s up to you to clear the way.

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Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 25, 2015

As we went from a small band of missionaries hell bent on making our idea a reality, raising capital, getting press, and selling to customers – we were all having fun. We built a business with $36 million in bookings and real customers who relied upon our service.

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Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 16, 2016

How does a startup founder know whether he or she has the skill and bandwidth to fill the role, or what and where to look for outside candidates? Even the best founders soon find that they can’t physically do everything required to start and grow the business. Customers and investors listen for a consistent message.

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Southern California Edison Blog

FEBRUARY 12, 2019

Businesses are driving that growth, winning customers and expanding their operations. To find scalable Ethernet services that can handle increasing demands as you grow, you need to evaluate providers and services on a specific criteria set that’s designed to accommodate growth. Start Local. In 2016 alone, over half of U.S.

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 24, 2016

million in funding on TechCrunch led by Harmony Partners and Upfront Ventures to double its footprint of 3 cities (New York, Chicago & Washington DC) to 6 in 2016. Incumbents became increasingly annoyed with our successes in the country’s largest market – NYC – that they started even taking out ads against us.

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Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 9, 2016

Good entrepreneurs are all about managing change, but too many forget that they have to change themselves as their dream evolves from a startup to a scalable business. For example, there once was a social network called Friendster , often credited with starting the social networking boom way back in 2002. It’s a big change.

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socalTECH

AUGUST 4, 2015

Santa Barbara-based Ice Energy (www.ice-energy.com) has quietly been working away at developing energy storage systems to help smooth out the demand for energy on the nation's power grid. Our customer is not the building owner or tenant, it's the utility. Explain what that peak demand problem is for the utilities?

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Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 22, 2016

Moonshots are simply efforts that demand breakthroughs that are not possible within business-as-usual practices. In reality, that’s the definition of a successful startup these days, so every aspiring entrepreneur should take note, as well as every existing corporate executive. It takes the right people to make a breakthrough happen.

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Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 29, 2016

Most entrepreneurs I know are so passionate about their new idea that they are surprised when family and friends don’t line up to invest in their new venture. Don’t let your lack of acumen with friends and family spiral your startup into the ground waiting for someone to go first. Demos and prototypes are key.

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 10, 2015

Greg knows consumer businesses and customers, which has added tremendously to our team where I admittedly have more of a background in enterprise software, data and online video. I had to keep track of who was injured, who was being arrested, who was likely to start in a given week, etc. But it still takes time.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 4, 2017

With the Identity Theft Resource Center® reporting a 40 percent increase in data breaches in 2016, there seems to be a growing population out there worried about all the people intent on hurting them. In addition, there is a real business opportunity here for startups. Why is everyone so paranoid these days?

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socalTECH

MARCH 9, 2017

Paul Myer: Veracity Industrial Networks is a startup in the industrial network security segment. Industrial networking is a new category for me, personally, and I only started here two years ago. As they did that, they were not only increasingly connected internally, but people started to have remote access to those same systems.

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Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 8, 2016

As a startup advisor and investor, I find that more and more entrepreneurs avoid using the term “profit” in pitching their new venture. Of course, I understand and don’t condone bad actors who get greedy, and exploit ways to unjustly squeeze customers and employees. Solve a painful problem for customers who have money to spend.

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Eric Greenspan

MAY 19, 2016

I was overwhelmed with that choice, but as I scanned the article published in the Star Tribune, APRIL 11, 2016 — 11:07AM., I no longer owned the URL that was mine since 1996 and I was up to my eyeballs at that time with legal issues, as I had personally guaranteed the Mini Cooper fleet, office equipment and a whole lot of company loans.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 11, 2016

Customers today extrapolate their relationships not only from personal contact, but from every aspect of their interface with your company, including web site and social media interactions, access to peer reviews, as well as the actual services experience. Relationships are a function of customer culture.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 29, 2016

Have you noticed that the really big startup wins in the last couple of decades have come from creating and dominating new market categories, more than just new solutions? They make a long-term strategy come alive for customers. In many cases, this approach fails by scaring investors and confusing customers.

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Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 19, 2016

Customers have come to expect disruptive change, so yet another social network is not the way to get traction. Mauri offers some practical, actionable advice for entrepreneurs who want to develop a leader’s mindset, on how to spread the right message to potential customers, as well as investors.

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Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 27, 2016

In addition to funding, the good news is that all of these provide aspiring entrepreneurs with an opportunity to perfect their marketing pitch, get some valuable target customer feedback and improve visibility to other funding sources. With a large number of unknown investors demanding details, you are highly exposed to potential competitors.

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TechCrunch LA

AUGUST 11, 2021

The link-in-bio business is heating up as more mobile website builders compete for a coveted slice of real estate on a creator’s TikTok, Instagram or Twitter. Linktree has been around since 2016 and has more funding than its up-and-coming competitors. Now, Snipfeed enters the ring with its own $5.5 Image Credits: Snipfeed.

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socalTECH

MARCH 4, 2021

I think, now more than ever, Flippy meets the distinct challenges and can help our customers spur new growth. How did you go from running a venture fund to starting Miso? This was in mid-2016, and the decreasing costs of robotics and computer vision made me think that the process of making a burger could be fully automated.

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Xconomy

DECEMBER 28, 2017

In 2016, the renowned international university programming tournament — attended by student competitors, coaches, and parents — took place in Phuket, Thailand. In 2016, Rapid City was officially named ICPC 2017’s host city. It took up every square meter of our 20,000 square meter center. Rapid City, South Dakota. Burgess agrees.

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LATechDigest

OCTOBER 26, 2016

Cornerstone on Demand brought together the area’s best & brightest for its fourth annual LA Tech Summit , once again hosted at the Fairmont. — LATech Digest (@LATechDigest) October 25, 2016. — LATech Digest (@LATechDigest) October 25, 2016. — LATech Digest (@LATechDigest) October 25, 2016.

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Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

No consideration can be given to experience running a startup, breadth of skills, or even thinking like an entrepreneur. Like startup investors several layers deep, parent company executives often demand approval rights and exert their power, without understanding the issues of starting a new business.

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Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 18, 2016

Committees don’t create successful startups. People who demand perfection from themselves are rarely good leaders. Be humble and transparent in involving your team and even your customers in your successes and your mistakes. Demand strong performance and deal quickly with mediocrity.

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Xconomy

JULY 21, 2016

Zingle, a Carlsbad, CA-based tech startup targeting the service industry and consumer-facing businesses with its messaging app technology, has raised $3 million in venture capital, according to a regulatory filing earlier this month. Zingle (@ZingleMe) July 14, 2016. Happy #TBT from our fearless Founder & CEO @fordblakely !

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