10 Marketplace KPIs That Matter
No two marketplaces are created equal. But they all share some common characteristics. This article delves into those and highlights some of the KPIs that every entrepreneur intent on building a world class marketplace should be able to rattle off the top of their head!
Content: Article | Author: Andrei Brasoveanu | Source: Medium | Subject: Management
Four Questions Every Marketplace Startup Should Be Able to Answer
Marketplace businesses can be messy, and every gain is hard earned. After all, you’re dealing with an ecosystem of participants — buyers and sellers — that’s constantly in flux, their needs and desires changing over time. Unfolding in both online transactions and offline interactions, marketplaces are organic and dynamic.
Marketplace leaders need to be experts in the dynamics of their platforms. Identify those dynamics in … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Jonathan Golden | Source: Medium | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Strategy
The Most Common Mistakes Made By Startups Throughout The Hiring Process
In the venture capital industry, we talk a lot about the importance of the founding team. But we might underestimate, especially in the early stages, something that might be as important as their drive, soft skills and strategic sophistication: their ability to recruit an A-class team. So I wondered, what are the best practices out there? I knew that I couldn’t find the golden formula, … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Willy Braun | Source: Medium | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Human Resources
What Seven Years at Airbnb Taught Me About Building a Company
I first joined Airbnb as an engineer, and then as one of the first members of the budding PM team. Back then there were a couple dozen engineers, a few designers, and two very cute dogs. Over the next seven years as the company scaled to thousands of global employees, countless cute dogs, and over $30b in value, I took on a lot of interesting … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Lenny Rachitsky | Source: Medium | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management
10 Hiring Hacks For Nailing Culture Fit From New York’s Top Tech Recruiters
Each month General Catalyst brings together leading technologists from New York’s top startups for a brainstorming session on an industry challenge or theme. Through an exchange of best practices, our goal is to move the collective tech ecosystem forward. This month, we focus on company culture. We hosted Chief People Officers and recruiting leads from New York’s pioneering startups and here are some of the … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Denali Tietjen | Source: Medium | Subjects: Culture, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior
The Cognitive Distortions of Founders
Cognitive behavior theory says automatic thoughts color and distort our observations, our judgments, and our actions. These automatic thoughts come to mind without even trying. They reflect deep beliefs about self, past experiences, and expectations for the future, and they have a profound impact on judgment and behavior. I’ve met thousands of founders over the last decade or so and I think many of them … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Michael Dearing | Source: Medium | Subject: Entrepreneurship
5 Cheap, Old-School Hacks for Building Company Culture
Building culture doesn’t always have to entail a huge cost or commitment. In fact, some of the most powerful culture-building tools are essentially DIY hacks. Here’s a look at some of the most effective tools Hootsuite has found over the years.
Content: Article | Author: Ryan Holmes | Source: Medium | Subjects: Culture, Management, Organizational Behavior
8 Principles of Great Leadership
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
Effective Value Messaging: The Definitive Guide
Companies do not pay enough attention to strategic messaging. Message effectiveness is not easy to track and to report on. This isn’t an A/B test with which you can get exact results in a matter of days, if not hours. The effects of great messaging and story comes later and usually results in shorter sales cycles. When you tell a consistent story and communicate a … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Myk Pono | Source: Medium | Subject: Marketing / Sales
How To Improve Content Distribution Strategy
Creating great content is just one piece of the puzzle of a successful content marketing strategy and even an amazing content doesn’t guarantee huge audience. Content distribution is typically an afterthought for many marketing teams. It feels like by the time teams have a solid piece of advice to share with their target audience, they’ve already forgotten about distribution. But posting on your blog and … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Myk Pono | Source: Medium | Subject: Marketing / Sales
How To Track Customer Acquisitions: Customer Lifecycle, Sales Funnel, and Content Strategy
This article will walk you through the customer acquisition funnel. The primary goal is to help you design, analyze, and optimize your customer acquisition process. The secondary goal is to present different perspectives on moving customers through the lifecycle stages and to show how marketing, sales, and customer success teams should collaborate and where each team’s responsibilities lay. Hopefully, everyone will find at least one … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Myk Pono | Source: Medium | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales
Robert McKee
… what attracts human attention is change. […] if the temperature around you changes, if the phone rings — that gets your attention. The way in which a story begins is a starting event that creates a moment of change.
Content: Quotation | Author: Robert McKee | Source: Medium | Subjects: Attention, Marketing / Sales, Personality / Behavior
The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen
It’s Zuora’s, and it’s brilliant. Here’s why.
Content: Article | Author: Robert McKee | Source: Medium | Subject: Marketing / Sales | Company: Zuora
All the Public Startup Pitch Decks in One Place
Andy Sparks and Joshua Levy have assembled a list of reference pitch decks for founders to view when building their own. Some notable inclusions: YouTube, LinkedIn, Mint, BuzzFeed, AirBnB, Tinder, Foursquare, Moz, and Buffer.
Content: Online Resource | Authors: Andy Sparks, Joshua Levy | Source: Medium | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital
Ben Horowitz
Every time your company gives someone a promotion, everyone at that person’s organizational level evaluates the promotion and judges whether merit or political favors yielded it.
Content: Quotation | Author: Ben Horowitz | Source: Medium | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior
Steven Sinofsky
Business is a social science which leads to lots of crazy advice that arises from doing whatever seems to be working at a given moment for a visible and successful company. […] Conversely, if something isn’t going well then it won’t be long before the collective wisdom concludes that you need to go with the other end-point of the pendulum.
Content: Quotation | Author: Steven Sinofsky | Source: Medium | Subjects: Best Practices, General
Steven Sinofsky
If there is one thing that consistently amazes me it is that org changes are made without clearly and deliberately identifying what problems will get solved by the new structure, new leaders, and new resource allocation. In fact, most every org change I ever saw that didn’t work started off not with a problem statement but with a goal of putting a certain person in … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Steven Sinofsky | Source: Medium | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior
Steven Sinofsky
When you create an org chart you are creating your product — the seams in the org get reflected in the product; the depth of feature work gets reflected in resource allocation; the coordination across job functions gets reflected by the leaders you choose, and so on.
Content: Quotation | Author: Steven Sinofsky | Source: Medium | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior
Steven Sinofsky
In practice, there are few hard and fast facts that govern the sociology of organizations. I would go as far as to say that anything can be made to work for any structure. In fact, since there is no optimal or perfect organizational structure (if there was, then this post would be unnecessary) then the most important thing is to know the weaknesses of your … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Steven Sinofsky | Source: Medium | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior
Steven Sinofsky
As was well-documented back around 2006, things had not been going well in developing the next release of Windows and so naturally one might ask if the organization caused the problem, if there was just a leadership/management problem, or the problem was in some process that could be addressed. That is always the issue with an org-centric view of execution problems. Is it the physical … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Steven Sinofsky | Source: Medium | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior