XYDO.COM: Startups

The @breadpig says Thank You along with @garyvee (and origami!)

When Gary asked us to include something with his Thank You Economy box, we were happy to oblige! We included some origami paper along with instructions for how to make an origami breadpig -- with coupon code for all of our products! Thank you for all the support, breadpig legion, we've donated nearly $200,000 in profits so far! Check out one of the first kits tweeted by one of our legionnaires! And here's the original art by the fabulous Hadley Rouse! Permalink | Leave a comment »

Internet Defense League introduces 'cat signal' for websites @LAtimes @fightfortheftr

For now, the sign that you are needed will look like the bat signal the people of Gotham used to summon Batman, but with a cute cat face. They call it the "cat signal."Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder of Fight for the Future who is spearheading the project, said WordPress, Reddit and the Cheeseburger network have already signed up to be part of the league and that Wikipedia -- the largest website to take part in the anti-SOPA protest -- is also considering membership."With the current sites signed up we have a combined reach of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people," Cheng said. "We are taking the network and tactics of the SOPA fight that we created and turning it into a permanent force."As for why the signal for Internet action is a cat, Cheng said it has to do with Ethan Zuckerman's cute cat theory of digital activism, which posits that the same tools that help people share cute cat photos can also be used for online activism.via latimes.com Go team internet! Permalink | Leave a comment »

5 Ways to Hire People Who May be Smarter Than You

Helpers do what you say, while good help does what you need, without you saying anything. People who can help you the most are actually smarter than you, at least in their domain. Top entrepreneurs spend more time putting the right team in place to accomplish their objectives than they spend on any other components of their job. Some entrepreneurs are so in love with themselves (narcissistic) that they insist on answering every question, and making every decision. That’s not only impossible, but also counterproductive. Effective entrepreneurs team with or employ people who can provide the answers directly, pertinent to their particular area of expertise. True leaders also know how to move out of the way to let others do what they do best. If you’re working too many hours and following up on every detail you may want to look closer at your team to ensure you’ve surrounded yourself with the right people. In short, if you can find people with more passion, more knowledge, and more desire to succeed than you have, it will push you to be better and take the organization to new levels. Here are some key characteristics to look for: Gets things done. Smart people know what’s required, or can figure it out, and are confident enough to make decisions without you. Getting things done is crucial to running a business. Often people with advanced degrees have academic smarts, but are not closers. You can’t afford to make every decision, or follow-up on every action item. Recommend their own ideas. How often do the people around you recommend sound ideas that you never knew were possibilities? If you’re teaming with people who are smarter than you, you should be frequently surprised with their new ideas and solutions. You will be constantly learning from them. Passionate and positive. The smart people you want are as positive and passionate about your business as you are. They take ownership and responsibility for their actions. They convince you with their actions and questions that they understand the big picture. They speak confidently and deliberately, rather than defensively. More listening than talking. Look for team members who are active listeners, where you can see yourself seeking them out for answers, rather than always the other way around. It’s great to team with inexperienced people who are growing so fast, that you can envision working for them soon, or having them take the helm of your business. Avoid the narcissists. Their energy, self-confidence, and charm make them look smart, but they resist accepting suggestions, thinking it will make them appear weak, and they don't believe that others have anything useful to tell them. Narcissists will take credit for all successes, and always find someone to blame for their failures and shortcomings. One of the most important jobs of every entrepreneur, and definitely one of the toughest, is to find and nurture people who are smarter in their roles than you. Resumes don’t provide much of a picture in this regard. Supplement this with networking input, references, and your own personal interactions. If you are looking for a potential business partner, count on building a relationship over several months, before you really know the person. The business relationship at that level is just as important as a personal relationship before marrying (no overnight affairs). If you are hiring, make sure you have multiple interviews, and input from multiple people on the team to balance your view. In my view, one of the most important aspects of being a successful entrepreneur is surrounding yourself with people smarter than you. Don’t let your ego get in the way. It’s the best way for you to grow the business, as well as yourself. Marty Zwilling

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original” [Video]

Creativity expert, Sir Ken Robinson emphasizes an interesting point that schools kill creativity, but importantly how one has to be prepared to be wrong, if one wants to be creative. “….that kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original — if you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity” Same applies to entrepreneurs.

Twitter Digest: 2012-05-26

Usain Bolt posts his slowest ever winning time in 100m final. Weird how 10.04s even looked slow. http://t.co/Y4kMVucr -> [1205.5509] Four Degrees of Separation, Really http://t.co/GxnzQ6CI -> Enjoying a Saturday morning watching epic Stage 20 of Giro over Mortirolo and Passeo del Stelvio. Go Ryder Hesjedal! -> Joe Kraus: We're creating a culture of distraction – http://t.co/0ctyo3qr /via @bfeld -> Petition: Require free access over Internet to sci journal articles from taxpayer-funded research.https://t.co/monA7aHO -> Remarkable graphic (pdf) of Everest deaths by altitude and nationality http://t.co/ndcq8wrb ->

Weekly Recap

Recommended articles for week ending May 27th, 2012. Letsbuy – bought! Now what? Exclusive: LetsBuy customers will now be redirected to Flipkart checkout process Is Indian Facebook a distant dream? What Exactly is Entrepreneurship [Interview with Naeem Zafar/Whiteboard Friday] India’s “GenY” prefers social networks over watching TV; Chat over Voice What makes a product “fit” a market? Or how to achieve product-market fit? Choosing an LLP over a Private Limited Company? Not such a no-brainer, really Why and how to read survey reports? [Data, Intuition and Truth] ValueFirst Acquires Way2sms and 160by2 in an all cash deal How to seed your network in standalone mode Startups Profiled/Funding TextHer : A Serverless P2P Messaging App Now you can customize your pickles at Goosebumps Badhai launches Social and Group gifting, Pooling is social now. Mumbai-based Ambab provides Service-as-a-Product to Startups Quikr secures US$ 32 million PE investment, led by Warburg Pincus TaxiForSure raises funding from Accel Partners, Helion Venture Partners and Blume Ventures CarZ secures $5mn funding from IndoUS Venture Partners JustRechargeIt raises funds from Ladderup and a consortium of investors. VentureFund – the new kid in the block connecting startups and angel investors Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure launched in India A Look at Founders Institute in Indian context Mobile/Gadgets: 68% of users have made an online purchase using their smartphone [eBay India Report] Sify Launches Sify videomeet,Video Conferencing tool for SMBs Sony to phase out feature phones in India by Sept Kobian launches 3G mobile router, connects up to 6 devices

The Experience Economy

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The Democratization of Innovation | Yes That is What is Occurring

Earlier this month I was fortunate to participate in a panel on the Democratization of Innovation. Participants included, Mark Walsh CEO of Genius Rocket, Mike Lincoln of Cooley LP, Ashish Jaiman of Microsoft, and Edmund Pendleton from MTECH at the University of Maryland. Jonathan Aberman of Amplifier Ventures and co-chair of Startup VA was the moderator of our panel. We convened at the Artisphere in Arlington, VA and really had a fascinating discussion surrounding the JOBS Act, 3D printing, low cost software development and other factors supporting the democratization of innovation. Marcia Moran of Modern DC Business covered the event in a post titled Tectonic Economic Shifts Coming and she discusses specific issues such as crowds ourcing, but also structural shifts and what they mean going forward for entrepreneurs and young, recent college grads. From Moran: There’s no denying that administrative headaches blossom when hundreds of uninformed, unsophisticated investors take interest in your company. The entrepreneur also loses the voice of experience and talent that comes with funding from seasoned angels or venture capitalists. Perhaps the personal touch from a mentor that comes with institutional funding will be the entrepreneurs’ greatest loss. Successful businesses gain support from a larger community, particularly when chemistry and complementary business philosophies come into play. I wonder what will happen when the ties to these networks weaken? Yet, when you think about it, only a select few get funded. Maybe it’s time for change after all. The Millennials use technology to build and maximize the power of social networks, and perhaps we’ll need to develop a new mentoring paradigm to match. When you think about the high unemployment/underemployment rates for college graduates, I want to reach out and tell them the old economic model is dying. If you cannot find employment, maybe you should consider creating your own. Sure, not everyone has the qualities to be a successful entrepreneur. But the rules of employment are changing anyway. Ashish shared his thoughts and notes from the event, with some really useful and specific insights the democratization of the software economy. From Ashish: It was a fun event, I had a chance to talk about democratization of software and field some of the questions around it. To prepare for the panel, I started putting my thoughts together and then thought I would share them in the blog, I am also putting some other learning’s and thoughts from the panel. I think there are two main enablers for democratization of software 1) Cost of Hardware has come down significantly Cost to build, host, run the software have come down There is a computer in every pocket and most laps and desks 2) Internet accessibility Penetration of broadband even in remote regions Connected devices over wifi, cell networks On the framework of the two main enablers we can divide the democratization of software into 3 main categories. 1) Democratization of creating or building software – how easy it has become to create software and how everyone with an idea can build software. 2) Democratization of delivering and running software – how easy it has become to put the software in the hands of your customers. 3) New business models and monetization approaches – new and proven business models and monetization opportunities. There is no doubt in my mind that universities have a huge role in the democratization of innovation; this includes everything from creating new knowledge via research to disseminating knowledge via classes, publications, and efforts such as MITx.

I’m Finally Recovered From My 50 Mile Run

On my run this morning along the Charles River, I decided I was finally recovered from my 50 mile run on 4/7/12. The end of my run brought me by the Hatch Shell and I smiled, even though it was muggy, cloudy, and there were too many people around. I’m now sitting in the Ritz Bar (they now call it the Taj, but that doesn’t work for me) a few hours later with Amy doing some writing while she reads. I took a break and decided to write up how the last seven week have been for me emotionally. Basically, they’ve sucked. I wrote The Physiological And Emotional Fallout Of My 50 Mile Race two weeks after the race. I was tired, struggling with depression, but feeling like I had turned a corner. It was a nice fantasy – after a month I was still having wild mood swings, feeling very tired most of the time, totally uninterested in running, and generally feeling overwhelmed by my travel, work, and all the people around me. I’d been through this before in my mid-20′s when I was very depressed for several years while running my first company. This was different – I haven’t felt depressed, but it was just over the horizon. Instead, I had a steady low grade anxiety all the time which would spike up for a few hours before dissipating. I’d feel ok and then suddenly be exhausted and want to take a nap. Or I’d just feel like canceling all my meetings and going home. I knew the feelings would pass, so I just rolled with them when they came up, but I didn’t deny their existence. Other than sleeping a lot, Amy tells me that I’ve been fine the past seven weeks. Low energy, but not noticeably in distress, crabby, or difficult. I haven’t done a survey of the people I interact with on a regular basis, but I’ve been open about how I’ve been feeling and I assume the people close to me have been giving me some space. I’ve been keeping up my typical work pace with one exception – I’ve been sleeping in many mornings as I just haven’t been able to drag myself out of bed at 5am. I felt something noticeably shift two weeks ago. Amy and I had a couple of wonderful days together in Chicago and then I flew on Sunday to New York. I spent the afternoon with a close friend whose wife is very ill, just sitting, talking, and enjoying being together. I went out to dinner with two CEOs we’ve funded and then had a good night sleep. I woke up Monday morning feeling a little flat, but by mid-day I felt normal and attributed it to being sad for my friend and his wife. I felt fine during the rest of my NY trip, I flew to SF for an extremely enjoyable dinner, and then spent the past 10 days in Boulder. While it has been very busy and there is a lot of pressure coming from different directions, I’ve felt very normal the past two weeks. I’ve had a few anxious moments, but they are all tied to specific events and easy for me to process. My normal temperament is very stable and mellow, even when the shit is flying everywhere, and I’ve felt generally back in that zone. I’m running again and enjoying it and I haven’t felt like curling up in a ball in the corner of the room in at least two weeks. As I’ve written before, running the 50 mile race was an amazing experience. But I’ve decided not to do it again while I’m working at the level and intensity that I work at. The training was too much but more importantly the recovery has just been way beyond what I feel like I want to process again anytime soon. So – it’s back to marathons for me, which I know makes Amy smile.

Memorial Day Weekend

“It is on the smallest shoulders that the heaviest price of war is laid.” (Hat tip: Kai Chang)

Don’t be Too Busy to Do Some Reflective Thinking

Startups and entrepreneurs are drowning in the information overload, where the volume of data created is like a new Library of Congress every 15 minutes. That creates a huge gap between data and meaning, and makes quick decisions and action ever more difficult. We all need to take a little more time to think. On the other end of the spectrum, some people “over-think” things to the point of inaction. Acting without thinking, and thinking without action, are both deadly to a startup. The challenge is to find the right balance, and to make the thinking deep and reflective thinking. In his recent book, “Consider,” Daniel Patrick Forrester talks about how some successful entrepreneurs, like Bill Gates, former CEO of Microsoft, force some think time in their schedule by abandoning the office for a cabin in the woods every few months for some reflective thinking. Others simply reserve an hour every morning for private thinking, despite a densely packed schedule. What are the issues and questions that these successful leaders reflect on within their own organizations, and related to their own behavior? Here is a summary as put forth by the research from Mr. Forrester: Control we assert. While none of us can stop the flow of data and the creation of content that swirls around us, we can control how we structure the moments that arise and our responses. As leaders, the control we assert in problem solving sets a tone that will be followed by the whole organization. Level of attention given. Now we work in a state of giving our “continuous partial attention” to issues before us. While not all matters require deep thought, we find the ones that do are afforded equal footing with ones that don’t. We must come to a conclusion about the consequences of giving only partial attention to top initiatives. Type of communication used. If email or text messaging is the default way you interact, then you have already declared where it sits in your hierarchy. While technology allows for speed and immediacy, it doesn’t usually convey the texture and empathy of face-to-face interaction that is key to many important issues. Value of disconnected short dialogues. In many ways, problem solving has devolved into a series of dialogues that take place across digital transmissions with occasional face-to-face interactions. Failure to think deeply about forward-looking events and big ideas will come at a cost. Time booked for your thoughts. With the tethering to technology that happens to us throughout the course of a day, it is clear that we treat time with our thoughts as a low-level priority. Even if you can’t book a week away to thin, it isn’t hard to book a meeting with yourself, when you are off-limits to everything but your thoughts. Reflecting before delivering messages. When people demand immediacy from you, do you consider how the people on the other end will receive it, before you dash off a message? Sometimes multiple crafting and editing iterations are required as you think about the ramifications. Is an electronic message even the right answer? Think-time and reflection don’t just happen when we are alone. Startups will inevitably engage in discourse and dialogue through meetings. You need to insure effective discourse in meetings (“thinking out loud”) by making sure there are no negative consequences to dissent and debate. Otherwise meetings will be perceived as a waste of time by the people who count. While technology and the Internet allow you to act and react more quickly than ever before, you need more than ever to consider decisions reflectively before making them. In addition to solving problems the right way, make sure you are solving the right problems. Marty Zwilling

Govt of India wants to ban HTTPS and SSH?

There is a proposal to block access to Internet as we know it in India and if it goes through you can say good bye to Gmail, Facebook and every form of secure communication you have had on the internet. Here is the proposal. http://www.dot.gov.in/isp/guideinternationalgateway.htm Please see II. LEVEL OF ENCRYPTION Individuals/Groups/Organisations are permitted to use encryption upto 40 bit key length in the RSA algorithms or its equivalent in other algorithms without having to obtain permission. However, if encryption equipments higher than this limit are to be deployed, individuals/groups/organisations shall do so with the permission of the Telecom Authority and deposit the decryption key, split into two parts, with the Telecom Authority. This proposal means that You can not use HTTPS in its default form. The default for HTTPS keys is 512. Please see http://www.openssl.org/docs/apps/genrsa.html#item_numbits You can not use SSH in its default form. The default key length for SSH is 1024 or 2048. http://www.openssh.org/faq.html#2.6 Why is this bad? Most software companies use SSH as a daily flow of their life. This means that most software which people use daily will break. You use HTTPS everyday. For example Gmail changed default to always use http in 2010. Because they cared about your privacy. Facebook recommends that you always use https. With the default key length of 512, you would be breaking the law. Lets say that everyone changed their defaults to always use key lengths of 40 bit. (Which is not going to happen). This is what wikipedia says about 40 bit key lengths A typical home computer in 2004 could brute-force a 40-bit key in a little under two weeks, testing a million keys per second; modern computers are able to achieve this much faster. Using free time on a large corporate network or a botnet would reduce the time in proportion to the number of computers available.[1] With dedicated hardware, a 40-bit key can be broken in seconds. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Deep Crack, built by a group of enthusiasts for US$250,000 in 1998, could break a 56-bit Data Encryption Standard (DES) key in days,[2] and would be able to break 40-bit DES encryption in about two seconds.[3] So all your banking passwords, your credit cards, your private data is breakable in seconds. I am sure that the internet doesn’t have any crackers who want to steal your passwords. [image credit: wikipedia] [Guest article contributed by Shabda. He is cofounder of Agiliq, a company that builds amazing apps. Their blog talks about many technical topics but reading them may be soon illegal as they plan to use HTTPS.]

Now you can customize your pickles at Goosebumps

Now you can customize your pickles by choosing ingredients on Goosebumps, a fresh new service launched by Mumbai based Digi-cult. Here is a QnA with Pinank Shah, founder of Goosebumps: 1. What’s the origin of this idea? My mother-in-law has been making pickles in the quantities of 500 – 700 kgs a year for the last 11 years. She supplies the same to friends, relatives & acquaintances in pretty decent quantities year on year. Pickle sales are not driven by tasting on the spot, in the sense, the places where pickles are sold have bottles which are sealed pack. They are packed with a brand name on it which is already known in the market. Hence the consumers buy them on-the-go. And I come from an online background. I run a digital advertising agency called Digi-Cult in Mumbai. Hence the idea stuck – why not sell pickles online in a country where such ideas are now gaining market acceptance? Also, there are many friends who are away from home working and miss the home-made food (ghar ka khaana). Hence we shot pictures of the pickles & cropped them to make the cover page of the website, wrote some lines for each of them & made them live for selling. 2. Where do you get the pickles made from? As stated above, mother-in-law makes them in-house assisted by 2 helpers & daughters. Pi: Future plans? We have already tied up with a company called Grab-a-Grub, a food delivery company. They have a pool of 50+ finest restaurants in Mumbai from where they deliver food to their audiences. These TG perfectly fit into Goosebumps’ strategy. Hence with every order, we send a sample of Goosebumps Pickles complementing the food. Also we’ll have a page in their booklet of menu items of these restaurants. Future plans are to come out with season based pickles. Product innovation is the key in this market & hence we’ll stick to the brand promise of giving goosebumps with more variety. – What’s your take on the Goosebump concept? For sure, do give the service a spin and share your comment. The website definitely is very well designed and sets a standard for other niche sites to follow. But more than that, is this an online business? Or it’s all about offline distribution?

Twitter Digest: 2012-05-25

Today in self refuting sentences: "Simply run {MA} and click on 96) to toggle to Advanced Search" -> Speaking of dueling FB algos, this: http://t.co/itWN54xe -> When the algos really went at it over FB last Friday reminds me of Close Encounters when computer & aliens did tonal sequence duet. -> Now Coveted – A Walkable, Convenient Place – http://t.co/zDlg0NZI /cc @richard_florida -> Just wrote a non-code email making extensive use of regular expressions. Yeesh, I can be geeky. -> The Verge reviews Samsung Galaxy S3. Shorter version: great hardware/perf; big; & a little Samsungy. http://t.co/qM3ew5jN ->

Pitch for Free Scrabble Dictionary

Company / App Name: Free Scrabble Dictionary http://freescrabbledictionary.com What does it do? Learn to cheat at scrabble with our word finder tools, online scrabble dictionaries which support multiple languages. You can also get scrabble help with our tutorials and tips. Why do we need it? You can beat friends with games like words with friends, draw something and scrabble Who is it for? Anyone who loves to play word games What makes it stand out from the crowd? There is no site out there that provides the comprehensive scrabble dictionary that I do. Not even Hasbro. Also I provide multiple languages and official word lists. What’s next? Just learning from users what they want and adding those features Pitch Video http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com

Indian PC market marks 6.6% growth in Q1, 2012; but sees decline over the last few quarters

A report issued by Gartner says that the Indian PC market, which comprises of both desk-based and mobile PC, totaled about 2.8 million units in the first quarter of 2012, almost 6.6 per cent increase over the same period last year. Though this seems to be good news, it is hardly so. The fact is that sales have gone down over the last few quarters, due to reasons of inflation and increased prices. The increase in excise and import duties also played a part reducing sales. While desktop PC’s declined 20 percent in the first quarter of 2012, when compared to the same period in 2011, Mobile PCs, saw an increase of 27 per cent driving overall market growth. Lenovo represented 64 per cent of PC sales and gained the top position, where as HP grew by 21 per cent. What’s surprising is that Dell that has been one of the torchbearers declined in sales by as much as 11 per cent. HCL’s share dropped to 5.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2012, as it experienced a 13 per cent year-on-year decline from the first quarter of 2011. Also see: Q1 2012: India PC Market Sales Surge By 7.7% Lenovo Occupies The Top Slot

What Exactly is Entrepreneurship [Interview with Naeem Zafar]

Entrepreneurship is a great journey, but before you embark on it there are lot of questions one has about how to become an entrepreneur or if they are fit for it. In this episode of eLagaan Whiteboard Friday, the eLagaan team discusses with Naeem Zafar* - What is entrepreneurship - How does one know if they can be an entrepreneur & characteristic of an entrepreneur. - When do they know if they are ready to start a startup. We also discuss seven steps to the successful startup including why it is important to talk to a customer before starting a startup, how to do market research in a shoe string budget. When do people with job know they are ready to start a startup..etc etc. And for the uninitiated, Naeem Zafar has done 6 startups so far (is now the founder of BitzerMobile) and he has extensive experience in mentoring and coaching founders and CEOs. - Subscribe to Pluggd.in’s Youtube channel.

Chatwing: Expanding the Horizons of Blogging and Internet Marketing

In a world filled with quick information jetting unstoppably, it is crucial to be flexible. There are thousands of ways on how to handle information, and they can be overwhelming for the average individual. However, people who are exposed to the Internet are already prepared to enter the chaotic but profitable world of blogging and internet marketing. Blogging and internet marketing must coexist with one another. Old-fashioned good content is still required nowadays, but marketing is the leverage. If you are new in the blogging industry, better keep in mind that marketing is ace. You cannot move forward without the simplest aspects of marketing. Luckily, you don’t have to be overwhelmed when it comes to the premise of marketing. I will recommend a very useful program that can grant you an edge in the sea of online competition. This program, by all means, is a chat box that goes by the name of Chatwing. At first, you may think that Chatwing is another simple application that can be found online. Well, you may be right, but Chatwing’s simplicity is part of the package. This simple chat application provides an efficient avenue of communication for everyone in just simple steps. Through this chat box, you can now connect to different people simultaneously. If you are new in blogging and internet marketing, consider Chatwing as a ‘booster’ for your success. Keep in mind: online presence is the life force of your blog. Manage it poorly and your blog will wither in just few days. Believe me—it happened countless times already to many users. You may also consider as a blog chat tool and friend inviter rolled into one. Chatwing allows you to log in using your Facebook account. That’s neat, considering the fact that you can now send out invitations to the visitors of your blog. Now that is a fine way to expand your blogging horizons. Are you featuring a product or a service? You may use Chatwing as an extension of customer service. Post necessary updates in the chat box and your visitors will get the information they truly need. They can also ask questions and share their opinions. In a simpler sense, Chatwing is your bridge for communication. Rather than spending thousands of dollars for tedious marketing campaigns, you can settle for Chatwing’s free application. Since it’s free, you don’t need to burn a buck just to try out an efficient service. Plus, installation is really easy and doesn’t take much of your precious time. Go on, try Chatwing and wedge your way to competition. Author Bio Ivan Diamond is one of the elite developers of Chatwing. He believes in the power of website chat and efficient communication. He spends his free time playing Frisbee or discussing the online world with his other developer friends. Tags: Internet, online chat, startups, tools

Pitch for Launch.it

Company / App Name: Launch.it http://www.launch.itTwitter – @Launch_it What does it do? Launch.it is a direct-to-consumer, leader generation platform for PR agencies and companies to launch their products, services and ideas. Why do we need it? We are a free self-publishing platform for anyone to launch a product, service or idea – our goal is to unlock the new and create the largest searchable database for all things new. Who is it for? PR Agencies and companies looking to launch anything new who want a home for their announcement in a social environment where they can receive insight, feedback and analytics directly from their consumers. What makes it stand out from the crowd? We beat our competition because we are consumer facing and will drive consumers, professionals and the media to find everything new. What’s next? Creating distribution channels to target consumers, professionals and the media to send them new things that they are interested in. Pitch Video https://vimeo.com/35206005

UTR Judge and Alumni Partner #Erply #RudysBarbershop #Payments

Last year, Erply presented at the Under the Radar Conference, and Vy Le CEO of Rudy’s Barbershop was a judge… We’re happy to see they are continueing to work together! Read more about their partnership below: Mobile technologies are changing the way we do a lot of things, from reading books to taking photos to

Reddit Founder And Activists Aim To Build A 'Bat-Signal (Cat-Signal?) For The Internet' @Forbes

[On our elected officials] “They’re like tech support, or customer service. It’s like calling Comcast,” says Ohanian. “They work for us, and we should have their number in our phones and be able to call them when something is upsetting us. Why not? Even something as basic as that brings home a point that SOPA and PIPA proved: That still, in the face of how everything else that’s screwed up in Washington, we the American people can fix things.” via forbes.com Thanks to @BenHuh for this idea -- we should all have our congresspeople on speed-dial. Join the Internet Defense League here! Permalink | Leave a comment »

Dreams of Growth and Expansion

Small business owners often dream of expansion, growth and enhanced profitability; those strategic moves and timely tweaks that catapult their operation to the next level of success. I say dream because it’s the official 2nd step in the popular business transformation model called Appreciative Inquiry (AI), introduced by management theorist, David L. Cooperrider, back in the early ’80s. In this dream step, (there are fours steps: Discover, Dream, Design, Destiny) owners and other team members close their eyes, and based on the current organizational assets and individual competencies, dream of an ideal “future state” where the company’s best practices are employed and most ambitious goals are realized. When it comes to expansion, owners invariably find themselves dreaming of an accelerated state of operations which includes extensive research, game-changing product innovation, new hiring, training and daily decision making. And oh yes… travel. If you’re venturing into the apparel market, you’ll have to visit China and Vietnam where the major garment factories are located. If you decide to produce toilets, sinks and showers, you’ll have to go to Japan. The textile factories are in Buenos Aires. And for coffee distribution, you’ll have to press elbows with Starbucks in Guatemala. All markets are global. So you’ll have to leave the comfort of your CEO control booth to travel afar. You’ll have to lead the charge into new markets, crafting new strategies, fomenting new relationships, and adjusting your already overcrowded schedule to a new, more demanding timeline. At this point in the AI process, reality sets in. Your glorious dream quickly transforms into a nightmare. You’re dreaming about growth because all small businesses face the same universal growth imperative: either, grow or wither and die on the vine. But in this new world order of growth and expansion, you can no longer devote the majority of your time to managing day-to-day operations. Think of it this way. You’re giving birth to a new thing, a critically important thing that will impact your company’s future survival. While you’re in labor, someone else will have to take the helm. In our technologically advanced society, inundated by talking smart phones, wifi-enabled tablets, encrypted teleconferencing and 24/7 cloud access, it’s easy to delude oneself into thinking we are always in touch, always in control. This is a false assumption, especially when it comes to running the day-to-day operations of a small business organization during its three to five year infancy. The team’s motivation, interaction, competitiveness, goodwill and spirit of reciprocation are tied directly to the owner/CEO’s philosophy and conduct. During these fragile years of struggle and uncertainty, rules and procedures remain in a state of flux. Many decisions are being made for the first time. Too many mistakes and everybody goes home. Be your organization’s visionary More importantly, the owner/CEO is most often the true (Michael Dell /Steve Jobs) visionary within the organization, the person that reassures everyone the impossible is possible, and that dreams do come true. That’s what visionaries do. They take an unfamiliar, untested concept and transform it into something believable, attainable, and beneficial to the participants. In a way, they are legendary conmen, peddling the truth instead of a lie. They believe, then make it possible for others to believe; enduring skepticism, criticism and even sabotage along the way. Visionaries are charismatic, persuasive, confident and high risk takers. They demonstrate tremendous self-control during times of crisis. But of all the characteristics that set them apart, the most compelling one is social intelligence. Visionaries have an uncanny ability to gage the shifting emotions, priorities and anxieties of their internal and external audiences, and then, respond accordingly. Visionaries use the power of empathy (toward the priorities of others) to make things personal. Many times Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, had to beg people to take a vacation because their “personal buy-in” to assignments and sense of being appreciated was so strong, it superseded their desire to take time off. Google has the same problem. If there is one common thread you should recognize among successful visionaries, it is their ability to not only create innovative, game-changing products and services, but also build a burning passion among stakeholders who associate themselves with the cause. But back to you… You’re dreaming of expansion, and rightfully so. But if you’re the company’s visionary, how can you afford to turn over the reins of power to your second-in-charge VP. He’s good at what he does. But he’s a manager in the traditional sense, cut from a conservative, no nonsense cloth. He’s not a visionary like you. What will happen to the company while you’re in Japan giving birth to this new thing? The answer is simple. What eventually happens depends on you. First, you must embrace your earlier assumption that he is not a visionary. He doesn’t have to be. In fact, when you examine the strategic impact that role playing has on successful team building, it may be a good thing he’s not. In most instances, two visionaries just won’t fit into one small business box. Respect your Drone/Enforcer In the book, What’s Wrong With Your Small Business Team [Executive Hardback], I refer to your second-in-charge VP as the Drone/Enforcer. If you’re a Star Trek fan and followed the series featuring Captain Kathryn Janeway of the USS Voyager, you’ll remember her first officer, Commander Chakotay. Chakotay represents the ideal depiction of what a drone/enforcer should be. He’s a designated, trustworthy, hand-picked team leader that thoroughly understands the stated and unstated mission of the organization, and functions as a trumpeter of the core message, a process-server of the detailed execution of policies derived from the core message, and a transparent firewall between the owner’s visionary leadership activities and responsibilities for the daily operation. Though fiercely loyal, he is, by no means, a yes-man. He’s not afraid to question, challenge, correct and even express disappointment in the small business owner’s decision-making. But because of his respect and loyalty, these critical exchanges almost always occur behind the scenes. During the civil rights movement, Reverend Ralph David Abernathy was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s drone. Vice President Dick Cheney was the Bush Administration’s drone. And before he left Microsoft, Bill Gates relied on Steve Ballmer as his drone. As a small business owner with years of team building ahead of you, there is a sophisticated premise in play here you should understand. Drones are not concerned with visionary breakthroughs or saving polar bears at the North Pole. Drones are interested in three things: knowledge, efficiency and control. Chances are, your detail-oriented, ever-vigilant second-in-charge VP knows more about your day-to-day operations than you. He knows which trucks are most dependable and which leaks in the warehouse roof need to be fixed first. He knows that invoice #2355RT has not been paid because he’s trying to teach vendor #277 a lesson about over billing. This superior knowledge serves as a balancing mechanism that defuses potential ego clashes when you’re standing at the podium, smiling, waving, and having your photo taken as you receives the Entrepreneur of the Year Award. The drone/enforcer is content, knowing true power lies in superior knowledge rather than the pomp and circumstance of bright lights and formal ceremonies. With this critical understanding of team dynamics and the importance of role playing within your organization, you can, indeed, go off to India and China and Japan to give birth to this new thing, free from worry your operation will fall apart. Your drone will take care of your operation. What you need to do is concentrate on taking care of your people. If you have ten to twenty team members working for your organization, call three a day… that includes warehouse workers and janitors too. Find out what they’re doing. Get them excited about what you’re doing. Use that wifi, encrypted, 24/7 technology to stay in touch. When you fly back on weekends, bring some tea cups from China, or whiskey glass from Russia, depending on the alcoholic tendencies of your group. Do what visionaries do. Do it without the slightest expectation your drone will do it for you. Make it personal. Show empathy for the priories of your team members. And then watch your business grow. Dreaming businessman image courtesy of Shutterstock

Twitter Link Roundup #132 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week! The video above shows 10,000 Japanese people singing Beethoven’s Ode an die Freude (Ode to Joy). I’ve never seen or heard a 10,000 person chorus – it’s pretty impressive. Wondering how your competitors are using Pinterest to increase their revenues? Here’s a good guide – http://bit.ly/JGEus8 What Small Businesses Can Learn From The World’s Best Brands – http://bit.ly/L7w1zq Small Business and Startup Tips: Analyze This (a Data Primer) – http://bit.ly/MAnPJA crowdSPRING’s Small Business Spotlight of the Week: Penn Brewery – http://bit.ly/LfMldU The $1 Billion Club Gets Crowded – http://on.wsj.com/KfXqfK Wondering how your competitors are using Pinterest to increase their revenues? Here’s a good guide – http://bit.ly/JGEus8 Small Business and Startup Tips: Analyze This (a Data Primer) – http://bit.ly/MAnPJA The Darwinian Evolution of Startup Hubs – http://bit.ly/Li4aZl Why Instagram Won’t Be the Last Billion Dollar App – http://on.mash.to/JcxaGv Has the term “innovation” lost its meaning? – http://on.wsj.com/LgeaTs Lies, Damned Lies, and Pitch Decks – http://bit.ly/JEpkWz Freemium Pricing for SaaS: Optimizing Paid Conversion Upgrades – http://bit.ly/KJkV4y ‘The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We’re Dancing on its Grave’ – http://bit.ly/KwEyZJ CEO’s Can’t Tweak Their Way To Innovation – http://bit.ly/Llufdi The Inside Story Of What Happened On The Facebook IPO – http://read.bi/KwAqXK 9 Deadliest Start-up Sins – http://bit.ly/Kg031g Good poston pivoting – be careful – http://me.lt/5kUJC Good suggestions on keeping balance while working – http://bit.ly/LoJQp0 How Tim Cook is changing Apple – http://bit.ly/KBBzxm Pivots are a Trap – http://bit.ly/K8uV4y Excelerate Labs, Just the Facts Please – http://bit.ly/KC86Jb Good article about Facebook’s dual stock class structure & investors – http://nyr.kr/MAsPhs Why stay-at-home mothers are more depressed than working moms – http://bit.ly/KdMD72 Take a Tour of 1871, a New 50,000 sq-ft Coworking Space in Chicago – http://techco.tl/JwQgSk How Intern Mentorship Works at Khan Academy – http://bit.ly/Li6a3F Facebook IPO, and How to Build a Social Network for $389 – http://bit.ly/KYyfjW GM Bows Out of Super Bowl Advertising – http://on.wsj.com/JTOIoq Q1 saw the most tech IPOs in four years, but funding amounts are down – http://bit.ly/KBDFNN Why Independent Employment Is Killing the Nine to Five Job – http://huff.to/KfZl41 Female Business Owners Network, Trade Success Secrets http://shar.es/qqOQG Number of job listings with the term “ninja” have increased 2,505% in past 6 yrs – http://on.wsj.com/Mtpdh9 Is it time to change the way we work? – http://bit.ly/KfZVPm Big Day for a Space Entrepreneur Promising More – http://nyti.ms/KLbfCJ Are Facebook Investors Playing Russian Roulette? – http://bit.ly/LoIzhR The Facebook Fallacy – http://bit.ly/KJkuat Facebook IPO Post Mortem – Killer – but not for the reasons you think ! – http://bit.ly/MJUk8m “Chicks Rule?” A great breakdown of which gender dominates networks – http://post.ly/7Qc7G Does GM Have a Point About Facebook? Yes, Rivals Concede – http://onforb.es/KfVzaO Why I Lost My Faith In Facebook Advertising – http://onforb.es/JcxWmS How Facebook’s bankers saved an IPO, kept shares above $38 – http://cnet.co/KwDSDN Pretty good analysis of what Facebook stock is actually worth (when you take out the hype) – http://read.bi/LaXrkj Sorry, But This Whining And Umbrage About Facebook’s IPO Is Ridiculous – http://read.bi/KC7Sln Why Did Zynga’s Stock Drop After Facebook Went Public? – http://bit.ly/KC9nA8 Proof That Pinterest Drives Sales, And Its Fans Spend Big – http://bit.ly/Li2dfr Women Click on More Facebook Ads – http://bit.ly/KpeUWA 11 Free High Quality Fonts – http://bit.ly/KjFfYF Wow – what a creative way to show an infographic – http://bit.ly/JAbkvI A roundup of awesome stickers design – http://bit.ly/KYGqg7 45 Fresh Must See Photoshop Tutorials from 2012 – http://bit.ly/KjBhza 95 Excellent High Resolution Wood Textures For Designers – http://bit.ly/KdVKFw Terrific essay about book cover design … Hack the Cover – http://bit.ly/KBE2YM The History Of Usability: From Simplicity To Complexity – http://bit.ly/LgawZJ 30 Fun and Interactive Business Cards – http://bit.ly/KjAPAT 30 Lovely Green Business Cards – http://bit.ly/LaNuDx A Showcase of Creative Gig Posters – http://bit.ly/L80XiP 30 Creative Package Design Examples – http://bit.ly/LExQ9n 30 Free Essential Photoshop Ornament Brushes – http://bit.ly/MHj4hg Album Cover Artwork Throughout the Decades – http://bit.ly/KgmkgB 30 Packaging Designs Which Showcase Creative Innovation – http://bit.ly/K8qaYR 30 amazing and stunning business card designs – http://bit.ly/KUBiHS How To Choose The Right Face For A Beautiful Body – http://bit.ly/Keh2mq 17 Transparent Plastic Business Cards – http://bit.ly/KjzNEX 30 Free Dazzling Photoshop Bokeh Brushes – http://bit.ly/Kjz6f5 10 Free Amazing Motion Design Fonts – http://bit.ly/Ke7IPz The art of print ads: 30 stunning examples – http://bit.ly/KYFFUa 30 Free Pretty Designs of Flower Font – http://bit.ly/LaN3t1 20 of Today’s Most Exciting Artists and Illustrators Reimagine the Paper Plane – http://bit.ly/JAdL1j Legal Contracts for Software Developers Who Hate Contracts (w/free contract template to use today) – http://bit.ly/1ySfi Legal Contracts for Graphic Designers Who Hate Contracts (w/free contract template to use today) – http://bit.ly/XTLkS 40 (More) Creative Negative Space Logo Designs – http://bit.ly/LaLrPO 10 Free Amazing Motion Design Fonts – http://bit.ly/Ke7IPz 11 Free High Quality Fonts – http://bit.ly/KjFfYF Designing Search: As-You-Type Suggestions – http://bit.ly/KYGa0y 50 fantastic tools for responsive web design – http://bit.ly/LaORlz Websites That Come In Black – http://bit.ly/JMgFl4 30 Brilliant Examples of Responsive Web Designs – http://bit.ly/K8nqKZ The State of Design in 2012: Six Header Design Trends – http://bit.ly/MHjgwZ Improving 404 Page Design – http://bit.ly/LlZykP 20 of Today’s Most Exciting Artists and Illustrators Reimagine the Paper Plane – http://bit.ly/JAdL1j Interesting insight for writers … use sensory verbs to better stimulate readers – http://bit.ly/KXAhic The fascinating history of the paperclip. It wasn’t always the one we use today – http://bit.ly/KXxLsd PayPal handles 60% of web transactions, leaves Google in the dust – http://bit.ly/KfUvUz An Egyptian 19 year old invents a way for spacecraft to maneuver in space without thrusters (using quantum physics) – http://bit.ly/MHjxjz The Samsung might get me to give up my Apple fanboy card – http://bit.ly/JsXlZS Nearly 16% of loans made by Greek banks last year went bad, compared with 7.7% in 2009 – http://sto.ly/KoGi9y Boy, 15, invents simple, cheap test for pancreatic cancer – http://on-msn.com/KjKiID 10,000 Japanese singing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy – http://bit.ly/KjE6QI! People are eating fish faster than fish can replace their population – http://bit.ly/MAtake Why Independent Employment Is Killing the Nine to Five Job – http://huff.to/KfZl41 Is it time to change the way we work? – http://bit.ly/KfZVPm I hope you enjoy these links! Please leave a comment and let me know what you liked/didn’t like. Related posts:Twitter Link Roundup #90 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More Twitter Link Roundup #91 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More Twitter Link Roundup #106 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

The Art of Computer Typography

Ever since I came across Jürg Lehni’s essay on typographic technology and digital fonts, Typeface As Programme, I’ve been fascinated with the story of Donald E. Knuth and his unexpected contributions to typography. You see, Knuth is a professor and computer scientist well known to programmers as the author of The Art of Computer Programming, widely regarded as the definitive treatise on the subject. The first of the four current volumes was published in 1968 and Knuth continues to work on it to this day. Truly his life’s work. Where this story gets interesting for designers like me is what happened in 1977. Knuth was obsessed with making The Art of Computer Programming perfect in every way right down to the print and type. We didn’t want our papers just to be there, we wanted them to be beautiful. I wouldn’t have wanted to write The Art of Computer Programming if it was going to look ugly. The first three volumes were stunning. It wasn’t until a new edition of Volume 2 was to be reset with primitive digital type instead of the traditional metal type of the earlier editions that there was a problem. Horrified by the inferior results, Knuth took it upon himself to improve things. After all, digital type was software, right? Determined to develop a solution, Knuth stopped work on his books and devoted himself to typography for the next 10 years. The result: The TeX typesetting system and the Metafont font description language. The combination of the two offered powerful typographic control that hasn’t been matched (even today), especially for complex typesetting like mathematical formulas. What’s interesting about Metafont is its unique approach to digital fonts. Most fonts are described programmatically as a series of outlines and then filled with a solid color. This allows for perfectly precise and accurate representation but Metafont takes a more fundamental approach. Knuth discovered what every student of typography eventually learns, that the roots of type are in handwriting. Before the invention of printing, documents were written and copied by scribes using a broad nib pen. These flat metal tips, held at an angle resulted in the thick and thin strokes we associate with calligraphy. The typefaces used in the first printed books were meant to mimic the familiar handwritten books they replaced and even today many typefaces owe their think and thin lines to the tradition of hand drawn letterforms. Calligraphy in a Latin Bible of AD 1407 compared to Bembo, a modern typeface with roots in hand written lettering. While fonts in other systems consist of outlined letterforms Metafont “draws” each letter, simulating the broad nib pen and the actual strokes you’d use to write them by hand. The resulting fonts are not only beautiful but their construction allows for greater control and variation. Rather than simply scaling to different sizes, fonts in this system can be further optimized for things like contrast, stroke, and x-height – essentially redrawn at each size like earlier metal type. Compare glyphs rendered with Metafont (left) and Postscript. Knuth created TeX and Metafont because he wanted to extend the care he took in his writing to the design and printing of the physical books. He shared them with the rest of the academic community by putting them into the public domain and they’re still popular today, especially in the publication of mathematic and scientific journals. I’m impressed by Knuth’s refusal to accept the status quo. When it didn’t meet his standards, he simply made something better. But even more I’m inspired by the focused dedication to his life’s work that led him to put down the familiar and immerse himself in a completely different field for an entire decade in order to realize his art.

The Wrong Advisory Board Will Hurt Your Startup

If you are an entrepreneur for the first time, or entering a new business area, it’s usually worth your time to assemble an Advisory Board of two or three executives who have travelled that road before. But if you select the wrong people, or use them incorrectly, the impact will not be positive for your company or your image. For perspective, you need to remember that boards of advisors, unlike directors, have no formal power or fiduciary duties, but rather serve at the pleasure of you the business owner. But they are not likely to stroke your ego, or be cheerleaders. They need to tell you the truth about your business, good or bad. Using them effectively requires real effort on your part. If you give and ask for nothing, you will get nothing. Used correctly, they will be your best advocates to investors, and can save you from making major mistakes. Here are some tips on using your advisory board effectively: Select people who complement your experience. If your experience is primarily technical, get someone who has built a business. If your business is too small for a CFO, get an advisor with heavy financial experience. If the business area is new to you, find someone who has lived it. Balance is best. Be specific on help needed. If you've chosen your advisory board members carefully, you're asking busy, successful people to carve even more time out of their schedule to help you. Let each one know how you see his/her expertise – it may be insight on trends, organizational advice, or funding connections. Set a fixed term, like one year. Formalize the compensation. Most advisory board members sign up because the want to help you, not because of the compensation. Yet you should offer a small monthly fee and/or some stock options to show you are serious about the position. If you want out-of-town members on your board, you foot the travel expenses. You need to drive to process. It’s smart to schedule a monthly Advisory Board meeting, with a formal agenda, as well as informal communication to keep everyone on the same page. Advisors can’t help you if they only hear from you once every six months. They expect you to initiate specific requests, rather than having to ask for updates. Respect their time commitment. For a business executive, nothing is more annoying than a poorly run meeting where the presenter is unprepared, rambles, and wastes time. Make sure every meeting is facilitated well so that concrete action steps, deadlines and assignments result. Have someone take notes so that decisions are recorded. Recruit the best for your real Board. Your Advisory Board is a pre-cursor to your Board of Directors, a bit further down the line. This is your chance to test commitment, chemistry, and contribution for that more formal position. It’s a great networking opportunity to expand your connections to include all their connections as well. On the other hand, if you find your Advisory Board is a burden on you, or you find yourself hiding things from them, then you have the wrong people, or you are letting your ego get in the way. Members can provide a mirror so that you can see your company as experts see it, as long as you look in that mirror with eyes wide open. If you are looking for someone to fill an operational gap, or to do product design, it’s usually more productive to look for a partner, employee, or consultant. These can help you when you don’t know what you don’t know, or to create what you don’t have. If you use your advisory board to feed your ego, or correct your mistakes, you will likely be disappointed. Worse yet, your image as an entrepreneur will be damaged. That will inevitably spread through networking across the business community. You don’t need that kind of help. Marty Zwilling

Anonymous India gives a sneak peek into ISP censorship

Anonymous India has released list of sites blocked by Reliance that includes protest by Air India employees. “When we first hacked into reliance they realised that we had the list and also cause of the media coverge they knew they were in trouble as they themselves knew that they broke the law and the trust of it’s customers. When they saw media was knowing this they started unblocking the sites to make it look like they are heroes and reliance did you feel it would be so easy for you to do that and not cross us. Bad Idea. You tried to change our passwords and tried everything you know to stop us. For your information We Dont Even Care If You Have A Password. Stop Attacking people and their freedom and we will stop. Why has Reliance blocked AirIndia employees Protest page on Facebook – Did the court issue an order for that too or does the government have some ties with reliance to help them kill the strike at AI. Bad Idea” [more here] Watch the video

Dear Google, Bangalore Airport is in Bangalore (Not Tamil Nadu)

Hello Google, Bangalore airport is in Bangalore (as expected) and not in Tamil Nadu. Bangalore Airport is in Tamil Nadu? A case of crowdsourcing gone wrong (Google relies a lot on Google Map maker product)? (hat tip: Rajkiran talusani/Raxit Seth) Know of more such instances? Please share it here (or use the embedded form). Name*Email*Share* Aside, an interesting read: How Google Maps (And Latitude) Helped Him Find The Lost Mobile! [Story]

Twitter Digest: 2012-05-24

Okay, I take back the nice things I've been saying about HTC One x. Nice hardware entirely ruined by horrific software. -> Chelsea F.C.: Can't Buy Me Love http://t.co/TDfWrMZJ /by @runofplay -> Nifty webcam video of 1,300 acre wildfire in mountains east of San Diego today – http://t.co/Iq2ad1Mr -> A time-honored tradition continues: European investors count losses on Detroit property – http://t.co/ovyuLKIm ->

Is Indian Facebook a distant dream?

The recent Facebook IPO, which valued the 8 year old company with a 28 year old CEO at over $100billion, provided yet another opportunity for many to again ask: “When will India have a Facebook?” or some variation like “When will India build global products?” While this makes for good discussion, some important points got missed. Namely that Facebook has been applying for a set of new patents in the past few weeks of which the top four published by the US Patent office include new ways of collecting messages from different devices and collating it with socially relevant conversations. And for the record, Facebook has over 800 patents. While the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem is changing for the better (read: Of Indian Startup Ecosystem and why it takes a village to raise a child and Entrepreneurial ecosystem) with various elements coming together, it is instructive to keep in mind one very important gap – the lack of innovation – in the ecosystem. Innovation – not of the Jugaad or service process or business model variety – in turn emerges from Research and Development (R&D). Mark Zuckerberg dancing in India..or is India dancing to his tunes? The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines R&D as “creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of man, culture and society, and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications”. Over the past 100 years, the role of R&D in the creation of the leading economies of the world has only increased. In the 21st century, this role will only accelerate. — The Choking Of Innovation: India’s Much-Vaunted IT Industry Has To Dramatically Change If It To Maintain Its Leadership Role In The Next 10 Years – The Indian picture on this front is dismal: i) India spends 0.9% of its GDP on R&D with the private sector contributing less than 25%. The corresponding ratio for the US is about 2.7% with the private sector contributing more than the government – remember that the US economy is more than 8 times India’s and so the difference in absolute dollars spent is embarassing. The Indian manufacturing sector spends around 0.2% of sales on R&D while the pharma sector spends about 7%. The much vaunted IT sector spends a negligible amount, if at all. An estimated 150 R&D professionals exist in India per 1 million compared to 4300 in the US and 1180 in China. A visit to any of the top institutes of our country will rather painfully showcase the fact that industry sponsored research at these institutes is almost always MNC sponsored research. The US produces close to 50,000 PhDs each year while India produces about 9000. The number of Computer Science PhDs awarded each year in the US is close to 2000 while India awards less than 200! That Indian industry doesn’t lay much store by R&D is evident. As the Prime Minister noted in a January 2012 speech at the 99th Indian Science Congress in Bhubaneshwar, “it is ironic that GE and Motorola have created world class technology hubs in India while Indian industry hasn’t.” ii) It isn’t unusual at all for a startup in the US to be able to sell to large companies or to find much larger partners that help them get to market. Given the brutally competitive nature of that market, innovation is valued as a competitive advantage. The innovation and what it can do – save money, increase revenues, enhance productivity – is valued and dispassionately so, irrespective of the size of the company delivering the innovation. On the other hand, it is incredibly hard, if not impossible, for an Indian startup to partner with a larger company or to sell directly to a large Indian company. iii) Indian startups too, having been born and nurtured in an environment that isn’t patient and supportive of innovation, are almost always oriented towards quickly spotting and efficiently capturing a new market opportunity. Highly entrepreneurial no doubt but hardly in line with producing “creative work that increases the stock of knowledge to create new applications.” This article isn’t meant to be a diatribe against startups but to hold up a mirror to the state of innovation culture in India. It will take the concerted efforts, over many years, of the government, industry, academia, research institutes, investors, media, markets and of course startups to change the current culture in a meaningful manner. China has shown that it is possible to effect change. Many years ago, when a friend interested in doing research left for the US, when I asked him why in my naivete, he replied “In India, R&D stands for Receive and Dispatch, not Research and Development!” This Receive and Despatch mindset is visible in areas as diverse as mobile phones to IT services. The serious ramifications of this kind of R&D is now all too obvious particularly in strategic sectors: - Defence: India is now the world’s largest arms importer making India incredibly vulnerable to external pressures. China indigenization policy is now in full force while we’re still floundering - Telecom: According to a June 2011 paper by Prof Jhunjhunwalla of IIT Madras, India’s telecom import bill in 2009-10 of over $20billion was second only to that of oil! The paper laments the lack of R&D, Design and IPR in India. Isn’t it strange that with over 800m telecom subscribers, we don’t have a single Indian telecom technology company or even an indigenous mobile phone company with some IPR? The entire telecom network of India runs on imported technology. Contrast this with the Chinese approach. All of us interested in Indian innovation, in unleashing its entrepreneurial potential and in seeing an Indian Facebook emerge, need to sit up, take notice and act in concert. What do you think? Also see: Calling Entrepreneurs –From Goan Feni To Scotch Whiskey Lovers [Guest article contributed by Sanjay Anandaram, a passionate advocate of entrepreneurship in India; He brings close to two decades of experience as an entrepreneur, corporate executive, venture investor, faculty member, advisor and mentor. He’s involved with Nasscom, TiE, IIM-Bangalore, and INSEAD business school in driving entrepreneurship. He can be reached at sanjay@jumpstartup.net. The views expressed here are his own.]

When should you give up on an idea?

Suppose you launch your new startup and don’t get the traction you were hoping for. How do you know whether to give up or keep going? This is a tough question. There are lots of examples that support seemingly contradictory theories. Instagram pivoted before launch, and Pinterest refused to pivot for years. Many other startups pivoted too early or kept working on dead-end ideas for too long. If the pre-product/market-fit phase of a startup is about efficiently testing hypotheses, then continuing to test an idea only makes sense if you have a strong theory about what has gone wrong and how things will improve. Specifically, you should have a theory about: 1) how to modify your product, 2) how to modify your marketing/distribution strategy, and/or 3) how external events (a new technology wave, cultural events, regulatory change, etc) might make your product take off. In other words, you need a plausible argument as to why the future will be different than the past. Another way to think about this is using what Jeff Bezos calls the “regret-minimization framework.” Imagine you do give up on your idea. Have you explored most of its plausible implementations? Are you confident that another entrepreneur won’t come along and make it work? You’ll regret it more if you nearly created a big company than if you spent an extra six months iterating. Finally, beware of the temptation to get distracted by new shiny ideas. When you are deep in the weeds, new ideas seem refreshing but this is usually the false signal of “uninformed optimism” that accompanies all new things.

Sphero Available At Brookstone

Sphero is now available in some Brookstone stores around the US. There’s a handy map on the Sphero site and I’ll include a list at the bottom of this post. Occasionally one of you, dear blog reader, will ask if you can do anything for me. I usually say something like “just do awesome things” but this time I have a request. If you live near one of the Brookstone stores with a Sphero, go check it out. Play with it. Have your kids play with it (if you have kids). And if you like it, buy one. Cats are cute, right? What could be more cute than a cat playing with a Sphero? How about the President of the United States playing with a Sphero. Ok – that’s not cute, it’s cool. Now, how about you playing with a Sphero? At a Brookstone store. And then buying one? That would be mega awesome cool. If you travel through any of the following airports on Memorial Day, go check out our little robot friend Chicago (O’Hare) Dallas/Fort Worth, JFK Los Angeles Miami Newark Orlando Following are the addresses for the stores in alpha order by city. Atlanta, GA - 4400 Ashford Dunwoody Road, Suite 1360 Braintree, MA - 250 Granite St # 12 Columbia, MD – 10300 Little Patuxent Parkway Concord, CA - 424 Sun Valley Mall # 1 Costa Mesa, CA - 3333 Bristol Street, Suite 1870 Dallas, TX – 214 North Park Center Danbury, CT - 7 Backus Avenue Denver, CO - 3000 East 1st Avenue Freehold, NJ - 3710 Route 9 Houston, TX - 5085 Westheimer Rd Louisville, KY - 5000 Shelbyville Rd # 1380 Lynnwood, WA - 3000 184th Street SW Marlborough, MA - 601 Donald Lynch Boulevard McLean, VA - 1961 Chain Bridge Miami, FL - 8888 SW 136 Street Minneapolis, MN - 162 Market Street Nashua, NH - 310 Daniel Webster Hwy Orland Park, IL - 736 Orland Square Dr Orlando, FL - 4200 Conroy Road Palm Beach Gardens, FL - 3101 Pga Boulevard Raleigh, NC - 4325 Glenwood Ave San Diego, CA - 7007 Friars Road San Francisco, CA - 3251 20th Ave Santa Monica, CA - 1311 Third Street Promenade Schaumburg, IL – 60173 Woodfield Mall South Portland, ME - 364 Maine Mall Road Troy, MI - 2801 West Big Beaver Road Waterford, CT – 850 Hartford Tpke # P207

What makes Sequoia Capital successful? “Target big markets”

Don Valentine, who founded Sequoia Capital, talks about what makes Sequoia Capital effective. It’s one of my favorite talks, and I find myself watching and re-watching it from time to time, and I’d encourage everyone to hear the wisdom themselves. Markets, not team In the beginning of the video, Don Valentine asks, why is Sequoia successful? He says that most VCs talk about how they finance the best and the brightest, but Sequoia focuses instead on the size of the market, the dynamics of the market, and the nature of the competition. This is, of course, super interesting because in many ways it’s contrarian to the typical response that investing is all about “team.” Creating markets versus exploiting markets Another choice quote: “We’re never interested in creating markets – it’s too expensive. We’re interested in exploiting markets early.” In consumer internet, when the divisions that separate product categories are so fuzzy, it can be hard to understand when you’re creating a market versus when you’re attacking an existing one. My rule of thumb is that: If people know how to search for products in your category then you are in an existing market. I’ve written more about this in posts here and here Watch the video of Don Valentine of Sequoia capital on “Target Big Markets” on YouTube or in the embed below:

Get your free copy of Getting Real

Getting Real, our book about a smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application, is now available as a free PDF (it used to cost $19). We’ve use the Getting Real methods to develop all of our products. Here’s what other people have said about Getting Real. Head over to the Getting Real site to get your free PDF of Getting Real. We hope you enjoy it.

The 3-Step Process to Creating an Effective and Profitable Keyword Plan

Would you rather get 1,000,000 visitors from Google each month or 1,000? You gut probably is telling you to go with 1,000,000, but the reality is you don’t have enough information to make an educated decision. The keyword game isn’t just about traffic, it’s also about quality. You have to look at conversion rates to make an educated decision. This means you have to look at larger goals and breakthrough keyword volume. In my ten years in the business I’ve made creating high-converting keyword research plans a priority…let me share my 3-step plan with you: Step #1: Keyword research for SEO When you research for keywords on your own site, it’s a lot easier to do because you know the content inside out. It’s almost instinct. But if you are working on a new site, then it is best that you do a lot of keyword research. This means starting with a list of keywords. If you don’t have a list, then work through as much content as you can. As you do that, think about this… Think about any word or category you don’t understand – Drop these words into Google and see what kind of results come up. Do these results match what you are trying to accomplish – Or does it look like their competitor? As you will see when we get into the conversion part of keyword research, keywords that don’t convert waste time and visitors. When you find non-converting keywords, search through and remove any other keywords that are similar. As you do this your list of categories will probably change as you start to understand your site’s content. But it’s always easier to start with too many categories, which you can reduce later. Check the estimated search volumes and make sure they match what you expect. For instance, do more people search for “SEO consultant” or “SEO services.” Or do more people search for “florist” or “flowers”? Or do more people search for “washers” or “washing machines”? While you may lean towards the more technically correct “SEO services,” you might find that more people are actually searching for SEO consultants, so you’ll want to work more references of “SEO consultants” into your copy. And you are ready to use these 5 questions to maximize your keyword research. The following exercise is recommended by Jenny Halasz, and is a very helpful way to uncover keywords for clients efficiently and effectively. How would you describe your site? – After you’ve spent some time evaluating your site and creating your own keyword bucket based upon what you read, you ask yourself to describe the site. You’ll notice that you’ll will probably tell yourself a lot of what you read on your own site. But just because you may understand your content and technical jargon, it doesn’t mean others will. This will help you figure out what focus on what needs to change. Why would someone choose you over a competitor? – What makes your product unique? These are keyword conversion type questions that will ultimately decide if you come up in searches versus the competitor. What products are like yours but not competitors? – An e-reader maker might say that smart phones are similar products since people can read on their phones…but not competitors since people will use smart phones for entirely different things. Do you have a flagship product? – Is it your most profitable product? What are the reasons for promoting one product over another? The answer to these questions will help you focus. This will help you first focus all your energy on ranking that one instead of the others. What are your most important keywords? – This question will help you back away from a mistaken belief that you have to rank for thousands of keywords. There are only ten really important keywords. Then there are the others. Once you have a base of keywords, you have to use them to discover untapped opportunities. See, keyword research isn’t important just for building your current business, but it will help you identify possible opportunities or neglected markets. This doesn’t have to be time consuming…you only need to pay attention to the data with an eye to helping build your current business and an eye to finding new markets. Using tools like Google Insights, Keyword Tool and Trends will create a bulk of words in which just with a casual scan you can identify possible new opportunities. Step #2: Keyword research for semantic understanding As you develop your core keywords for SEO, you want to next shift into the area of semantic search keywords. There are a lot of advantages for having a keyword database like this: Higher CTR – When you are using highly-targeted keywords, your CTR will improve…and if all your conversion funnel elements are in place are optimized for semantic searches…your CTR will skyrocket. Reduce bid amount – Naturally, if you are creating keywords that are more a tune with searchers wants, you won’t pay as much for your pay-per-click campaigns as less, but higher-quality clicks will result in less money spent. Raise quality score – This situation then leads to your semantically higher relevance for your keywords, which the search engines will happily reward you since you are contributing value to the web. So, let’s look at some ways to find semantic keywords. They are not as easy to determine as SEO keywords. I’ll show you the tools that I use when analyzing a site and looking to build a semantic keyword database. Optimizing semantic keywords around trends – One of my favorite strategies when it comes to staying in the public eye…and at the top of search rankings…is to develop keywords around trending topics. Fortunately there are some great tools to use like Google Trends, Ice Rocket, Trendrr TV and TweetVolume. Studying social bookmarking tags – Analyzing how tags are used in social bookmarking platforms is another good way to generate semantic keywords. I would use sites like Diigo, Pinterest, Licorize and Delicious. And to take things a step further you can also use the advanced search. The quickest way to find semantic keywords is to search on Google, and then look at their advanced search results… Now click “related searches”… …and all of your terms will appear: From the results above you can determine that people are typically looking for brands when shopping. Knowing that is gold. Google Instant will also give you further ideas for semantic…ideas that don’t show up in the “related search” results: Now let me show you what semantic search is all about. Search for “lap top repair”… …and you’ll see all of the similar keyword phrases. But when you look at Google Instant you’ll get this: Now you have options related to location. Obviously you don’t scoop all these terms up and dump them in your database. Keyword research involves carefully sorting through and understanding each phrase. Some will be obvious ones to use…others not so much. And then you should use Google Insights to narrow your keyword list down by category: Just as semantic keyword research is about finding actual keywords you can use in your SEO campaigns…it’s just as much about building a complete profile of your target customer. And the better you can understand your target customer the better your campaign results will be! Step #3: Creating keywords for conversion At this point you should have dozens of files that you exported from dozens of keyword tools…flipping back and forth between those files isn’t efficient, so you need to create a master table in a database that you can eventually export into Excel. This is a trick I learned from Tom Schmitz, and you don’t need to know how to work a database to do it. You do need Microsoft Access. Here’s what you do: Put all of your keywords into one master file. Sort all your keywords into number of words and then number of searches. Identify all relevant keywords under three words. Identify all keywords that are embedded in larger phrases. Set traffic limits that are relevant to the site that you are trying to optimize. I’d recommend that a site that gets a ton of traffic will have a higher traffic limit than a site with a lower traffic limit. Anything that is left over, keep it if it is relevant. At the end, copy all the keywords you marked or set them aside into one table. These are your keyword candidates. The above steps are pretty typical for SEO keyword research that is done on a practical, efficient and effective level. You are now ready to look at the conversion side of your keyword research. The basic rule is this: you need to assign keywords to a target page. If there is no target page, then you have a useless keyword. Go through your keywords and assign target pages. This post by Rand will tell you how to target more than one phrase to a page. Once you have assigned keywords, now you can think about tracking these keywords. Here’s what you need to look at: Organic visitors – How many visitors do search engines bring from natural search for each particular keyword? Exact match search – What is the volume of exact matches when people are searching and landing on your target page? The higher this number the closer you are to correctly targeting your consumer. Phrase match – You are looking at the volume of phrase matches for this one, too. And the conclusion is the same…the higher the volume the closer you are to correctly targeting your consumer. Keyword diversity – How many different keywords are bringing in traffic? If you have a narrow variety of keywords, then you need to figure out how to expand that amount. Are the keywords with low search volume relevant? Do you need to re-evaluate their effectiveness? Conclusion This three-step process of researching and identifying keywords will help you build a comprehensive and effective keyword plan that will help increase your traffic and more importantly boost your revenue. I know the process above can be time consuming, but if you don’t start off with a proper keyword plan you’ll just end up flushing your money down the toilet. Do you have any other advice for creating effective and profitable keywords?

10 Uncommon “Superfoods” from the World of Ultra-Endurance

While doing research for The 4-Hour Body back in 2009, I resorted to Twitter in search of elite athletes who performed well on a vegan diet. I was repeatedly referred to Rich Roll, whom Men’s Fitness Magazine dubbed one of the “25 Fittest Men in the World.” (Sidenote: if you missed the bonus vegetarian/vegan athlete interviews from 4HB, here they are.) Among his accomplishments: - Two top finishes at the double Ironman-distance Ultraman World Championships - Completing 5 Ironman-distance triathlons on 5 separate Hawaiian Islands in less than a week, a feat no one had ever even attempted. Here’s the kicker: he did both in his mid-40′s. But most remarkable of all, just a few short years before exploding onto the scene, Rich was a middle-aged couch potato, depressed and 50 pounds overweight. His 40th birthday present to himself was attempting to reverse course. He overhauled his diet (now 100% plant-based), used The 4-Hour Workweek as a primer to reconfigure his life, and made fitness his Mount Everest. This original content covers the top 10 obscure superfoods Rich used to cultivate this elite performance. Even I hadn’t heard of a few… Enter Rich I abused my body throughout my 20’s and 30’s with a revolving door of junk food, drugs, alcohol and pretty much anything I could find to numb my discontentment. Overhauling my diet played a crucial role in my mid-life transformation. In the most general sense, fruits and vegetables repaired my body wholesale, but there’s more to the story. It’s important to realize that I’m not a professional athlete. Over the last 2 years, I have balanced a life of 20-30-hour training weeks and crazy endurance events with my career as an entertainment lawyer, my family life (married 10 years, father of four), and writing a book. Developing an acuity for sleep deprivation is a big part of my personal success equation. Nonetheless, I can’t recall the last time I got sick, missed a workout, family obligation or professional deadline because I was too tired. And despite my advancing age, I continue to improve as an athlete – getting leaner, stronger, and faster with each successive year. How is this possible? Superfoods. Admittedly, the term is subject to cavalier overuse. And the health benefits are frequently overblown. I get it. But there are “superfoods” you see in tabloid ads, snd then there are superfoods. I am absolutely convinced that my steady intake of many of the below uncommon (and other more mainstream) superfoods has played a major role in helping me break the glass ceiling on my physical potential. We’ve all heard of acai, goji berries and chia seeds. But I’d be willing to bet most of you are unfamiliar with more than a few of these more obscure superfoods: 1. Natto: Heart Health. A popular fermented soybean food prominent in the Japanese diet, natto is a must for anyone concerned about heart or circulatory disease. High in pyrazine and the enzyme nattokinase, blood thinners that can prevent thrombosis (blot clot formations) by essentially devouring arterial plaque, natto significantly reduces the risk of suffering a pulmonary embolism (arterial blockage) that could lead to a heart attack or stroke. Also high in vitamin K, it’s excellent in maintaining bone density. Warning: natto is a very acquired taste. In fact, it’s horrible, unless you’re a fan of strange exotic cheese. Prepare with turmeric and sea salt or alternatively sweeten with erythritol — a very low glycemic non-caloric sugar additive derived from glucose fermentation that retains 60-70% of the sweetness of table sugar. If it’s still unbearable, nattokinase is available in capsule form. I like Doctors Best (1-4 2,000 FU capsules / day). 2. Cordyceps (Sinensis) Extracts: Stamina. Well-known for centuries in Chinese herbal medicine, Cordyceps sinensis is a parasitic dried fungus that grows on caterpillar larvae native to high-altitude regions of China, Nepal and Tibet. Gross, right? But awesome when it comes to health and athletic performance. Pharmacologically anti-oxidative, anti-inflammatory and anti-lipid (cholesterol lowering), studies indicate enhanced immune system functionality as well as improved stamina in endurance athletes via increased aerobic capacity and oxygen utilization as well as stabilized blood sugar metabolism. Chinese Olympic Track & Field athletes have been swearing by it for decades, and I can attest to their effectiveness. Another plus? Increased sex drive and functionality. The benefits of Cordyceps are enhanced when combined with the adaptogen rhodiola, as they are in Optygen and ShroomTech — both good recommended products. 3. Tumeric: Anti-Oxidant / Anti-Inflammatory. A plant native to South India and Indonesia, if you like curry or mustard, you’re already familiar with this yellow food. What you might not know is that turmeric — due in large part to curcumin, tumeric’s primary active ingredient — is one of the most powerful anti-oxidants and anti-inflammatories on the planet. The majority of foods we eat, including low fat diets, promote arterial inflammation, which is a leading (and often underrated) cause of heart disease. In the fitness context, exercise-induced physiological stress causes inflammation, which impedes muscular repair. In a general sense, the more quickly the inflammation subsides, the more quickly one recovers from training. Foods like turmeric reduce inflammation, thus expediting recovery (and circulatory health). Extrapolated over time, an athlete on a nutritional regimen high in anti-oxidants and anti-inflammatory foods such as turmeric (buttressed by a predominantly alkaline-forming diet) will in turn be able to train harder, more effectively and more efficiently in a given time period while simultaneously taking out an insurance policy against the primary culprits that foil even the most conscientious athletes — undue fatigue, overtraining and illness. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that there is some evidence to suggest that people who eat diets rich in turmeric have lower rates of breast, prostate, lung, colon and skin cancers. Curcumin can be taken in capsule form, but it is not the most bio-available substance in extract form. Personally, I prefer to drink turmeric in a tea – 1/2 spoonful dissolved in hot water does the trick. 4. Apricot Seeds & Sprouted Mung Beans: Cancer Cell Inhibition. Both of these foods share one thing in common: high levels of laetrile (vitamin B17), which has been found effective in arresting tumor growth. But how does it kill cancer cells without killing healthy cells? Without getting too technical, there is some evidence to support that when laetrile comes into contact with an enzyme called beta-glucosidase (which is only found in cancer cells), the laetrile is broken down, releasing “manufactured” hydrogen cyanide (HCN), which attacks the cancerous cell. Normal cells remain unaffected because of the mitochondrial enzyme rhodanase, which detoxifies the cyanide component. Cancer cells lack this enzyme. I’m not saying laetrile is a magical cure for cancer. But it’s a cheap preventive measure. Organic and raw apricot kernels (the seed inside the pit) are available online (try Nuts.com or iHerb.com). I blend them into my Vitamix morning smoothie. Sprout mung beans overnight (using a simple sprouting vessel) and eat over rice. Alternatively, you can make a broth with turmeric or even brew a coffee-like drink in a French Press with nutritional yeast. 5. Green Coffee Beans: Fat Loss. Similar to green tea and grape seed extract, organic raw (green) coffee beans have powerful anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties effective in combating free radical damage. Benefits in weight management are due to two active compounds, caffeine (lower in green beans) and chlorogenic acid (which is destroyed by roasting) [TIM: Also found in my perennial fave, yerba mate]. The caffeine releases fatty acids into the bloodstream from stored body fat, while the chlorogenic acid increases efficiency of metabolizing these fats while inhibiting sugar (glucose) absorption by the blood stream. Simply grind the green beans and prepare in a French Press like normal coffee. Alternatively, place the ground beans in water in the sun to brew iced coffee. However, don’t expect it to taste like coffee – it doesn’t. Slightly bitter and somewhat flavorless, try adding erythritol to sweeten. Nor will it give you a boost; its caffeine content is significantly lower than roasted beans. There was a rumor that Starbucks was test-marketing some iced green bean elixirs, but I have yet to see it hit stores. Probably didn’t test well. 6. Elk Antler Velvet:Testosterone Booster. Elk antler velvet isn’t just the “fuzz” growing on the animal’s antler, it’s derived from the whole cartilaginous affair, which is removed from the animal (humanely), dried and ground into a powder (predominantly in Canada and New Zealand). Due to growth proteins called Insulin-like Growth Factors (IGF-1 & IGF-2), this “velvet” creates an endogenous increase in testosterone production, increasing in the body’s ability to naturally and rapidly regenerate tissue & bone (antlers are the fastest growing animal tissue known to science – growing upwards of an inch per day). For personal reasons, I eschew animal products from my diet, so I do not myself use elk antler velvet. Nonetheless, and from what I understand, antler removal does not harm the animal, and is in fact a humane and necessary safety precaution that helps prevent the elk from attacking each other. The extraction process is heavily regulated by the Canadian government and the USDA, so make sure your product is government certified (a precaution against bacterial infection incident to chronic wasting disease that occurs in hoofed animals). Currently most of this product is exported to China but is readily available online. Administer in capsule or powder form, 250mg/day post-workout or before sleep. 7. Suma Root & the 4 Ginseng Blend:Adaptogen. Adaptogens are metabolic regulators that increase the body’s ability to – for lack of a better phrase – adapt to environmental stressors, both physical and emotional. Suma is a ginseng-like adaptogen extracted from a root native to Brazil that is linked to improved immune system functionality and hormonal regulation. Combine with (American) ginseng, Ashwaganda (Indian ginseng), and Eleutherococcus (Siberian ginseng) to create a potent combination that promotes longevity and stress management — normalizing and balancing emotional and physical energy levels. Take in capsules (easily sourced online) or brew into a tea. 8. Camu Camu: A sour lemon-sized orange-purple fruit indigenous to Amazonian lowlands, camu camu contains an impressive array of phytochemicals, bioflavonoids, amino acids, vitamins and minerals like beta-carotene and potassium. Most importantly, camu camu boasts the highest natural vitamin C density of any food on the planet — anywhere from 20-50 times the level of vitamin C in a typical orange, and scores extremely high on the “ORAC” (“oxygen radical absorbance capacity”) scale, a method of quantifying the anti-oxidant capacities of biological samples. Camu camu also reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol and facilitates the uptake of serotonin. In other words, it will make you happy. Available in supplement form, I like Navitas Naturals Organic Camu Powder. Add a teaspoon to juice or smoothie (taste is tart, a bit like orange juice itself). 9. Moringa (Olefiera): Dubbed the “miracle tree” and the “world’s most nutritious plant species ever studied,” this amazing tree is native to regions of Africa/Asia but can grow almost anywhere due to its incredible ability to extract nutrients from the soil and air. Its leaves are an all-around green superfood; with more than 90 nutrients, moringa is like a utility baseball player that can excel in every position. High in a wide array of vitamins and minerals it’s anti-oxidant rich (46 anti-oxidants), anti-diabetes (reduces blood glucose) and promotes heart health (lipid lowering) among other benefits. Available in capsule and powder form, brew the powder into a tea or add to juice or your morning smoothie. 10. Pu-erh Tea: This tea can be perhaps the most expensive in the world, with some cakes priced at $350K (for a 250g cake), its leaves derived from trees upwards of 1,700 years old. A post-fermented tea product produced in the Yunnan province of China and carefully aged, the harvesting, creation and ceremony of Pu-erh is an art steeped in preserved tradition dating back millennia. But what makes Pu-erh truly unique is the process by which the leaves are fermented by microbes after drying and then aged. It is believed that the microbial activity in the tea provides probiotic health benefits unique Pu-erh, such as reducing arterial plaque and LDL cholesterol levels as well as aiding in weight loss by reducing blood sugar levels and improving the body’s ability to metabolize fat. Dramatically less costly versions of Pu-erh are available [TIM: I drink this version almost every morning]; versions I have used provide a long-lasting even-keeled energy. To learn more, I suggest you consult your local teahouse. There is nothing like a traditional Pu-erh tea ceremony administered by a tea master. It’s an extraordinary experience. If you happen to be in Los Angeles, Colin Hudon at Temple Tea in Venice is excellent. To Test or Not to Test? All well and good, I hear you saying. But where’s the proof? Herein lie the rub. To be sure, studies of varying legitimacy exist to substantiate the above. But large-scale, peer-reviewed research requires substantial funding. This funding is often provided by for-profit corporations that have little interest in validating natural products that cannot be protected via patents. That said, I’m not asking you to take my word for it. Do your own research (Ray Sahelian, M.D.’s website is a good place to start). Experiment on yourself. Start conservatively, document your findings, and tweak your way to success. Perhaps you won’t recognize yourself in the mirror a year from now. Best of luck, Rich ### Tim: Any questions? Please ask them in the comments and Rich will jump in there with you. Rich’s amazing story and techniques are covered in-depth in Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World’s Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself, which just came out this week.

Six-Figure Businesses Built for Less Than $100: 17 Lessons Learned

Photo: 401K. The following article is a guest post by Chris Guillibeau, who’s traveled to 150+ countries and studied more micro-businesses than anyone I know. I hope you love this piece as much as I did. Enjoy! Enter Chris Over the past several years, I’ve been on a quest to study micro-businesses—small operations (typically one person) that make $50,000 a year or more (often a lot more). The quest took me all over the world, at first to a large group of 1,500 “unexpected entrepreneurs” who volunteered to share their stories in detail. I wanted to hear from all kinds of businesses–both offline and online–to decipher what made them so successful. How did they get started? What helped them grow into significant, reliable sources of income? How can you increase odds of success? After much effort, a small team and I narrowed down the case studies to a subset of 70 that I focused on for final analysis. All 70 people had created freedom for themselves: new income and a completely new way of life. There are formulas. Here is a highly-condensed list of 17 lessons learned… The 17 Lessons of $100 Start-ups Note: Links show the businesses in action. A gap in the marketplace reveals a business opportunity.Gary Leff used his Frequent Flyer Miles to travel all over the world in First Class, and his friends kept asking for advice. Almost on a whim, he decided to launch a basic website offering the service of booking travel awards for a fee. His service is something that people could do on their own for free—but plenty of people don’t know how it works or just don’t want the hassle of dealing with airline call centers. This “side business” now brings in more than $100,000 a year. Lesson: Provide results (photos, testimonials, details of your own experiences) and offer to do something for people that they don’t know how to do or don’t want to worry about. Latch on to a popular service, then simplify it for others. Self-described “professional nerd” Brett Kelly wrote Evernote Essentials, the first English-language manual for the popular Evernote software. Brett was hoping for a $10,000 payday over the course of a few months—enough to pay off some bills. Instead, he received $10,000 in two days… and then the sales kept coming. Originally conceived as a hobby that Brett worked on during nights and weekends, Evernote Essentials now earns more than $160,000 a year in net income. Here’s what Brett says about the results: “The unreal success of this project has not only freed our family from a decade of debt and financial instability, but has also given us the freedom to pursue the kind of life we want.” Lesson: Simplify things and cash in. Brett developed a comprehensive resource with lots of screenshots and detailed, highly actionable tips. More than 10,000 customers later, it’s still going strong. Don’t beg your friends for money! You probably don’t need any outside investment to begin. The vast majority of respondents in the study started their business for less than $1,000, and nearly half for $100 or less. In Vancouver, Canada, Nicolas Luff started with only $56.33, the cost of a business license. Others started only with a domain name and a free WordPress account. It wasn’t just online businesses that started on the cheap. Michael Hanna started an unconventional mattress store after being laid off from his job in media sales. A friend of his who owned a furniture store offered him an unwanted truckload of mattresses, figuring that Michael could sell them one at a time on Craigslist. Instead of Craigslist, though, Michael found a car dealership that had recently gone out of business. He was able to rent the space at a huge discount, and he opened his first store while learning on the job. Even though Michael originally knew nothing about the mattress business, three years later Mattress Lot produces more than $1 million in revenue. The chart below illustrates the average startup cost from the businesses we examined. Image Credit: Mike Rohde. Note: I sometimes hear from people who say that not all businesses can be started on the cheap. This is true. If you want to open a factory, you might need more than $100. If you want to found a VC-backed tech start-up, you might need to woo investors. But the point remains: you can start many different kinds of businesses without going into debt. All things are equal, why not take that route if the costs are low? Lesson: Whenever possible, start quickly and start cheap. (And most of the time, it is possible.) If you do need money, you can find a way. Emma Reynolds had an idea for a consultancy that would work with big companies to improve their staffing and resourcing. She calculated that she would need at least $17,000 to start the new firm. There was just one problem: Emma was 23 and unlikely to get a business loan. Emma and her business partner Bruce realized that despite this, they could probably get a car loan. Bruce proceeded to do just that, borrowing $17,000 for a car and then investing the funds in the business with Emma instead. They paid back the car loan within ten months, and the bank never found out that there was no actual car. Now the profitable firm employs twenty people and has multiple offices in four countries. Another example: Shannon Oakey was turned down for a small bank loan despite excellent financials and a strong business plan. Shannon took her business elsewhere: to Kickstarter, where her project was fully funded. Shannon printed out a copy of the final results and mailed it to the loan officer who had rejected her—with a lollipop inside the printout. Lesson: If you really need a loan, don’t take “no” as the final answer. Consider alternatives. Bootstrap. Hustle. Figure it out. (Note: Borrowing money for a non-existent car is at your own risk!) Get to the first sale as quickly as possible.Nick Gatens put up a portfolio site for his photographs and sold a $50 print for the first time. What’s the big deal? When you’ve never sold something before–i.e. never had a stranger comes to your website and hands over their credit card–the first time is flooring. Here’s what Nick said: “It took me a long time to add the order button on my site. For a while I kept blaming it on technical issues—a WordPress glitch, the need for design improvement, and so on. Finally I realized I was waiting for no good reason. I put the offer out there and made a sale. It felt great!” Lesson: Does your site have a PayPal button on it? If not, add one today! A trend or controversial idea can also reveal a business opportunity. Jason Glaspey was a follower of Paleo, the controversial diet that is both loved and ridiculed. Jason noticed a common problem among fellow devotees: because of the requirement for regular shopping and planning, Paleo was hard to follow on a regular basis. Jason created Paleo Plan, a membership site that offers shopping lists and ongoing guidance. The goal of Paleo Plan is to keep its customers on track, with detailed shopping lists and ongoing recommendations. The project now brings in more than $5,000 a month. Lesson: When large groups of people love and hate something, it’s a good sign there’s a business model hiding in plain sight. Get paid by making things easy for the people who love it. You can be one person… or maybe two. Nathalie Lussier had lost weight and discovered a new way of life by following a raw foods diet. She then set up a successful business teaching people how they could do the same thing, using webinars, courses, and personal coaching. One of the tipping points came when Nathalie discovered that the initial name she had chosen, Raw Foods Switch, could also be rendered Raw Foods Witch. Nathalie jumped into character, dressing up with a broom and pointed black hat. Within a year, the business grew to more than $60,000 a year in net income. What’s not to love? Just one thing: Nathalie liked raw foods, but that wasn’t all she liked. She was also a programmer who had set up the entire database and backend operation for Raw Foods Witch. She wanted to put those skills to greater use, and she felt like she could help aspirational entrepreneurs build their business. Instead of shutting down the raw foods business, however, Nathalie put it on auto-pilot, using auto-responders and repeating webinars to essentially market the business on its own. Then she switched over to a new site, NathalieLussier.com, where she offers specific consulting services based on business-building and technology. Nathalie now earns a good living from both businesses, with RawFoodsWitch.com essentially running on its own as she focuses her efforts on the new site. Lesson: Clone yourself for fun and profit. It’s not necessarily about doing more, it’s about being smart. Notice what frustrates you, then figure out a way to correct it. [TIM: This is my business model for almost everything] In Portland, Oregon I met Sarah Young, who opened a yarn store at the height of the recession despite no business background. When I asked Sarah, “What made you think you would succeed?” her answer was astute. “I wasn’t an entrepreneur,” Sarah said, “But I was a shopper. Other yarn stores were cramped and unfriendly. There wasn’t really a space you could go to hang out. I knew I wasn’t the only knitter who felt this way, so I decided to create an alternative.” Sarah followed up, renting retail space and decorating for the grand opening of Happy Knits, a welcoming space for knitters and their families. The last part was important: most (though not all) knitters are women, so Sarah set up a play area for kids and a WiFi area for non-knitting partners. Customers are welcome to stay as long as they like. You can see Sarah and hear more about Happy Knits in this video trailer. [Note: in the trailer, Sarah tells the story of her first $1,000 day. We filmed this a few months ago, and when I recently caught up with her, she told me about the store's first $10,000 day. Business is great and Happy Knits now has six employees.] Lesson: See something missing? Maybe you’re not the only one. Pay attention to inefficiencies, which may be opportunities to provide something better. To make an extra $35,000 a year, be open to change. One of the most insightful stories came from a source who preferred to be anonymous, a gent who tweaked a single variable in his sales page. Everything else was constant: On one sales page I had $49, and on another $89. Nothing was different at all—same copywriting, same order process, same fulfillment. To be honest, I thought that $49 was a better price, but I had set that price somewhat arbitrarily. Guess what? Conversion went down [for $89]… slightly. But overall income actually increased! … I then decided to test it at $99. Why not, right? But from $89 to $99 I saw a bit more of a drop-off, and I got worried. I’m now back at $89, and even with the lower conversion factored in, I worked out that I’ve given myself a $24 raise on every product that sells. These days we are selling at least four copies a day. If everything else remains consistent, I’ll make $35,040 more this year . . . all from one test. This single, unexpected tweak resulted in more than $35,000 a year in net income. His last words to me were: “I’ve decided to try some more tests.” Lesson: Test everything. If you’re not good at testing, however, at least test pricing. [TIM: Here's one helpful tool you might get obsessed with: Unbounce.com] Give them an offer they can’t refuse. What separates a decent offer from a compelling offer that you simply must purchase? I learned this lesson in Anchorage, Alaska, when I talked with Scott McMurren, co-founder of Alaska TourSaver, the leading coupon guide for visitors coming to Alaska. Scott explained how it worked. Every year, more than a million visitors head to the frontier state, and many of them travel independently. Alaska is a beautiful place, but it’s also expensive. To keep costs down, Scott worked with hotels, restaurants, and tour providers all across the state. He put pressure on them to provide real savings instead of the usual minor discounts that other coupons offered. (In the TourSaver guide, most deals are Buy-1-Get-1-Free or 50% off.) Then Scott make an important decision: instead of pricing his coupon book for twenty bucks or so, like some competitors did, Alaska TourSaver would sell on an annual basis for just under $100. Because the deals are so valuable, it’s a no-brainer for most travelers to pick up the package. Scott’s pitch is: “Get this coupon book, use it once, and it will pay for itself. Then you’ll have hundreds of additional coupons to use as well.” Lesson: Make your offer so compelling that buyers have no reason to say no. Give them an offer they can’t refuse. (Bonus tip: every compelling offer includes an element of urgency, the reason why buyers should take action right now. “Supplies are limited! Don’t wait!”) Give people what they want (not just what they say they want).Kyle Hepp is a wedding photographer who travels the world from her home base in Santiago, Chile. Kyle’s clients tend to be young and hip, and they’re drawn to her work because it is non-traditional. Sometimes they even say they don’t want any traditional wedding shots. “We’re not into old-school,” was how one couple put it. Kyle agrees with them and spends her time at the wedding getting fun, candid shots that she knows the couple will like. But that’s not all. Having done this for a while, Kyle knows that what her clients want and what they say they want may be different—and she also knows that the families of the bride and groom may have preferences of their own. Here’s how she handles these competing desires: On the day of the wedding, I’ll grab them and say, “Let’s get your family and just do a couple of traditional shots.” I’ll make it quick and painless. I make sure everyone is laughing and having a good time and it’s not those awful, everybody-stare-at-the-camera-and-look-miserable kinds of shots. And then after the wedding, when I deliver those photos, either the bride and groom’s parents will be thrilled to have those pictures (which in turn makes the couple happy), or the bride and groom themselves will end up saying they’re so happy that we did those shots. Kyle goes above and beyond by giving her photography clients what they really want… even if they hadn’t realized it themselves. Lesson: Dig deeper to uncover real needs. Give people what they really want. Put happiness in a box and sell it. What do people really, really want? They want something positive added to their lives or something negative removed. The best microbusinesses do this in different ways—making it easier to travel the world, for example, or making customers feel special. But when you talk with business owners, many focus on the descriptions of their business instead of how their product or service will actually help people. Consider these different approaches in explaining the mission of the V6 Ranch, an unconventional vacation destination in Parkfield, California: Descriptive (Boring): Our business enables visitors to ride horses and sit around the campfire. Benefits (Inspirational): Our business helps visitors be someone else for a day. The message we try to send is “Come stay with us and be a cowboy.” Isn’t the second option so much better? Sell happiness (benefit) instead of merely describing your business (features). Lesson: As much as possible, focus your business messaging on adding something positive or removing something negative from customers’ daily routines. Forget traditional demographics. Focus on psychographics instead. In Arcata, California, Charlie Jordan and Mark Ritz teamed up to start the Kinetic Koffee Kompany. They had great coffee, but that wasn’t enough—these days, there are plenty of small businesses making great coffee. What set the Kinetic Koffee Kompany apart was their target market: they focused specifically on the outdoors community, pitching bike shops and “gear retailers” on carrying their stock. They showed up at races and made a name for themselves among groups interested in active hobbies. Instead of competing with Starbucks, Charlie and Mark made their own market. Lesson: Figure out who “your people” are and serve them. Don’t group them according to traditional demographics unless you have a good reason to. Offer a “no pain, all gain” refund option to build confidence.Nev Lapwood was a snowboarding instructor who created a set of instructional DVDs that sold around the world. Nev had a good business model almost from the beginning, but he decided to kick it up a notch, offering to refund his customers 110% of their purchase price if they didn’t like the product. Sales increased, and Nev applied the same approach with foreign translations of his DVDs. I asked Nev if this had become a problem with people requesting habitual refunds. His response: nope, not at all. The business now produces more than $240,000 a year in net income. Lesson: Build trust by making it easy to trust you. Offer a strong guarantee, and don’t make people jump through hoops to get a refund. [TIM: 110% sound familiar? Check out the below. Congrats again, Nev!] “Marketing is like sex (only losers pay for it).” This quote, originally from a 2010 Fast Company article, aptly describes how the roles of marketing and paid advertising have changed. The vast majority of business owners I surveyed had built their customer base without any paid advertising at all. Instead, they did so largely through word of mouth. I tested this hypothesis through my [Chris] own $10,000, Ten-Hour “Marketing and Sex” experiment—placing a series of paid ads for a travel service I operate and comparing them to the efforts of “hustling,” or connecting with friends and readers in a free, organic manner. The results were clear: I made far more money through the hustling efforts than through the paid advertising methods. Lesson: If paid advertising proves to work for your business, by all means, don’t quit. But before you go down that road, consider “hustling” instead—the gentle art of self-promotion, and making something interesting that others will be eager to share for free. Plan your product launch long in advance, and make people line up to purchase. Like a Hollywood movie, you want to build anticipation before launching anything. Use the “dark and stormy night” approach to tell stories and lead people into a great experience—not just a sale. Adam Baker and Karol Gajda’s Only72.com project illustrates this concept well. Twice a year, they line up affiliates and partners to push through a megasale of discounted online products… for only 72 hours. Each sale produces a six-figure payday for Adam, Karol, and the affiliates—because they’ve learned to build anticipation. Free bonus: wondering how to launch your first product? Here’s a 37-Step Product Launch checklist. Pay it forward by making a great product or service and launching well. Lesson: Get people excited! Then give them what they want. Turn disaster into recovery—then sell recovery. Ridlon “Sharkman” Kiphard was on an island in Fiji, operating his first big tour for Live Adventurously, an alternative tour operator for those who like to play hard. The first half of the trip had been great, but then the call came: the chief of the neighboring island, which they were scheduled to visit the next day, had died. His death called for a mandatory 100 days (!) of mourning. Suddenly, Sharkman had nine high-paying guests… and nowhere to go. In Sharkman’s words, here’s how the story unfolded: “This was when doing our research earlier, and really knowing the area, paid off. We managed to extend our stay where we were by one night and spent the time feverishly cobbling together plans. We chartered an aircraft; contacted numerous hotels, resorts, and dive operators; got recommendations; did some more research; and booked the group into a newly opened property on a remote island. The transition went smoothly, the entire rest of the trip came off without a hitch, and it was as if it had been planned that way the entire time.” Over and over, I heard stories like these—of how an impending disaster turned into a moment of strength. In Sharkman’s case, his guests were highly impressed with how the team managed the problem. Some of them offered to pay extra to cover the additional costs incurred with the change, and all went on to provide strong referrals for Live Adventurously. Lesson: Stick it out! (Bonus: The value of failure is overrated. Everyone always wants to know about failure because of some convoluted theory that you must fail more often than you succeed. “You learn more from your mistakes…” etc. Why not succeed from the beginning? Some people do. [TIM: In other words, learn from other people’s mistakes instead, when possible.) *** Wrap-up: Your Turn The constant themes in our study were freedom and value: freedom is what we all want, and value is the way to achieve it. Over and over, I found business owners who had created their own freedom (and a great income) by making something useful and desirable for their customers. It’s easy to think that these are isolated examples, or that you can’t achieve the same results, but the micro-business phenomenon is happening all over the world in different ways. Follow the path of these stories and make actionable plans. Pick one thing, get it on the calendar, and do it in the next week. Just do something. Lesson: Don’t kill the dream! Live the dream! ### Odds and Ends: - If you have enjoyed the muse example series in the past, you will love Chris’ new book, The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future. - If you’re interested in product launches, check out this oddly named (cough, cough, scratch head, scratch head) piece in Forbes: The Tim Ferriss Effect. - Are you a writer, or an aspiring writer? Read this: “How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day.”

Twitter Digest: 2012-05-23

One more Toronto real estate graphic. I'm sure this will work out fine. http://t.co/ZkRiEbJc -> The official bird of Toronto: The construction crane. Remarkable. /via http://t.co/oNInbLB2 http://t.co/47Jvst2g -> Science is finally getting to the big questions: Why do bubbles in Guinness sink? – http://t.co/ZkVgHago -> This week's episode of Game of Thrones reminds me of Empire Strikes Back as re-done by medieval furriers. ->

Gen Y Independents Non-Profit Oriented

We posted the article Gen Y Independents: Socially Oriented and Serving Non-Profits over at MBO Partners blog. The article covers one of the more interesting statistics from MBO Partners State of Independence Study, which is 22% of Gen Y (born 1980 to 2000) independent workers (freelancers, temps, etc.) reported that the primary market they served is non-profits. This is substantially higher than any other age group. On average a bit less than 5% of older respondents reported that non-profits were their primary market. A number of studies have shown that Gen Yers are more socially oriented than older generations, so we weren't completely surprised by this finding. But we were surprised just how the strong the difference is between Gen Y and the other age cohorts. Head over to MBO's site for more on the social orientation of Gen Y. Speaking of the State of Independence Study, we've just kicked off year 2 and one of our focus areas is Gen Y. So in a few months we'll have a lot more to say about this entrepreneurial and socially oriented generation.

India’s “GenY” prefers social networks over watching TV, Chat over Voice

The times, they are a changing and so is the taste of Indian’s Gen Y consumers. As per a survey conducted by TCS, eight out of every ten high school students own mobile phones and more than 40% use mobile phones to access the internet (compared to just 12% in 2009). The survey was conducted across 12 Indian cities – Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Bhubaneswar, Chennai, Coimbatore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kochi, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai and Pune, with over 12,300 high school students in ages of 12-18 participated (undertaken from July to December 2011 during the nationwide TCS IT Wiz program) and here are a few interesting highlights of the survey: - 3 out of 4 students cited “Research for School” as the main reason to access the internet followed by social reasons like chatting/connecting with friends (68%) and listening to music (50%). Over 84% of the students go online from home compared to just 58% (in 2009) - One-third of all respondents said that Facebook was their preferred site. Other platforms like Orkut and India-based networks like Apnacircle, iBibo and Hi5 are more popular in mini-metros compared to metros. - India’s urban Gen Next is turning to text and chat as alternatives to voice. 50% of those surveyed in metros said that they used SMS the most to communicate while 45% used IM and 38% used Facebook or Twitter – all significantly higher than the number of students in metros who said they used email (34%) for the same purpose. Reflecting poorer connectivity levels, use of email (55%) in mini-metros continues to higher than metros (34%). - The least favorite gadget is the television with less than one percent voting for it and the most favorite gadget with 28% votes is the mobile phone! Gaming consoles are also increasingly becoming popular even in mini-metros with a little over 16% of students owning at least one gaming console as compared to nearly 45% in metros. Music players are also very popular with 60% of the respondents owning them. Tablet PCs and Tabs, though nascent, have penetrated far more intensively in metros with 15% respondents listing it as their choice of device to access with mini-metros at 7%. Top 10 Trends Percentage Use Facebook 85 Access internet from home 84 Own mobiles 79 Use internet for school-related research 74 Own and access the internet through a PC 68 Use internet for chat / to connect 68 Make voice calls to communicate 59 Use email as a tool of communication 45 Prefer IT as the first option for a career 34 Spend more than an hour on the internet everyday 33 - more details here. PS: Before you blindly trust the survey, read this: Why and how to read survey reports? [Data, Intuition and Truth]

It’s Morning in Venture Capital

This article originally ran on PEHub. If you prefer the super short version – I’ve summarized the post in the final section. Many observers of the venture capital industry have questioned whether its best days are behind it. They are frustrated by the past decade of subpar returns for the sector. The most recent report to weigh in on the troubles of the industry was produced by the esteemed Kauffman Foundation. There are obvious reasons the industry has had less-than-desirable returns, including: massive over-funding of the sector, huge increases in inexperienced venture capitalists that took a decade to peter out, and the massive correction in the value of the public stock markets that closed many exit opportunities for half a decade. I can’t help feel a bit of rear-view mirror analysis in all of “VC model is broken” bears in our industry. I have been close to the tech & startup sectors for more than 20 years and I can’t think of a period in which I felt more optimistic about the innovation and value creation I see in front of us. Looking ahead at the next decade I am excited by what I believe will be viewed as one of the best and most rational investment periods for venture capital due to seven discrete factors: 1. The number of startups being created has increased by an order of magnitude Cloud computing and the open source movements have brought down the costs of starting a company by more than 90%. If you want to understand the details of why this is, I covered it in detail in this post, Understanding Changes in the Software Industry. This has led to the creation of incubators, accelerators and seed funds. From this we have seen a commensurate boom in the number of startup companies. When I was graduated from university in 1991 it was only the really committed who eschewed the corporate world for creating tech startup businesses. When I came out of college LA Law was one of the most popular shows on TV and made being a lawyer sexy, so most of my peers made that career choice. But in 2012 a visit to any major college in America will show you the massive increase in aspirations of our young talent to become the next Mark Zuckerberg and build a future Facebook. The movie, “The Social Network” might have had more of an impact on creating future entrepreneurs than any other event of the past 5 years. Thank you, Aaron Sorkin! Contrary to some press reporting, the boom in startups, the creation of accelerators and seed funds as well as the deserved popularity of AngelList do not signal doom for our industry. They are, in fact, great news for traditional venture capitalists. The most successful of these businesses will still need venture capital to scale their businesses. They need a combination of capital and experience to separate from the rest of the pack – the low cost of starting a business means it is even more vital to become the market leader more quickly. What the explosion in startups really means for our industry is a much bigger pipeline of potential deals if we VC’s can be patient. Yes, it’s true that FOMO (fear of missing out) is driving some irrational behavior and valuations amongst uber competitive deals and well-financed VCs. I’ve written in detail about that in this post, “On Bubbles, And Why We’ll Be Just Fine.” It doesn’t seem too irrational for seed or A deals, just a bit higher than the norm. And by the C round it seems like investors feel more confident in setting a fair market value. But in a race to be sure you don’t miss the next Pinterest, some people are paying huge premiums for “market risk” B rounds. Some will pay off, others will not. For those patient enough to source great companies at reasonable prices and prepared to weather the next inevitable downturn, I believe firmly there will be economic rewards for discipline and patience. 2. The number of venture capital funds has shrunk by two-thirds To really assess what opportunities the VC industry has over the next decade, one needs to first look at some of the root causes of poor returns in the past decade. The Funding Problem In 1998 there were around 850 VC funds and by 2000 there were 2,300. Thomson Reuters data shows that around $10 billion of LP money went into VCs per year pre bubble. By 2000 the total LP commitments had mushroomed to more than $100 billion. Everybody knows that most funds are 10-year funds (and that strangely 10-year fund really means 12-year funds). So it is unsurprising that an over-funding environment and the commensurate returns hangover would have lasted until about – well – 2012 Just why does over-funding dampen returns? For starters we saw a huge influx of inexperienced managers enter the VC industry proving clearly that being a VC is not a purely quantitative job. But on micro level, over-funding also creates performance problems for specific companies. In a rational funding environment you might see 3 or 4 great competitors slug it out over the market, each with enough funding to prove their performance until the next milestone where the market decides whether they deserve more funding. They compete on features, price and execution. In an over-funding environment companies are encouraged to eschew revenues in a land grab to acquire eyeballs, clicks, page views or whatever other vanity metrics give VCs the false comfort that they’re sitting on a gold mine. Try charging customers for your product when you have 12 competitors giving the product away free finances by $20 million of VC. The Exit Problem And of course the funding problem coincided with the stock market correction that took away most exit options for years to come. IPO markets had burned an entire cycle of retail stock investors and many institutional investors to boot. The numbers of potential buyers had decreased dramatically both because large companies were shedding jobs and because many past buyers simply lacked resources to make acquisitions. And in a market with too much capacity (too many startups) the leverage was completely in the hand of buyers at M&A activity finally picked up. So of course returns from 2000-2010 were subpar on average for the industry. Today’s Normalization Fast forward to 2012 and none of these conditions hold. While the number of startups has increased exponentially, the number of active venture capitalists has shrunk by more than 2/3rds in the past decade to less than 750 today and still shrinking. Put simply, more deals and fewer venture capitalists mean better access to deals, more stability for winners and great returns for the best in our industry. Money flowing into our industry has also massively downsized. LP contributions to VC firms shrunk from 2000 and by 2005-2008 had stabilized to around $30 billion per year. By 2010-2011 this had shrunk by half again, averaging under $15 billion. It’s also worth noting as data would suggest from this SVB venture funding report, lower costs to build tech & operate businesses implies the possibility of lower loss ratios in portfolios. It will take some time to prove out this hypothesis, but the data above suggests it may be the case. So it’s hard to make a compelling argument that the performance on average in the past decade will prima facie have any predictive powers in determining the next ten. In fact, the market conditions would argue for quite the opposite, which is what makes rear-view-mirror analysis so blurred. 3. There are 20x more consumers online In 1997, the year the Kauffman Report begins its analysis; there were 70 million users online globally. In 1998 it was 150 million, 1999 250 million and by 2000 it had crossed 350 million. Even at this staggering pace it still represented less than 6% of the world’s population. By the end of 2011 the Internet population was estimated at 2.3 billion, with 275 million in North America alone (source: Internet World Stats) and an astounding global penetration of 33% of the world’s population. Considering how much world poverty exists this penetration rate is truly mind-boggling. Put simply – doing business online is significantly more valuable than it has ever been. There is no sector of the economy that isn’t being transformed by the online community that is now voraciously consuming media, applications, communications and buying global products. To ascribe past poor performance in our industry to the current market situation we face is myopic. 4. We’re online all the time and at high speed It’s not just that more people are online, it’s that we’re online all the time. Internet usage a decade ago was less than 1 hour per day and was restricted to narrowband communications. Today we’re online 3.1 hours per day on average, and that’s excluding the other 13 hours a day where we have our mobile devices, our connected TVs, our iPads and Kindles and soon our cars connected to the web. The ability to interact, transact and disrupt is an order of magnitude greater at broadband speeds than at 56k dial-up modem speeds. Just how transformative is broadband? As of January 2012 consumers were watching 4 BILLION video views per day on YouTube. A decade ago the idea of even watching video online would have been laughable. THAT is disruption. And as the recent VC fundings of Maker Studios, Machinima, Movie Clips, Big Frame and Fullscreen will attest – opportunities for massive growth in our sector are anything but moribund. The video industry will be disrupted just as books, newspapers and music before it. And retail, financial services, hotels, the auto industry, taxis, flowers and every inefficient or protected industry out there is being altered by technology changes that change market dynamics and create opportunities for the innovative, the nimble and the risk takers. 5. Mobility really changes everything It’s not just that we’re connected to the Internet at higher speeds and for longer; we’re actually always tethered to the web. In fact, the majority of Americans are now carrying computers in their front pockets. The opportunity to transact at the point of purchase increases the sheer number of revenue opportunities. This world of local meets retail meets digital advertising portends to technology disruption and with it VC opportunities. This never existed a decade ago. Heck, this opportunity didn’t exist three years ago. According to Google data 30% of all restaurant searches now come via mobile devices. Our societal behavior is now to look up things we want to book or purchase at the point & time of need. The desktop web introduced banner ads that offered “brand advertising” opportunities akin to television. Mobile devices deliver “bottom of funnel” sales opportunities that deliver real & immediate economic results. Search for a restaurant, book a table, eat in 30 minutes. Search for movies times, book your tickets, see a show. Bottom of the sales funnel. The mobile world brings enormous business opportunities and changes to business models that were unthinkable when VCs made investments ten years ago that produced the last decade of results. And the future? Nearly 25% of US users access the web primarily through only mobile devices and these are our youth and thus our future. It is estimated that more than 30% of all YouTube videos are now being consumed on mobile devices and I’ve seen actual data that shows in some youth genres mobile video consumption now exceeds 50% of video views. When you look at the developing world this is the majority of users (due to lack of landline infrastructure) and it portends future opportunities in payments, entertainment, application development and services. This doesn’t seem like the end of VC to me, it feels more like the 2nd inning. 6. Everybody is now payment ready Often overlooked in the importance of what has changed during the past decade is that we’re all payment ready now. We’re all one-click away from buying, watching, renting or ordering just about anything. When you order an Amazon Kindle it comes pre-configured with your user name already configured into the device so that you can click a single button and buy shit. And buy people are doing en masse. It’s not a tablet – it’s an order entry device! A decade ago most of the country was fearful of entering their credit cards or using mobile banking. Today all of our banking and payment information is accessible online and we are one-click from buying from Amazon, iTunes, the AppStore and PayPal. Businesses are also one-click from advertising through Google and now Facebook. Web businesses can now grow revenue before they can even afford sales people. This trend is often overlooked yet the results or palpable. When businesses really work – they explode financially at a pace that we haven’t seen in history and with limited investments to prove out this case. If you think back to just the past couple of years we’ve seen enormous growth on limited capital in businesses like Words With Friends and OMGPop (both now Zynga) as well as Angry Birds. This has spawned growth in related VC-backed businesses like Burstly, TapJoy and Flurry who help enable real-time transactions in mobile apps. The whole ecosystem grows rapidly because the distance between, “I like this application” and “give me an upgrade” is one click with none of the traditional abandonment that comes with having to pull out your credit card. Consider this: 5 years ago VCs were debating whether US consumers would ever adopt “virtual goods” in the way that Asian consumers did and thus saw the popular rise of QQ (TenCent) in China (which did $5 billion in revenue in the past 12 months). Virtual goods are in fact booming on a global basis and in many instances deliver a much higher ARPU than advertising revenue. 2012 virtual good revenue is expected to top $12 billion this year. [thank you to Kidlandia for the chart] And here’s the thing – 55% of the entire market of purchasers are 15 years old or younger. There is no stronger evidence of the power of one-click purchasing (as these people clearly don’t have credit cards). Imagine how these consumers look in 10 years time. Will they really even understand cash? Unimaginable to you? Just remember that 10 years ago you had no: YouTube, Facebook, iPhone or iPad. In fact, you were cool because you had a Palm Pilot while your friends still used a Filofax (yes, you know I’m on to you). 7. We’re all socially linked And finally it can’t be ignored that we’re not only payment ready, but we’re socially connected. Look at the rapid adoption of Groupon, LivingSocial or Instagram as proof of how rapidly businesses can grow through viral means. It’s not just that businesses can monetize more easily, when people like products or services they are diffused more rapidly through the population than has ever been the case. Nowhere was this more evident than the rise of Zynga, one of the fastest growing companies in history. But this is also spreading through non-game types of businesses. Evidence Fab: Just 18 months ago they started selling products and through a unique offering and a flawlessly executed social model they are reportedly on par to cross $100 million in sales in 2012. That type of growth on limited VC dollars was unthinkable a decade ago. Morning in VC These seven factors are leading to better and more sustainable opportunities in venture capital than have been present at any time in our investment histories. We have lower costs to create companies – leading to more early stage innovation. We have a more normalized venture market with less capital and fewer firms. We have consumers who are online at higher speeds and for more of their days. People are connected all the time and when they’re mobile. Each of these pocket computers is payment ready & social linked. Given these seven factors – it’s hard to look in the rear view mirror and imagine you can see the future. I believe it’s truly morning in the technology sector. And I remain convinced this bodes well for our venture capital industry. Top image courtesy of Fotolia.com

It’s Morning in Venture Capital

The New Networking: Ultimate LinkedIn Guide For 2012 Grads

(We’ve looked) at how social media sites can be used as powerful networking tools for new college graduates, sharing our best picks for tips, tools, and more for Facebook, Twitter, and now, LinkedIn. Today, we’re exploring LinkedIn for new grads. We’ve saved the best for last: this site was created with professional networking in mind, and it’s our top pick as the most effective resource when it comes to making meaningful professional connections. Check out our guide to find great ideas for making the most of this great tool, as well as groups to check out and insightful posts for LinkedIn success. Tips Whether you’re a LinkedIn newbie or just need to become more effective on the site, these tips offer great ideas for LinkedIn networking as a new grad. Use it: Too often, students and recent grads shy away from LinkedIn, preferring to use Facebook or Twitter instead. That’s a mistake: LinkedIn is the online destination for professional networking, and you’ve got to be on it to get connected. Create a complete profile: Don’t just give a tiny bit of effort when it comes to your profile; actually take the time to fill it out completely so that you’ll be more likely to connect with others that share your interests. Connect with your classmates and professors: Leaving school doesn’t mean you have to leave all of your connections behind. Bring them with you by reaching out and connecting with classmates, faculty, and friends on LinkedIn. Find a mentor: Use LinkedIn to find alumni, professors, or industry greats that can help you out as you navigate in your new career. Use introductions: If you share a connection with someone you’d like to meet, simply use the introduction form to request that your connection passes it along and helps you grow your network. Connect with all of your past employers: Yes, all of them. You never know which connections can pay off for you, so really take advantage of your full network. Take advantage of resources just for new grads: LinkedIn has recently spiffed up profiles for new grads, allowing users to list projects, honors, organizations, and even courses that you’ve taken in college, all relevant experience that can help you stand out and get connected with more people. Ask for recommendations: Check in with former employers, professors, colleagues, and classmates to greatly improve your LinkedIn profile with recommendations from those who know you in your college/professional life. Be a connector: If you know two (or more people) that should know each other but don’t, take a moment to introduce them to each other on LinkedIn. They’ll appreciate that you thought of them and recognize that you’re valuable as a person who offers assistance and great connections. Don’t neglect keywords: Although you’ll likely connect with people you know, and people they know, others (including recruiters) will find you simply by searching. The best way to get found is to include relevant keywords throughout your profile and summary. Remember to highlight and repeat key phrases and words that do a good job of explaining what you’re all about. Go public: Although you may be concerned about privacy, keeping a private profile is not the way to go on LinkedIn. Open your profile up publicly to connect with new people, and just be careful about what you share. Make small connections: LinkedIn’s co-founder, Reid Hoffman, says that it’s a great idea to do “small goods” on the site, offering congratulations, “likes,” and other little ways to let people know you’re listening and you care. Join groups: This one should be a no-brainer. If you want to network on LinkedIn, one of the best ways to do so is to get connected with others through industry and career groups. Establish yourself as an expert with Q&A: Check out the LinkedIn Answers tool to stand out as a resource in your industry and area of interest. You’ll attract new connections and show potential employers that you’re well-informed. Personalize your connections: When requesting connections on LinkedIn, take a moment to change the template request from “I’d like to add you to my professional network” to something that actually identifies you and why you should be connected with that person. Network in person, too: Use LinkedIn as a way to get connected with people and events that you’ll spend time with in person, deepening connections and finding more resources within your network. Groups for New Grads Join and participate in these groups to get connected with relevant new contacts, find resources for new grads, and more. Your alumni network: Take advantage of your college connection and get active in your alumni group on LinkedIn. Some of the best of these include the Boston College Alumni Group and The Penn State Alumni Association. Young professionals groups: There are countless groups on LinkedIn dedicated to young professionals in a variety of different interests. These include those that are industry-based, like Young Professionals in Energy, and location-based, like Chicago Young Professionals. Professional organizations, interest groups: Perhaps the most valuable groups you can join are the ones that cater to your specific career, interest, and industry. Search to find the right one for you, and dive in to become an active member. New Grad Life: Join this group to find discussions on interviewing, job posts, networking, and more. Students and New Grads: Become a part of Students and Recent Grads to get connected with people who want to hire new grads, learn about entry-level jobs available, and find out about news that matters to recent graduates. College Graduate Job Hunters: Find great new jobs, lively discussions, and great connections, all aimed at new graduates searching for jobs in this group. College Recruiting Central: Get insight into how human resources professionals and recruiters are finding new grads like yourself by joining and participating in this group. Useful LinkedIn Tools Find a job, discover new connections, and share your portfolio by taking advantage of these great tools on LinkedIn. LinkedIn Student Jobs: LinkedIn has made it amazingly easy to find a job targeted for new grads on the site. Through the LinkedIn Student Jobs section you’ll find a wealth of companies looking to hire recent grads just like you. Beepmo: Using this GPS-enabled mobile app, you can discover new connections based on where you’re located, making finding new people “as easy as checking into Foursquare.” Creative Portfolio Display: If you’ve worked on a lot of projects in college, this app is a great way to showcase your work and show your connections (and potential employers) what you’re all about. Reading List: This app is great for discovering new and relevant books, and also for striking up a conversation with others about what you’ve read. LinkOut: Having trouble finding time to get together with a new connection? LinkOut can take your calendar, your connection’s calendar, and automatically find times in which you can get together. Cardmunch: At events, it’s not always easy to collect business cards and remember to connect with everyone you’ve met on Facebook. Cardmunch automates much of this, automatically transcribing and uploading information from business cards after you take a photo of them. Events: This is a can’t-miss app. Stay on top of events that are important for networking and your career with the LinkedIn Events app. Helpful Resources Further explore the ways you can use LinkedIn for professional networking as a new graduate with these blog posts. LinkedIn Tips: Getting More from the Social Networking Service: Check out this post from CIO.com to learn how you can get more out of networking on LinkedIn. What Do I Put in My LinkedIn Profile if I am a College Student?: Neal Schaffer’s post goes into great detail about what you should do with your profile if you’re just starting out in the workforce. Oops! What NOT to Do When Approaching a Recruiter on LinkedIn: Thinking about connecting with a recruiter? Tread carefully, and watch out for these mistakes. LinkedIn Recommendation Tips: Chris Brogan’s post explains the fine art of sharing and requesting recommendations on LinkedIn. 9 Steps to LinkedIn Networking for a Job: Follow the steps in this post to increase your chances of finding a job through LinkedIn networking. Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn: This resource is more than five years old, but Guy Kawasaki’s advice still rings true as he explains several ways that anyone can put LinkedIn to work for networking and more. 5 Reasons to Use LinkedIn: Geared toward freelancers, this article is great advice for anyone who needs to better understand why and how they should ramp up their LinkedIn networking. This post was first published in Online Colleges.

Congratulations to the Stanford BASES Final Winners

Yesterday afternoon, I had the opportunity to join the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students, known as BASES, as a judge for its end of the year finale in which student-run start-ups compete for $150K in prizes. This was my third year as a judge. As with prior years, I was impressed by the quality of the presentations and teams this year. Congratulations to all of the finalists and this year’s winners: Calcula Technologies – an innovative treatment of kidney stones that are traditionally determined to be too small to be operable, but that are very painful for patients. RAVEL – a legal search platform for lawyers and law students that helps reveal the most important cases, the connections between cases, and the evolution of legal principles over time. Wello – an online marketplace that connects consumers with fitness professionals over live, interactive video for group and individual workout sessions. Lightspeed has been a proud sponsor of BASES for the last few years and continues to be impressed with their impact on the start-up community at Stanford and beyond.

Amazing Day At The Glue Conference

Man does Eric Norlin know how to put on a conference. And, as a bonus, he’s got an awesome soundtrack and mindblowing trailer for the Glue Conference that Fake Grimlock would love. Here’s a taste of what’s saturating my brain. Shit My Could Evangelist Says, Just Not to the CSO by Chris Hoff, Juniper Networks Foragers, Farmers, Forks & Forgers: On Software, Patronage and Craft Brewing by James Governor, Redmonk Using APIs and Infrastructure by John Musser, Programmable Web NoSQL Smackdown: Cassandra, MongoDB, and Neo4J by Tim Berglund The Badass Beyond Hadoop: Percolator, Dremmel, Pregel by Mike Miller, Clouant And then it was lunchtime. Breath deeply.

Telling a Story Through Your Social Media Marketing Campaign – Guest Post

**This is a guest post for the Under the Radar Blog provided by Kate Willer. Social media marketing continues to evolve as the web’s users increasingly become more dependent on these popular networks. Companies across the board are now focusing on storytelling, meaning sharing their unique history and message with an assortment of users through

Copromotion Rant: Do Your Homework First, or Why Content is Like Children

Please: before you send somebody an email about bundling your product with theirs, do your homework. Look at that target product’s specifications. Look at how and where it sells. Go to the company website. Look for ways that your product can enhance their product. Figure out ways that both sides can win with what you’re suggesting. Don’t waste your time or anybody else’s proposing useless bundles. I really hope that I never again have to look at a proposal from somebody suggesting that I take my content, that I own , and substitute that for their content, that they produced, instead. In a way it’s like children. Yours may be brighter and better looking and more accomplished than mine, but I will still always like mine better. (image: bigstockphoto.com)

What Small Businesses Can Learn From The World’s Best Brands

We’ve previously shared lessons that small businesses can learn from the world’s best brands. For example, we wrote about five common lessons small businesses and startups can learn from the world’s best Brands, the 10 key learnings from PSFK’s Good Brands Report 2009, and the lessons for small businesses and startups from Interbrand’s Best Global Brands 2011 report. Market research firm Millward Brown has published its annual BrandZ study, ranking the world’s leading brands. Interestingly, four of the top five and seven of the top ten are technology companies. The study ranks the world’s brands by their dollar value (based on financial data, market intelligence and consumer measures of brand equity). What additional lessons can small businesses learn from BrandZ 2012 study? First, great products and services are critical to building a strong brand. Apple, for the second year in a row, is the world’s leading brand. According to the BrandZ 2012 rankings, Apple increased its brand value by 19 percent this past year – to $183 billion (37 percent of Apple’s market capitalization). This was extraordinary – especially since its visionary founder, Steve Jobs, died last year. Most people write about brands to share their experiences, to offer advice, and to praise a brand. Second, you can’t coast when you’re the market leader – there’s always someone on your tail. According to the BrandZ study: Apple continues to innovate and maintain its ‘luxury’ brand status, but faces future competition from Samsung. Samsung is successfully outpacing Apple in a significant number of markets by positioning as a cool, well-priced alternative to the ubiquitous iPhone. Third, a strong brand will help a company weather tough times. Between 2006 and 2012, a period that saw the economies of most countries around the world challenged with high unemployment and generally unfavorable conditions, the total value of BrandZ top 100 increased 66 percent. Fourth, reaching the top doesn’t guarantee success. In 2008, Nokia was the world’s ninth most valuable brand. Last year, Nokia was ranked 81st and this year, it fell even further. A company cannot stop innovating because even a strong brand will suffer when you create average or below average products or services. Fifth, you don’t have to mimic the brand personality of your competitor to succeed. In fact, brands in the same category, but with radically different personalities, can succeed. The key is to understand your brand’s personality and be consistent in your messaging. I recommend you download a PDF copy of the BrandZ report – there’s much more great insight that we haven’t discussed. Related posts:What Can You Learn From The World’s Best Brands? Most Valuable Brand In The World: Google 5 great viral marketing campaigns (and what small businesses can learn from them!)

10 Concrete Steps to Assure Business Innovation

Continuous innovation is required to survive in all businesses, beginning with a startup, and increasing in importance as your business matures. Technologists often insist that new things can’t be invented on a schedule, but successful companies seem to be able to do it on a regular basis. Many people have tried to define a process for innovation, but most are too abstract for me. I like the easy to remember approach found in “Robert’s Rules of Innovation: A 10-Step Program for Corporate Survival,” by Robert F. Brands. It seems to be more concrete, and chronicles several decades of practical experience to solidify the principles which together spell INNOVATION: Inspire. The first and most important step is to identify a leader who can inspire and drive the process. In a startup, that needs to be the founder or CEO, and that person has to be regularly and personally involved. This is an imperative. No risk, no innovation. Not every idea can, or will, be a winner. Without risk, there can be no innovation. Innovation teams perform best when they trust that failure or a pivot will not result in punitive measures. Fear of failure can kill innovation. New product development process. A formalized process with timelines and milestones is a must. This should include at least the key elements of idea generation, prioritization, prototyping, commercialization, and measurement. Ownership. Innovation needs ownership, a champion and team leader within the organization. The champion must have the credibility to convince others to take calculated risks and work outside of one’s comfort zone. Value creation. Successful innovation turns ideas into money, to enhance customer value, and thus shareholder value. Longer-term, enhanced product value begets superior company valuation through your organization’s intellectual property (IP) portfolio. Accountability. This is a critical component of the trust equation, even when the process is akin to “herding cats.” Team members need to feel responsibility for on-time delivery. Slippage is the sure way to jeopardize the entire process. Training and coaching. Proper hiring of people with a natural curiosity, open-mindedness, and ability to see the big picture is the way to create and enhance the right mind-set. Ongoing coaching from the top is essential to maintain the attitude and spirit. Idea management. Build and manage a pipeline of ideas. From time to time, include customers and sales members in ideation sessions. Make sure all team members have some connection with the product – has either used it, or sold it, or assembled it. Observe and measure. Tracking results are essential to optimal ROI. Product life cycles keep getting shorter and shorter, which mandates accelerated innovation cycles. Once a new product is launched, a key metric is the ratio of new product sales to overall sales. Net result and reward. Based on ROI, incentives should be developed for all participants. Reward your people. Frequently, the key motivator is less financial than it is recognition for a job well done. People are your best innovation resource. Sustainable innovation is really the only sustainable competitive advantage. But innovation is hard, because people by nature resist change, and company cultures are most comfortable with status quo. Yet survival in today’s world of rapid business change requires that you keep one step ahead of your competition. Innovation is what gives life to your business initially, and keeps it alive in the long term. Make sure your business can spell it. Marty Zwilling

What makes a product “fit” a market? Or how to achieve product-market fit?

A relatively young term in an entrepreneur’s vocabulary is “product-market fit” (PMF). Attributed to Marc Andreessen in 2009, this term, has a relatively simple meaning but one that’s hard to really get a sense of: Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. If you go after an awesome market – growing fast, has excellent demand and a great growth curve, then you’ve got 90% product-market fit, even though technically 50% of the challenge in any startup is coming up with a good product. Lets assume you are going after a great market. How do you know its a great market? Besides the fact that its large (obvious) the speed of adoption is tremendous. What then makes a product “fit” a market? First there are 3 important assumptions I make: 1. The best team does not necessarily create the best product. 2. The best product does not necessarily win in the market. 3. It is rare for startups or entrepreneurs to create markets.A product “fits” a market when 1. Your metrics for adoption of your product exceed adoption of all your “competitors” combined (Instagram had more downloads in 1 week than other competitors did in 6 months) 2. There are so many missing features in your product but its still being sought after (HotorNot had no other features except an upvote and downvote) 3. The problem you solve for the user is such a big one that they are willing to forgive the lack of “nice to have” capabilities (during its early days, Twitter kept crashing daily) The first point (metric) answers the question – What should I measure to know when I have achieved PMF? The second point (features) answers – How can I tell? The third point is the most important. To know about problems that are painful and large there’s one thing you need to learn, i.e. Learn how to ask the right questions! – Relevant links that I would highly recommend you read: 1. Jeff Bussgang on why early in the product cycle entrepreneurs should be hunch and not data driven. 2. Andrew Chen on “When” has a product-market fit been achieved? 3. Ash Maurya on the 3 stages of a startup and why problem-solution fit comes before product-market fit 4. Patrick’s perspectives on steps to product-market fit. [Guest article contributed by Mukund Mohan. Reproduced from his blog]

Vertical Coworking News Roundup

We've long followed the growing number of coworking facilities that cater to vertical markets, specific industry groups and/or professions. It's even on our list of the Top 10 Signs Coworking is Growing Up. This week a series of articles highlight this trend: - Co.Exit's Forage Kitchen: A Coworking Space for Food covers a new effort to create a food-oriented coworking space. The article mistakenly says it "may end up being the first full-fledged co-working space for food". In reality there are at least several hundred shared kitchen facilities in the U.S., but it's good see more entering. - The Hollywood Reporter's Hollywood, Digital Media Players Unite to Launch L.A. Incubator looks at the new space io/LA which is targeted at "the convergence of tech and entertainment and aligning storytellers with technologists." It sounds very cool and very LA. - Mashable's Green Spaces is a Coworking Hub for Social Startups talks about a new coworking and incubator space for social ventures in New York. The growing numbers of vertical coworking spaces is another example of the shift to Coworking 2.0. We're working on a research memot on this topic that we hope to have out soon. But the quick summary is we expect the number of vertical spaces to continue to grow and serve an increasing number of vertical market niches.