998 Posts Found

As a founder, learning how to launch your startup is incredibly important. But as your project grows, you will have more and more people following your lead. Many founders are inexperienced at the art of leadership and lack the management principles necessary to build an enduring company. History ー even the history of Silicon Valley ー furnishes many illustrations of skillful leadership and of principles … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Aneesh Pappu, Josh Singer | Source: Medium | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Leadership

After watching other founders – including myself – flail about, pivoting their way through the darkness, I’ve become obsessed with being more systematic and disciplined about entrepreneurship. So I decided to take Leo Polovets’ lead and standardize risk management into a single spreadsheet, which you can copy, download, or remix.

Content: Article | Author: Josh Smith | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Risk Management

When Leslie Ziegler joined the founding team of Rock Health in 2010, she had an enormous task ahead of her: make the intimidating world of institutional health care approachable for startup founders. No matter what the firm did next, its brand was going to have to do this heavy lifting, and as a veteran art director with the likes of McCann Erickson and DDB, this … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Leslie Ziegler | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Brand, Entrepreneurship, Marketing / Sales

The clearest indicator of the values driving a company — your own or one you’re considering joining — is already in motion from the start, in one of the last places you’re probably looking: compensation.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bethanye McKinney Blount | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Culture, Entrepreneurship, Human Resources

If you’re a B2B startup founder, having warm relationships with a crowd of prospective customers is an ideal. But it can also be a reality. In this exclusive interview, Peter Kazanjy shares the steps any startup — no matter how small — can use to build its own, robust Customer Advisory Board. He covers how to recruit members, gather high-quality feedback, keep relationships strong, and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Pete Kazanjy | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

As a professor teaching strategy, most recently at Harvard Business School and Northeastern University, I have tried to offer the minimum essential explanation of an integrated view of strategy, to combine the best of the many frameworks that exist, show how they relate to one another, and distill the field to the essentials that entrepreneurs need to know to get started.

I’ve published my notes … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Kevin J. Boudreau | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Strategy

It’s worth thinking about whether you are a category creator or disruptor. If you are creating a category, focus on market risk — do users really feel the pain and want this? Is there budget out there? If you are trying to take over a category, then what are the dynamics, the changes in technology or environment, the 10x better that will allow you to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Sarah Guo | Source: LinkedIn | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Strategy

Great entrepreneurs can change and expand markets, even consumer attitudes. Total focus on solving a problem for a customer you understand helps you dominate a “small market,” and dominance of a tactical, small market gives an agile and ambitious team a wedge to grow from. Many great companies start from a tactical feature in a space full of problems. Initially, they must fight to maintain … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Sarah Guo | Source: LinkedIn | Subject: Entrepreneurship

A company is a great story told again and again, to recruits, investors, media, customers, and partners, until it’s real.

Content: Quotation | Author: Sarah Guo | Source: LinkedIn | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Miscellaneous

Some entrepreneurs validate customer need through years of having lived the problem. Others go native with users — survey and interview them, show mocks and prototypes, do demand testing by “selling” or advertising a product they haven’t built yet, even get customers to partner and co-develop with them. There’s no replacement for shipping a product and getting adoption, engagement and revenue data. But that is … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Sarah Guo | Source: LinkedIn | Subjects: Customer Related, Entrepreneurship

Kabam’s story is pretty well known. In a Cinderella story twist, the social network-turned-sports-turned-gaming company weathered three major pivots in 10 years to ultimately sell for $800 million. This is pretty much unheard of. But there’s a big chunk of this unlikely tale that hasn’t been told — how they managed to pull it off. In this exclusive interview, Co-founder and CEO Kevin Chou shares … [ Read more ]

Content: Case Study | Author: Kevin Chou | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship | Company: Kabam

A lot of companies don’t decide how they want to grow until they’re well into their growth phase. For a long time, your actions pull your company along, and then all of a sudden it switches — your existing business starts pushing your behavior. External forces like feature requests, the need for more customer support, the need to create a team to do X when … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Claire Hughes Johnson | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Organizational Behavior

As your startup grows, what your customers expect from you will change and the volume of their requests will change. You’ll shift from the reactive mode of supporting requests as they happen to the proactive mode of fixing issues before they ever become a problem.

I’ve spent the last seven years building the customer success function at HubSpot. I grew with the team, and played a … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael Redbord | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Entrepreneurship, Management, Organizational Behavior

By any measure, Instagram’s major milestones are staggering. The entire startup ecosystem sat up and took notice when Facebook acquired it for $1B only a year and a half after its founding. But that was both the result and beginning of mind-boggling, exponential growth in its user base, from 30 million monthly active users when it was acquired in 2012 to 200 million two years … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Mike Krieger | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Human Resources, Management

It’s easier than ever to start a business, but harder than ever to scale one. […] And while there has been a lot of emphasis on starting lean, there has been a surprising dearth of tools and information as to how to cross the chasm between starting and scaling.

Content: Quotation | Authors: David Butler, Linda Tischler | Source: Fast Company | Subject: Entrepreneurship

7 signs that you’re focused on stuff that doesn’t matter, and how to snap out of it.

Content: Article | Author: Alex Turnbull | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Cooley, one of the top startup law firms, has open sourced the legal documents required to do a Series Seed or Convertible Note financing.

Content: Online Resource | Source: Cooley Godward | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Free Stuff / Tools, Legal, Venture Capital

Many of the mechanics of running a business are opaque, particularly to first-time entrepreneurs. You may not have done bookkeeping or contract negotiation before. You might be used to working in companies with processes and people in place to support your work. Don’t worry! Every skill involved in running a business is learnable. Atlas exists to help entrepreneurs worldwide start, run, and grow internet businesses. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: Stripe | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Small Business

New research examines fair market value of startups worth over $1 billion and finds huge discrepancies in their purported worth.

Content: Article | Authors: Ilya Strebulaev, Shana Lynch | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Finance

I tell our founders that there should always be a slide in their board decks that shows the five most likely acquirers of their business and what they’ve done to further those relationships since the last board meeting.

Content: Quotation | Author: Chris Fralic | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship