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I’ve started a recent series on PR at startups since I get asked for advice on this topic so often. The start of this series was, Should Your Startup Announce Funding ? After that a meme developed amongst many startups (and the advisors that coached them) that, “TechCrunch didn’t matter.
I recently wrote a piece for Mashable on how to create a company blog. Since it’s already written (and since I promised not to republish on my blog other than a summary) if you’re interested please have a read over there. Summary notes and then I’ll extend: Should you blog? What should you blog about?
But for some strange reason they make you file your progress on fund raising, which is the widely picked up by the press. And why I woke up at 4.50am. I like to speak about this topic with first-time wantrapreneurs because if you read the tech press every day you’d get the impression that it all glamor.
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. In stead of doing my typical big long post with 10 PR tips (like I did there), I’m going to break them up into individual (I hope more digestible) chunks.
I don’t know Ezra yet but since he’s taking the time to blog (which I hugesly respect) and share thoughts I thought I’d take him up on his challenge and also spill the beans on my secrets. On blogging I blog because I love it. Mostly I’m Blogging for the Hell of It, Not Blogging to Stay Relevant.
As I’ve said before, all startups need to realize that every other company still has to see itself naked in the mirror in the morning. Stop reading their press releases or hearing their founder talk about he is crushing it. Startups are filled with enormously talented people – often product people & engineers.
In a startup this is a mistake. I pointed out the fact that they only ever talked to the press when the had an announcement and that it was a continual process. In this instance I typically recommend that startups NOT hire a big, well-known PR firm. Their competitors took it seriously. There is one carve out.
I made every textbook mistake at my first startup, which is why I believe I was much more effective at my second one. The following are some lessons I learned about early-stage startup marketing. I worked with an entrepreneur who was to appear at a startup networking event where he was to talk about his company’s plans.
Tracy DiNunzio isn’t your typical Silicon Valley startup founder. She did her first tech startup after the age of 30. And she didn’t start her company in Northern California. She leveraged herself and even sold many of her possessions to get started. She started her business from a personal need.
Creating awareness for your brand and products is one of the lifebloods of technology startups yet in a world where so many companies are being created it becomes difficult to rise above the noise. Ever notice how some companies tend to be in the press all the time and your big new product launch struggled for inches? I am a VC.
We’ve grown accustomed to a professionalism where we know when a work issue comes up we can count on each other for a quick Sunday call between family time. And that person has almost certainly chosen specifically to be a startup lawyer over serving other types of customers because he or she enjoys working with entrepreneurs.
This is part of my series on How to Raise VC but could equally be filed under Startup Advice more generally. He started the call by telling me he had exciting news. Entrepreneurs get so used to friends and family congratulating them on their press coverage that they forget sometimes that this isn’t real.
For our Insights and Opinions section this morning, we asked Michael Terpin , the founder of SocialRadius , to lend some hard-earned perspective on fake releases following the flap last week over a fake press release involving Google, ICOA, PRWeb, and half the Internet news and blogging sites. READ MORE>>.
Yesterday I wrote a post about top-down versus bottom-up thinking. So they create a task list of all the marketing activities an organization can do: press releases, web site updates, customer case studies, blog posts, daily Tweets, Facebook fan page, attending conferences, etc. You have a marketing department with three people.
I’m sure you’ve all heard saying derived from Voltaire, “don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good” which in a way is encapsulated in the lean startup movement and the ideology of shipping a “minimum viable product” (MVP) and then learning from your customer base. Startup Advice'
This is part of my ongoing series “Start-up Lessons”. 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. We listened way too much to what the press said.
It’s a fantastic startup that has had a amazing impact on society. It’s not just about people like me who can (and do) turn up in nearly any city in the US and immediately book a ride. They were a little too fierce in their competitive practices against Lyft to sign up drivers. Is Uber evil? That’s silly.
Chris Dixon wrote a blog post last week titled, “ Techies and Normals &# in which he defined “Techies&# as people who are not just “early adopters&# but also have more of a geeky, technical, product bent. Anyway, Chris’s blog got me thinking about Techies and Normals. He is both.
This is part of my ongoing posts on Startup Advice. The world has changed much since I started my first company in 1999. Tim started to change our processes. Tim encouraged us to set up a blog and start talking openly about what we were doing as a company and inviting comments.
I even prefer to fund entrepreneurs who have experience some level of set-backs in their careers or startups because I think it brings a humility to decision-making that I find healthy. In London when founders failed they were ostracized in the press and culturally I believe it became harder to raise capital.
I know that this will sound like a random post topic for startup advice but I promise it’s relevant. When I startedblogging I had an idea. I would take all of the one-on-one conversations that I have with entrepreneurs from the things I’ve learned and just write them up for anybody to read.
I wanted to also post the series here to have it as a resource on my blog for future entrepreneurs who stop by. It’s the person who never gives up – who never accepts “no&# for an answer. If you’re already running a startup you know all this. I came up lots of reasons why I was the perfect fit.
Yesterday I wrote a post about “ the politics of startups ” in which I asserted that all companies have politics, which in its purest sense is just about understanding human psychology. A co-founder who started by working hard but gets sucked into the tech party circuit and has more interest in socialize than building cool s**t.
Upon graduation from Wharton, John and Kyle launched a startup based upon a simple, pedestrian product: a computer mouse shaped like the head of a golf driver. However, a number of them wanted to vicariously experience the startup world through John and Kyle''s venture. It''s gonna highlight our emotions, our ups and our downs.
Fred Wilson wrote a Tweetstorm and then did a blog post on the topic. I never asked Marc why he stopped blogging but I presume it is some combo of having started a venture capital firm (which you might guess takes a bit of time) and also allowing some air time for his then-less-well-known compadre. Engagement.
Let’s start with the fund. If you’ve been following the press about VC funds you’ll know this is no small feat. Santa Monica is the place where the highest concentration of early-stage startups are created if you consider also the contiguous geography of Venice Beach. What’s up with that?
Brunson’s short and to-the-point blog post, “ It’s Called Networking, Not Using.” It’s why I wrote the blog post on 50 Coffee Meetings. When you want press, it will come. Todd Gitlin is one of the best executive recruiters the technology & startup market in Los Angeles. Startup Advice'
Mark is a Partner at GRP Partners and authors one of the most widely read startupblogs, BothSidesOfTheTable. Start – It’s The Only Way You Will Know. Mark reinforced this message by telling the students, “I didn’t start young enough. I started at 31. The reality is, most startups do not work.
When to start PR? So my simple advice is to start PR as early as possible (and certainly earlier than most of your investors will advise) when you have your head around your product plans and are well into execution (or ready to launch) precisely because your recruiting, seed funding and initial user base may depend on it.
Working with early-stage teams : coaching, mentoring, setting strategy, rolling up sleeves: 9/10. “Ok, so this guy can write a blog and source deals but can he make any money?” ” So it’s now March 2014 – 5 years since I started investing. Sourcing high-quality leads : 9/10. Since then? ” Yup.
Andrew & Petri posed a question to me, “If Walt Disney were starting his company today, what kind of company would he build?” They had all of their character development started (they showed up mock-ups) and the basic gameplay for Game 1 was through through (but not yet built).
I wrote a blog post on how to work with lawyers at a startup nearly two-and-a-half years ago. If you don’t have much experience in working with law firms at a startup it’s a good primer. In that post I talked about how to select a law-firm for a startup. Startup-focused. It was very widely read.
The press around the raise & company was fantastic and the promise of their technology – wireless charging that works as easily as WiFi – would positively affect many of our lives. Even bigger is the desire to stick one’s middle finger up at all of the people who doubted you all along.
They become frustrated when they are unable to build their startup over a weekend, and give up way too soon when the path to real success seems to be interminable. A successful startup needs to be a daily task, with consistent focus. Getting started is always a challenge. Frequency keeps insights current.
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. Needless to say I was positively predisposed to this individual before the meeting started.
I just had to line up behind him. Because my wife is a superstar she published them all on a blog here along with much other wonderful type-A mom advice. We then started talking about Dave McClure. He had just written another one of his way-over-the-top blog posts. EcoMom originally started as SproutBaby.
Chris Dixon is one of my favorite people in tech and writes one of the few blogs I read religiously. If you like the quick summary notes, please check out Adam’s blog on tech, entrepreneurship & VC as a thank you. 2. Chris then discussed his time as founder and CEO of SiteAdvisor, his first venture-backed startup.
When you first start your company and raise initial venture capital your board probably consists of 1-3 founders and 1-2 VCs. Most experienced VCs won’t push you to give up founder control at this stage of the business nor should they. As You Start to Mature. In the Early Days. Mentorship. You’ll get empathy.
I’m a very big proponent of the “lean startup movement&# as espoused by Steve Blank & Eric Ries. In the late 90′s I saw a dangerous trend creeping into the startup world, which was that companies were suddenly raising huge amounts of money too early in their existence. This post originally appeared on TechCrunch.
Startups are hard. When you read the press you only read the glamorous bits. Whether you choose to be happy or not is up to you. You really can’t help but become pumped up with he’s on stage. He took an entire audience of cynical tech people and brought our energy levels up 10 notches. Life is hard.
Some great content around the intersection of startups and being a Startup CTO in June this year. This continues my series of posts: Top 29 Startup Posts May 2010 Startup CTO Top 30 Posts for April 16 Great Startup Posts from March There was some really great content in June. It shows a lack of interest.
It’s why I always work hard to find images for my blog posts & why all of my keynote presentations are visual rather than bullet points with words. This applies equally to VCs, startups & big company executives. When I write a blog post I often see the words before I write them. So I thought I would.
TechCrunch ran my article yesterday as a guest post but I wanted to have a copy here for anybody who missed it and for future readers of this blog. Mine started this way … I started my first company in the “go-go years&# of the Internet: 1999. We had a $40 million round lined up to close in the Autumn of 2000.
A few weeks ago I was reading a blog post by MG Siegler that really struck a chord. I recently was reviewing a press release for a company in which I’m an investor. I told him that I thought the press release was crap (I think my words, exactly). Sometimes I just serve it up directly. ” My response?
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