Both Sides of the Table

MAY 4, 2013

Should I trust my instincts for founders and products or should I be more focused on the market size or business plan? I eventually stumbled on to the best source of high-quality deal flow imaginable – blogging. So I stand by my well-read Quora post of why I don’t attend demo days. It’s a Demo Day thing.

Startup 361

Startup Venture Capital Pricing Technical Review 361

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 4, 2013

Should I trust my instincts for founders and products or should I be more focused on the market size or business plan? I eventually stumbled on to the best source of high-quality deal flow imaginable – blogging. I have always advised startup companies against letting valuations get massively ahead of market norms.

Venture Capital 347

Venture Capital Startup Pricing Invest 347

Eric Greenspan

MAY 25, 2010

What I mean by this is we do radio better by building it around the web, social media and traditional marketing strategies alongside, behind and wrapped around our radio shows. We post content from our show on blogs including show notes and tips and tricks. We post podcasts immediately on the blog, websites and iTunes.

Social Media 220

Social Media Media Blogging Social Network 220

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 15, 2014

” I have been weighing in slowly on the topic over the past few weeks on Twitter but have avoided writing a blog post about it until now. I first discovered him or her as a commenter on Fred Wilson’s blog. It wasn’t because I’m the target demo for that app – I am certainly not. But context matters.

Technical Review 329

Technical Review Blogging Examples Startup 329

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 31, 2012

Jeff (also an HBS alum) co-teaches the LTV course with Professor Eisenmann about a student of theirs who had written a blog post about sales taking on some of my previous assertions. The idea that the course asks students to write public blog posts is a testament to its more modern teaching style.

Startup 319

Startup Sales Course Competition 319

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 26, 2010

Along with detail orientation I have a strong bias for “doers.&# When I ask for a quick demo and the CEO tells me that he’ll schedule a follow-on meeting with his sales rep because, “I’m not a demo guy. One of the large parts of the burn was PR, Marketing and attending conferences.

Entrepreneur 286

Entrepreneur Startup CTO Hire Sales 286

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 18, 2015

There’s too much PR and too many tech blogs and too many newsletters and aggregators and Twitter summarizers to even try to catch everything that’s going on and equally there’s so much noise that it becomes harder to be heard. I often tell people that in some ways it’s easier to build great companies in down markets.

Software Review 150

Software Review Startup Venture Capital Invest 150

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 13, 2018

The most important advice I could give you before you set out in fund raising mode is to understand that fund-raising a sales & marketing process and needs to be managed. People who believe the former believe that you should see the market demand before too many people know you’re “in market.”

Venture Capital 332

Venture Capital Funding Startup Sales 332

socalTECH

SEPTEMBER 23, 2009

We've been two years in development, and are excited to provide a revolutionary platform for web sites, blogs, and social sites to create and grow their international business. The service is for sites targeting foreign markets, who are determining how to better optimize and tune how they are engaging around the globe.

Startup 133

Startup Technical Review Social Network Content 133

Tech Zulu Event

AUGUST 6, 2013

Marketing tools may change, the way consumers discover products may change, and consumer behaviors may change, but one thing that remains constant is the consumer adoption process. In my years of business, my days in school, and my experience at WeLink, I have learned about numerous companies and how they market their products.

Tool 81

Tool Product Marketing Pricing 81

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

.&# It was my investment philosophy that observing teams’ performance over time was far more insightful than reacting to how good of a product demo they do, how good they present Powerpoint slides or how great tech blogs say they are. Market Opportunity. But what about markets? I would like to say it again.

Entrepreneur 330

Entrepreneur Marketing Venture Capital Hulu 330

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 9, 2009

I recently wrote a blog post here in which I argued that the best VC meetings are discussions and not sales pitches. A few weeks ago I sat through two very contrasting presentations and wrote this blog post right afterward. We talked about measurable marketing. This is part of my ongoing series, “ Pitching a VC.&#.

Venture Capital 288

Venture Capital Startup Advertising Yahoo 288

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 13, 2009

Tonight I was reading a good blog post ( here ) from Sean Powers with Alistair Croll on preparing yourself for the TC50 “bump” – the rise in traffic that a company gets from presenting at TechCrunch 50. Market, market, market. Write a blog post or a journal about how you feel while you’re there.

Startup 310

Startup Venture Capital Press Journal 310

InfoChachkie

DECEMBER 10, 2012

If we hadn’t done well on Hacker News we would have needed to have some serious product/market fit discussions.". The best way to 'game the system' is simply to develop a genuinely interesting and useful product, or blog post, open source library, etc., to actionable user feedback, "Just went through the demo. Hacker Downside.

News 198

News Sites Startup RSS 198

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 30, 2011

The global advertising market is estimated at around $475 billion / year with only 12% of this online and measurable. And market research seems to confirm this. I’m sure it probably resonants with how most of you read the web. So I’ve spent the last few years checking out companies that are trying to solve for this problem.

Advertising 352

Advertising Media Social Media Screening 352

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 13, 2011

Brad on blogging. How did you start blogging? “My My initial desire to blog came from something that’s always been my approach to investing – I’m a nerd and I love to play with the technology and part of my approach has really been to understand things both at a user level and at a reasonably deep tentacle level.

Venture Capital 288

Venture Capital Startup Technical Review Software Review 288

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 25, 2010

When I first read Paul Graham’s blog post on “High Resolution&# Financing I read it as a treatise arguing that convertible notes are better than equity. Markets always evolve toward higher resolution. I believe you reward investors who make an early call just like on the public stock market. Photo credit: D.

Venture Capital 286

Venture Capital Pricing Technical Review Startup 286

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 18, 2014

The frantic pace of technology cycles, the amount of tech news, the blogs, the conferences, the demo days, the announcements, the fundings, the IPOs. Any longtime readers of this blog will know that I often try to simplify complex ideas into a simple parable that is easier to remember to set the tone of one’s behaviors.

Startup 317

Startup Technical Review Venture Capital Email 317

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 4, 2011

How many social networks, picture sharing sites, new aggregators or blogs can we really spend time on? I don’t want to go in depth here because it could take a whole blog post, but if you’ve got direct sales teams make sure to have performance metrics in place. Sure, but will they still be using it in a year? In 6 months? In 3 months?

Metrics 346

Metrics Startup SEO Customer 346

Tech Zulu Event

SEPTEMBER 11, 2012

According to her blog , the Material Mix software features a disruptive technology that commoditizes the trade of reusable materials within the current waste collection industry. This partnerships will help find innovative ways to market firm’s reusable materials. Billion Market Opportunity. billion market opportunity.”.

San Diego 55

San Diego Education Platform Web 55

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 29, 2010

Justyn Howard, founder of Sprout Social has a blog post that he’s written about his experiences of migrating from scrappy tools to more efficient ones (i.e. I changed that quickly when the market shifted and I had to lay off more than 80 people – many of whom were friends. I was too much Accenture, not enough Startup.

Startup 333

Startup Class Conference Product 333

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 5, 2014

uBeam’s tech does work and I have safely seen it demo’d in the real life many times. Of course we threw at him every skepticism of the market that we had heard or thought. His math was correct and I can hardly blame him for taking a guess at what uBeam does but every assumption that he used was wildly inaccurate.

Technical Review 417

Technical Review Startup Software Review Course 417

CEO Flow

DECEMBER 23, 2008

The old way of marketing and selling involved pushing information onto prospects and then working to control their steps along a sales process. You’ll have to accept that most prospects that initially sign up for a blog, trial or demo just won’t be ready to do anything.

Sales 40

Sales Customer Custom Blogging 40

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 22, 2010

File this under both Startup Adivce and Sales & Marketing Advice. Oh, and Demo charges the startups $18,000. It got me thinking, which for me is always the sign of a good blog post. Guy Kawasaki said it best (paraphrasing), “you can’t do great marketing with a bad product.&# I think Robert’s right.

Tips 307

Tips Startup Press Blogging 307

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 1, 2011

Justin Bieber is unbelievably entrepreneurial and most of you will never know it because he serves a target demo that doesn’t include you. You need to be great at something: technology back-end, front-end design, usability, sales, marketing, quantitative analysis, leadership –> whatever.

Entrepreneur 398

Entrepreneur Startup Writing Blogging 398

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 11, 2011

All of this is covered in more detail on the TWiVC video above (and much of it is covered in text on this blog on the “ Raising VC &# tab). If they did they would be in constant violation because VCs often see 3-4+ companies in every market that they operation. Can’t you just demo & talk? Demo could go here].

Venture Capital 340

Venture Capital Slides Doc Startup 340

Tech Zulu Event

JANUARY 12, 2010

The final showoff's have been selected, so that brings the count to a total of 10 showoff's plus a wild card from the demo night at UCLA (full list of showoff's below). Eric Ries is the author of the blog Startup Lessons Learned and the lean startup methodology. He is a frequent public speaker. Brian Solis. Alex Quilici.

Twiistup 40

Twiistup Riot Games UCLA Media 40

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 30, 2016

Here’s a recent one I did on Fund Raising in tough markets. If I blog on a stand-alone platform I have to work to get distribution. So if my target demo is on Snapchat — why the f**k would I publish somewhere else? You can follow me on Snapchat at msuster. https://medium.com/media/fcbf3382017c6dc3792ff6baf03d260b/href Nope!

Snapchat 150

Snapchat Course Media Venture Capital 150

SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

This continues my series of posts: Top 30 Startup Posts for July 2010 Top 30 Startup Posts in June 2010 Top 29 Startup Posts May 2010 Startup CTO Top 30 Posts for April 16 Great Startup Posts from March Here they are: How to Minimize Politics in Your Company - Ben's Blog , August 24, 2010 “Who the f@#k you think you f$&kin’ with.

Startup 191

Startup Venture Capital Blogging CTO Hire 191

Frank Addante

DECEMBER 5, 2006

About Frank Addante > (from the Silicon Valley Business Journal) Twitter Updates follow me on Twitter Blog Archive ► 2010 (2) ► June (1) Part II: Optimized for Profitability ► February (1) Get Out of the Office! ► October (1) New Video! . What is the Rubicon Project? Startup 3.0: Be scrappy. ReaXions, Inc.

Outsource Development 40

Outsource Development Develop Development Product 40

SoCal CTO

JULY 13, 2010

" 8 Questions to Ask When Interviewing at a Startup - Instigator Blog , June 18, 2010 Job interviews are meant to be conversations. Just because a product has a patent, deep complexity and an obvious competitive advantage does not mean that it can fly by itself into the market. Yes, even bootstrappers. liquidation preference.

Startup 175

Startup Venture Capital Slides Blogging 175

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 25, 2009

This is part of my blog series “ Pitching a VC.&#. The presenter comes out of the meeting proud at having gotten through all 30 slides (and maybe even a demo) with a bunch of smiling faces and nodding heads and no discussion. After the sales meetings I would ask the exec afterward, “how do you think it went?&#

Venture Capital 275

Venture Capital Sales Slides Startup 275

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 1, 2011

If you get a moment, as a favor to John for having produced such wonderful notes I’d be grateful if you would check out his most excellent startup blog The X Factor. I appreciate the write-up and your continued support of this blog. Thank you, John. Why AltaVista Failed To Become as Successful as Google. How Hashable Got Buzz.

Google 302

Google Startup Advertising Acquisition 302

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2016

Let me first address VCs or anybody else who is likely above the age where they “get” Snapchat but whose customers are likely in the age demo who use it religiously. It will be a follow on from my “App is Crap” or “Web Second, Mobile First” blog posts but in short, video, updated, digestible formats.

Snapchat 150

Snapchat Screening Venture Capital Guide 150

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 27, 2015

I was trying to tell a real story about grit and risk and determination and seeing the markets early but struggling to persuade others. The truth is that many “unicorns” have reached the status solely because the funding markets have said so. That’s how markets go. ” No. We f **g don’t. I like that.

Technical Advisors 150

Technical Advisors Startup Writing Blogging 150