January, 2013

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A Post Startup Execs Should Forward to Your Spouse or Partner. 12 Tips for Making it Work

Both Sides of the Table

I recently wrote a post about how to manage relationships when you’re at a startup or are busy executive. It was based on an excellent book I had just read by Brad Feld & Amy Batchelor (his wife). I had images in my brain of all of the stresses I had placed on my wife in the heyday of my startups. We once took a “vacation” in Spain with Tania’s parents but we were in the midst of an M&A transaction so this photo is how my wife & her family remember me on that

Tips 418
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Startup Mentors

SoCal CTO

I've had several Startup CTO Consulting sessions recently where it became apparent that the Founder needed help with the business and product as much or more than the technology. I suggested that they should look for someone like me, but on the business end. Then we discussed how they could go about finding this startup business advisor. Then I got an email that asked: I'm leading the marketing efforts for an early-stage startup.

CTO Coach 259
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Capturing The Entrepreneurial Energy At StartEngine's Demo Day

socalTECH

It was standing room only at StartEngine 's Demo Day Wednesday afternoon, held at Santa Monica's Cross Campus , as the startup accelerator launched eight of its latest startups into the world, after a 90 day process of mentoring, honing their business model, and heads down development. In a way, the event--like the Demo Days from the other accelerators around town--seems to have focused the startup community and prospective startup community on the possibilities inherent in a new startup.

Commerce 256
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Effective Email Introductions or Why Blind Intros Suck

InfoChachkie

A version of this article previously appeared on Forbes. It just happened again. A well-intentioned colleague introduced me to a stranger via email, without first confirming with me that the intro was welcomed. Such "blind"matchmaking is more often than not a waste of everyone’s time: the person making the introduction, the person being introduced and me.

Email 256
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Can You Ask for Office Rent Relief? How to Manage Your Lease During COVID-19

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.

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An Ode To Joy – in the workplace.

Berkonomics

My brother, Barry, passed away recently. A world famous architect, he is credited with the design of over 600,000 homes worldwide. He had been named one of the world’s top 100 architects by Architectural Digest, and one of the ten most significant figures of the 20th century by Residential Architect. He was quite a role model as a big brother, five years my senior.

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Entrepreneurs Who Master Storytelling Win More

Startup Professionals Musings

The entrepreneur’s challenge is to effectively communicate their value proposition, not only to customers, but also to vendors, partners, investors, and their own team. Especially for technical founders, this is normally all about presenting impressive facts. But in reality facts only go so far. Stories often work better, because humans don’t always make rational decisions.

More Trending

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MuckerLab Unveils Second Graduating Class to Investors

Tech Zulu Event

A traffic jam of expensive cars lined up to pull into the packed parking lot of MuckerLab for its second graduating class demo day. The large gathering of top investors spilled out of the office into the surrounding sidewalk and swelled with buzz and speculation of what the 10 newly formed companies had to offer. Some flew in from overseas, different states and from Silicon Valley to attend.

Class 100
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BlankSpaces Renews Faith In Coworking

socalTECH

The last few years in Los Angeles has been a heady one for the technology startup community, with hundreds of new startups, and a tangible enthusiasm in the air along Silicon Beach. Along with that growth, there have been a host of coworking and similar service provider cropping up to serve the community, offering up office space and more to local startups and other businesses.

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Startup Sales Lessons From TLC’s “Say Yes To The Dress”

InfoChachkie

If you have your eyes and ears open, you can discover sales lessons in unexpected places, including the cable TV show, Say Yes To The Dress. I do not consume much TV content, other than cable news. However, my wife is a major fan of fashion oriented "reality" TV shows, including Say Yes To The Dress (Say Yes). In my ongoing quest to be a wonderful husband, I have watched some of these shows with my lovely bride (sorry, I draw the line at Project Runway ).

Sales 251
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Find and build recurring revenues.

Berkonomics

Most every business can take advantage of continuing, recurring revenues from its customer base. Sometimes, products are designed to make all of their profit upon the recurring revenues from supplies or support. We immediately recall the razor and blade analogy to illustrate the point when planning product development and release. Xerox in its formative years, even though barely having enough cash to market its then revolutionary copier, elected to lease rather than sell the units.

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8 Indications of a ‘Wanna Be’ Entrepreneur Dreamer

Startup Professionals Musings

If I had a dollar for every time someone has said to me, “One of these days, I’m going to start my own company,” I’d be rich. If this day ever comes for all these people, we will be overrun by startups. Yet I don’t lose any sleep over either of these possibilities. Most people procrastinate from time to time, but I suspect that the challenge here is somewhat deeper than that.

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We Need to Have Sympathy for Those With Depression. It is an Illness

Both Sides of the Table

Somebody commented that in 2013 I have done a lot more personal posts than usual. I didn’t set out that way. It just happened. Lots of tragedies in the past couple of months. Aaron Schwartz. Sandy Hook. Now Jody Sherman. And my friend Brad Feld & his wife had written a book on the importance of personal relationships which made me want to weigh in on that.

Blogging 400
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PromoJam 2.0 | The Social Promotion Management Platform

Tech Zulu Event

Today, Los Angeles based PromoJam released their newest product to the world offering marketers something they haven’t had before – full control and insight into social campaigns. With PromoJam 2.0, marketers now have the power to create social media campaigns with no development or design skills required - just drag and drop. The Social Promotion Management Platform is for businesses of all types – small, medium and enterprise.

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Five Startups Revolutionizing Music, In Southern California

socalTECH

Southern California is the center of the entertainment industry, which not only includes the world of Hollywood, movies and film, and television, but is also the home of the music industry. Combine that with the growing startup community here, and you end up with at. intersection of technology and music. We've compiled a list of five of the startups that are revolutionizing some part of music, based here in Southern California.

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Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos Shares His Secrets Of Startup Success

InfoChachkie

As part, of UC Santa Barbara’s Distinguished Lecture Series, Eucalyptus Systems' CEO, Marten Mickos shared his insights and advice regarding what it takes to be a serially successful entrepreneur. Marten has enjoyed a celebrated entrepreneurial career. As an early executive at MySQL, he helped build the company into the world's most used open source database.

Startup 245
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Oh please! Walk the talk!

Berkonomics

Ever had a manager who hung those motivational posters around the office, spoke of “pushing together,” or “you’re empowered to give great service” – and then acted at least once in complete disregard of those statements? It takes only one time caught by subordinates to lose the faith of an entire group of faithful followers. And that certainly counts for customers too, although the customer jungle drums don’t communicate quite as fast as the virtual water cooler system, even with today’s many w

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Top Entrepreneurs Have Follow-up, Not Ideas Alone

Startup Professionals Musings

When someone introduces me to an “idea person,” I automatically jump to the down-side conclusion that this person doesn’t do follow-up. Of course there are people who are great at getting things done, but haven’t had an original idea in their life. Great entrepreneurs, like Bill Gates, are great at both. I was with IBM in the early PC days when Bill worked with us to provide PC DOS and other software.

Ideas 110
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GRP Excited to add Sam Rosen to Its Ranks. How Did He Get the Role? Hustle. Here’s the Story.

Both Sides of the Table

I’m very excited to be finally be able to announce that this week we’ve added Sam Rosen to our ranks at GRP Partners in the role of entrepreneurs-in-residence – EIR. It’s the first EIR that we’ve had in the years that I’ve been with the firm and I hope will be the start of our investment in this program. And it’s the latest in a series of investments we’ve made in building out our practice as the LA technology market continues to grow robustly and

Startup 372
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TZ Presents: ‘Nice Guys’ DO Finish First In Business | Fireside Chat With Clay Collins

Tech Zulu Event

TechZulu is excited to invite you on February 7, 2013 at 7pm , to a fireside chat with Clay Collins , Co-Founder of LeadBrite. Clay will be interviewed by our very own Espree Devora , known as “the Girl who Gets it Done” and creator of SaveBusinessTime. Clay will share his experience on how to build a profitable and bootstrapped SAAS startup that’s doubled in revenue almost every month since its inception.

SaaS 97
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Silicon Beach Firms Plan Showcase At SXSW

socalTECH

A local group is planning an Silicon Beach-themed event at the upcoming SXSW Interactive event in Austin, to help showcase the diversity of companies in the LA tech industry. According to organizers Kevin Winston of DigitalLA and Nicole Jordan of Radix Collective, the Silicon Beach Sunday Funday --planned for March 10th--will include a mixture of companies from multiple verticals - everything from fashion to enterprise to demo, connect, and network at SXSW.

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Creating An Innovative Corporate Culture, Citrix Style

InfoChachkie

This article originally appeared on Forbes HERE. As part of UC Santa Barbara’s Distinguished Lecture Series, Citrix's CEO, Mark Templeton shared his advice regarding building and maintaining a healthy and innovative corporate culture. Mark framed his comments around the culture he built at Citrix, which has been augmented (and complicated) by the significant number of acquisitions the company executed during the past decade.

RSS 221
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Should Startups Announce Their Funding?

Both Sides of the Table

Understanding “The Funding Angle” I sit at enough board meetings to hear conflicting advice given to entrepreneurs about how to handle PR and announcements at startups. I think many board members (including VCs) were trained 10+ years ago when life was very different and their advice often comes from an outdated lens. One of the advantages of blogging, using social media, public speaking, etc as a VC is that you get a more nuanced view of these shifts by watching your own successes a

Startup 355
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I’m Back. Why I Love January

Both Sides of the Table

It’s January. Happy New Year! My last post was December 17 – nearly a month ago. I miss blogging because it serves as a great repository for me of my current thinking, as a way of organizing my thoughts and clarifying what I think and as a conversation started with so many of you (as Hunter Walk elegantly said, “Blog not to show how smart you are, but in the hope of soliciting feedback from smart people.

Writing 313
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Should You Bother Targeting the Tech Blogs for Your PR Campaigns?

Both Sides of the Table

I’ve started a recent series on PR at startups since I get asked for advice on this topic so often. I will put the full list of posts here. The start of this series was, Should Your Startup Announce Funding ? 6 or 7 years ago when TechCrunch was at its peak market share (they are still strong but many more tech blogs have also popped up) there was a term for getting covered there called “the TechCrunch bounce.” If your company was featured there (in the early days of what peop

Blogging 309
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Sandy Hook Promise and Tech Activism

Both Sides of the Table

The tech community has become more politically active over the past 5 years and this is a good thing. We live in a representative democracy and organizing, having a voice and expressing views is critical to our functioning democracy. One of the most visible, active and admirable leaders of this movement is Ron Conway and he describes this in this post on TechCrunch.

Activity 287
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How Google's Old Offices Are Becoming A Tech Hub, with ROC's Walter Grieves

socalTECH

In a sign of the growth of the Silicon Beach technology world, last year, Google moved its headquarters out of a space on Arizona Avenue in Santa Monica, and into a new fancy headquarters space in Venice. However, it appears the spirit of innovation and technology didn't leave Google's old space: instead, that office has become Real Office Centers (realofficecenters.com), an office center which on a recent Friday looked to have become somewhat of a hub for Silicon Beach's startup and investors.

Google 253
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How FreedomPop's Free Wireless Internet is Disrupting Telecom

socalTECH

How do you go about trying to completely disrupt the entire telecom industry? If you're FreedomPop , the Encino-based startup, you start by offering up free 4G wireless data access, and then expand to offer free, voice-over-IP services, along with home-based wireless Internet services. No fly by night startup -- the company is backed by the founders of Skype -- we talked with COO Stephen Sesar about how FreedomPop can provide free wireless Internet, the firm's expansion plans, and how the compan

Startup 245
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Southern California Venture Deals Hit $683.7M in Q4 2012

socalTECH

The latest numbers from the PricewaterhouseCoopers/National Venture Capital Association MoneyTree report were released today, finding that a total of $683.7M was invested across Southern California in Q4 of 2012. That total was less than the $859.6M raised by companies in Q4 of 2011, and less than the $701.18M raised by companies in the region in Q3 of 2012.

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FitOrbit Links Fitness With Dating

socalTECH

FitOrbit , the online fitness service which offers up personal trainers and weight loss plans via the Internet, has tied itself with online dating site Chemistry.com , in what might be the first link between fitness and dating. FitOrbit, which is based in Santa Monica, is the online fitness and personal training startup started by Jake Steinfeld of "Body By Jake", offering up handheld guidance of a personal trainer via the Internet, and tracks fitness, meals, workouts, and more for users.

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Playsino Debuts iPhone, iPad Bingo App

socalTECH

Playsino , the social casino games and app developer headed by Brock Pierce, said Tuesday that it has released iPhone and iPad versions of its Bingo World app. The free-to-play apps are on the Apple iTunes App store. Playsino, which is based in Santa Monica, is a developr of casino focused games, which are available both on mobile platforms and on sites like Facebook.

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EventUp Hits Eight Locations, Plans Further Expansion

socalTECH

EventUp , the online marketplace which helps people find and book unique venues for their events, has now expanded into eight markets, after recently adding Washington, D.C., to its list of cities. The company, which now has operations in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, said that the market is among a number of markets it plans to expand into during 2013, as it rolls out its service nationwide.

Malibu 229
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Creating A Culture Of DIY Hacking, with Tara Tiger Brown and LA MakerSpace

socalTECH

What is a hackerspace, and why might having them available in the area help the tech community? The idea is a community space where people can come together, learn something from one another, build that electronics project, software, or even arts and crafts, in a supported environment. One hackerspace coming together in Los Angeles, LA Makerspace (www.lamakerspace.com) is being put together by Tara Tiger Brown.

Startup 227
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Lynda.com's Growth Trajectory: Revenues Doubled In Last 3 Years

socalTECH

The massive, $103M funding round for Carpinteria-based Lynda.com might have been a surprise for some, except perhaps readers of this publication, who over the years have gotten a glimpse of the growth rate of the company in recent years. The firm--which said it has been profitable since 1997 in its announcement this morning--disclosed that it now has over $100M in annual revenues, and 400 employees.

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Gobbler Gets $1.5M More

socalTECH

Los Angeles-based Gobbler , the cloud-based media backup, file sharing, and collaboration software provider run by Chris Kantrowitz , has raised $1.5M in a funding round, the firm said today. The funding came from celebrities Ryan Tedder (One Republic), Jared Leto , and Troy Carter (Lady Gaga's business manager). Gobbler develops a cloud-based service, specifically aimed at musicians, for helping them send files, collaborate with others, and back up their music.

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Retention Science Links With Magento

socalTECH

Santa Monica-based Retention Science , the developer of big data software being used to help e-commerce companies covert more customers, has linked into e-commerce engine Magento, the firm is announcing today. Magento said that it has added a new extension to Magento called the "Customer Profiling Engine", which will help online stores with automating personalized retention campaigns for customers.

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Event Honors Sky Dayton, Identifies SoCal's Tech and Innovation Leaders

socalTECH

Who are the top technology and innovations leaders? C-Suite Quarterly has identified the top leaders in Southern California's technology industry, and is honoring them Wednesday evening at an event at the Viceroy in Santa Monica. The event--which is being sponsored by HP, Macallan, Cohiba, and others, is honoring Boingo's Sky Dayton , as well as other entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk , Brian Lee , Bill Gross , Karen Kerr , Gil Elbaz , Richard Rosenblatt , Josh Berman , Adam Miller , Brandon Beck