TechCrunch LA

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

Bird Pay will work by way of a QR code, which can be read via your app at the point of sale at participating businesses to make cashless purchases. Both Apple Pay and Google’s Android-based offering have had strong take-up, as have alternatives from Samsung, PayPal and many others. The challenge in the U.S.,

Santa Monica 158

Santa Monica Startup Demand Los Angeles 158

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 4, 2021

It means you’ve anticipated what your customers will need as they move up the power curve, For example, Google is a one-stop source for your online needs, ranging from simple search to managing your e-mail, to analyzing your Web site. Of course, great startup solutions need great teams to implement them. Intelligence.

Ideas 155

Ideas Startup Summary Examples 155

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 26, 2016

profitable and companies like Amazon who chose to focus on growth > profitability were not losing money on each book sale (ie they were gross margin positive). And even when calculated correctly often CAC’s are assumed to be constant but of course they’re not. Gross margin positive !=

Metrics 150

Metrics Startup SaaS Course 150

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2014

Much has been written about when it is time to hire a “professional CEO” to run a startup company and of course that has long been a norm in Silicon Valley when founders find that their inexperience may be a limiting factor in company growth ( know as the Peter Principle ). So why did Larry need to return?

CTO Hire 309

CTO Hire Organization Google Course 309

InfoChachkie

OCTOBER 13, 2009

Sales – Many publishers, including Grit, encouraged newspaper boys to create new routes and expand existing ones by aggressively selling subscriptions to non-subscribers. This pay-per-newspaper formula directly rewarded the children’s sales efforts and sparked a life-long entrepreneurial fire in generations of newspaper boys.

Web 2.0 222

Web 2.0 Web Sales Outsource Development 222

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 19, 2013

The era of VCs investing in successful consumer Internet startups such as eBay led to a belief system that seemed to permeate many enterprise software startups that hiring sales or implementation people was a bad thing. But the “no sales people” mantra isn’t what I’m here to take on. I believe it’s flawed.

Startup 403

Startup Sales Software Review Technical Review 403

InfoChachkie

DECEMBER 23, 2018

My wife quickly adopted Alexa as a member of the family, relying on her for recipes, jokes, telling the time, predicting the weather and, of course, playing music. The research organization CIRP announced in August that sales of smart speakers had exceeded 50 million, with sales expected to grow 48% over the following twelve months.

Platform 100

Platform Technical Review Research Entertainment 100

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 29, 2014

And being persistent I believe is the most important attribute for success in an entrepreneur (assuming of course that you have all the other requisite skills). Of course at one end of the bucket are entrepreneurs who are persistent but just aren’t polite. Of course I felt badly. It’s your job to persist.

Venture Capital 389

Venture Capital Email Startup Conference 389

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

With Google, you get all the storage you need in the cloud for free. Social media facilitates marketing and sales. Of course, not all new businesses can benefit from all these recommendations, so think carefully about what you can do, and what you can’t.

Entrepreneur 162

Entrepreneur Startup Social Media Outsource Development 162

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

They will often run all of the daily reports into them covering off for finance, sales, marketing, biz dev & HR. You can always spot these types because they can’t tell you what their revenue number for last month was or what their sales target is for next month. But ask yourself, what does a COO actually do?

Startup 325

Startup Technical Review Sales Report 325

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 6, 2014

You may have raised money across multiple rounds of investors from 3-4 different VCs and of course most of them would like board seats or at a minimum board observer rights. how much energy to put into channel partners vs. direct sales. how to build an initial sales organization. how to market our products and company.

Startup 325

Startup Sales Technical Review Software Review 325

socalTECH

MARCH 10, 2017

Once you get past Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, and maybe Yelp and Bing, you've counted for 90 percent of all interaction. If you ask Siri for where to get skinny legs jeans, or ask Google Maps for where to get a vegan burrito, they try to give you the best recommendation.

Google 127

Google Paid Search Mobile Activity 127

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 13, 2021

Of course, it takes both short and long-term focus to survive, but I see too many businesses fall into some common product maladies, which ultimately keep them from becoming a unicorn, or achieving the level of disruptive change they initially envisioned. Obsessive sales – must meet revenue goals.

Metrics 133

Metrics Product Yahoo Examples 133

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 17, 2016

The show has become my best curator of which books to read (including my favorite of last year, The Accidental Superpower ) and my go to for understanding geopolitics of: Russia, Iran, Pakistan, China, India and of course the US. But they also take on issues in science, technology and management.

Coach 150

Coach Technical Review Framework Google 150

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 27, 2012

The process for raising money from a VC is a sales process and as such much of what is taught in enterprise sales can be applied. While this post is written about raising venture capital (which I always remind entrepreneurs IS a sales process) the lessons can be applied to any sale or biz dev deal. I disagree.

Venture Capital 308

Venture Capital Sales Entrepreneur Startup 308

socalTECH

SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

As the school year kicks off for college students, one of the big tasks of the year is buying books for their courses. Every price comparison out there, whether that's Google Products, Bizrate, or other sites, can find books, but you can only do it one at a time. You've got to find each one, and research them online.

UCSD 185

UCSD Course Startup Sites 185

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 22, 2014

Of course it is super helpful if a VC can drop you in to important people for business development, recruiting, PR, sales and eventually M&A. The best way – of course – is to reference check. Connections? It felt like there was a wavelength with management and somebody wasn’t on it. FourSquare. Everywhere.

Venture Capital 364

Venture Capital Coach Writing SaaS 364

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 27, 2012

David encourages entrepreneurs to stay away from the big tech firms (such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple) because they are hard to compete with. And Dropbox & Box.net in a Google, Microsoft, Apple world. We once thought nobody could unseat Google since all inbound traffic to the web came from them. Of course not.

Technical Review 299

Technical Review Venture Capital Yammer Google 299

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 28, 2018

If a consumer will pay a fixed price for a product or service then the battle over who gets the margin in any sale is between the person who merchandises a product and the person who manufactures it. This has obviously occurred in battles with tech platforms like Yelp vs. Google or Zynga vs. Facebook). What is it, really?

Product 296

Product Course Customer Custom 296

Tech Zulu Event

DECEMBER 16, 2013

The seed round was led by investments from Richard Chino, a key early member of GoTo.com and Smarter.com; Dan Murray, CFO of Machinima ; Derek Draper of Wildfire by Google; Nikhil Srivastava of KKR ; Angel Investor Andrew Schwartz and other angles from LA and Silicon Valley. 750,000 for Scaling & Product development.

Seed Funding 79

Seed Funding Product Draper Develop 79

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 28, 2016

And of course fudging never produces world-class results, so many companies suffer from mediocrity. People laughed at Google buying YouTube for $1.65 And while leaders set direction, of course it is teams that deliver results. They are great at their respective fields whether they be marketing, sales, programming, PR, whatever.

Organization 150

Organization Course Ideas Class 150

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 27, 2011

The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. If you hire 6 sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business for 4-6 months. “COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you.

Startup 418

Startup Venture Capital Sales Technical Review 418

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 22, 2011

But of course tens of thousands of people saw the headline while probably 10% of them or less watched the video. I guess that’s why people like my pal Trevor Owens felt vindicated by the sale of GroupMe as evidenced by his Tweet to me. Google has Google Voice. What do I think now?

Company 295

Company Companies Gogii Google 295

socalTECH

JANUARY 14, 2011

We have a very sophisticated, analytics and software platform that over half the Fortune 50 are now using, to help guide how they invest in marketing and sales activities and investments. Jovian's platform allows us to process and analyze campaigns in-flight, and also provide in-flight course corrections for marketers.

Social Media 235

Social Media Demand Activity Marketing 235

socalTECH

OCTOBER 4, 2012

We teach through video tutorials, with courses around specific sites, like how to make content for FunnyorDie, taught by one of the staff writers from FunnyOrDie. We also have live lab sessions, which we run through Google+ Hangouts, which mirror the school education experience. Those teachers are what set us apart.

Web 187

Web Content Startup Education 187

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 22, 2012

And of course on Twitter I’ve seen the Tweets, ReTweets and superlatives on what a great post it is. I know that some of the best businesses have seen this rapid acceleration quickly: Google, Facebook, Instagram, AirBnB and the like. In revenue terms our first two years of sales were $2.1 Not Google.

Startup 390

Startup Venture Capital Entrepreneur Technical Review 390

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 29, 2019

Equally important, if someone does find your site, your content must stand out above all similar sites, to keep visitors engaged, close a sale, and get customers to return. Every business person should count on at least a couple of course corrections before they get it right. Build relationships with potential business partners.

Blogging 85

Blogging Search Engine Optimization Writing SEO 85

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2015

Excite, MSN and eventually Google. The initial Apple/AT&T deal was of course limited to the geography in which AT&T operated and thus after its initial success Apple had a template for exclusivity agreements in other countries. So the value on the Internet went “up the stack” to portals such as Yahoo!,

Outsource Development 150

Outsource Development Startup Customer Custom 150

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

In the article it talks about Sequoia’s $19 billion sale of WhatsApp to Facebook that generated apparently $3 billion for Sequoia and its shareholders. This was an industry defining deal on returns in the league of Google, Facebook, Twitter and one imagines Uber. So LPs are investing in potential. Do they win competitive deals?

Venture Capital 264

Venture Capital Invest Funding Competition 264

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 21, 2011

Nordstrom sales reps are trained to do this to, but of course they can’t know every customer that walks around the store. Publishers have been reluctant to put phone numbers on Internet ads because then they lose the ability to track the fact that they drove the sale in the first place. Or can they? The Future.

Mobile 329

Mobile Advertising Media Marketing 329

Inverted Software

SEPTEMBER 8, 2017

From Google Maps, Apple Maps, Facebook, Bing, Yahoo, Yelp and more, Yext lists your business for you and keeps your data accurate so you can be easily found by your customers. Considered to be the #1 landing page builder, Leadpages generates leads and sales for your business on the web, in emails, via text messaging, and on social media.

Software Review 44

Software Review Tool Software Marketing 44

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 26, 2015

Understanding your vulnerability and understanding the power of those with whom you must do business is a very important part of figuring out as a startup how to fit into the broader ecosystem and the art of statecraft is tremendously important in knowing when and how to project power in sales, recruiting, negotiations, fund raising, etc.

Startup 150

Startup Google Software Review Snapchat 150

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2010

I recently did a post for startups on understanding sales people. It’s what makes Google, Google and Facebook, Facebook. Of course I’m generalizing. new features need to go into the sale people’s slides so that they know the latest and greatest about how to differentiate from the competition.

CTO Hire 400

CTO Hire Fractional VPE Startup Outsource Development 400

Tech Zulu Event

APRIL 1, 2013

Learning experience includes: on-demand online video tutorial courses, live video-conference workshops, as well as individual online consultations, live workshops, and group programs. Mike’s work in sales, marketing, distribution, and business development is essential to customer acquisition, growth, and scalability. How does it work?

Web 93

Web USC Course Guide 93

socalTECH

JANUARY 23, 2018

Anyone who has ever bought or sold a home is most likely familiar with the Multiple Listings Service (MLS), the big database of homes for sale used by traditional real estate agents. However, is it better to skip the MLS (and agent) entirely the next time you sell your home? The company just raised $15M more in a Series B.

Artificial Inteligence 113

Artificial Inteligence Woodland Hills Orange County Startup 113

Frank Addante

MAY 23, 2012

The boy's father, my colleague, was quick to exclaim, "He was Googled!" The dad was, of course, alluding to Google's frequently-used strategy to make available free services in otherwise paid markets to rattle competition and gain market share for advertising-supported products. "Some kid is trying to screw us," he elaborated.

Oracle 111

Oracle Google Competition Marketing 111

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 17, 2010

We had software executives from Google, Yahoo!, And of course we had, TheMan. We’ll be conducting a series of educational programes covering: fund raising, team building, product development, sales, marketing, business development and how to prioritize your time as a CEO. Now begins the 6-month journey.

Company 276

Company Companies Startup Southern California 276