The aim of TNW Academy Guides is to bring you only the highest-quality content, from well-established thought leaders in numerous spaces. You’ll find work from people such as Steve Blank, Megan Berry and Dan Martell, covering a range of topics such as branding, social strategy, growth hacking and business plans.
Our immigration system is fundamentally at odds with the needs of American startups," Bannon said. "I think Obama gets it. You hear him talk about entrepreneurs more and more.
I couldn't agree more.
But the most effective marketing is a compelling product that can be easily tried.
Conviction is one of the most important things entrepreneurs want to see in an investor. The overhead of working with an investor who lacks conviction is just too much for an entrepreneur. It can become a major drain on them and their company. I'd rather have conviction and be wrong than have doubts and be right. Because the latter doesn't work in a relationship with an entrepreneur and you are likely to lose anyway.
Despite all of this education, one thing remains relatively unchanged: The number of entrepreneurs that think that if they just have the right idea and turn into the right product, they will be skyrocketed to success like Facebook, Instagram or Dropbox. For some reason, this magical leap to success is a persistent delusion.
What’s the honest trajectory? There can only be one Mark Zuckerberg, and at last look he’s young and healthy. Can every startup skyrocket like Facebook or Square or Google? It’s downright impossible. The solution: understand your startup’s “honest trajectory” and align objectives of the founding team and—importantly—its investors to define and agree about what “success” looks like. Thousands of entrepreneurs would be a lot happier if their focus was a solid, growable, defensible niche business that might never go public or be worth $100 million. There’s a ton of money to be made “in the middle,” a broad swath between struggling or gasping for cash and ringing the bell at the NASDAQ.
Find the right trajectory for your business and focus not only on reaching it, but on assuring that the result is a sustainable, repeatable profit engine that can perform and grow healthily over time. Use Customer Development to identify and refine the potential profitable niche and stay in close contact with customers as you build, to be sure you’re building something they’ll want to have…and keep.
Knotice also places a strong emphasis on keeping its talented employees happy. The company's work culture merges openness, accountability, creativity and fun, elements that CFO Jon Grimm argues are key to the success of the firm's 95-person crew."We hire smart, well-rounded people who are hungry to learn, and who truly care about our customers. We look for people who are team players and who make the mission of the company a priority," Grimm says.
Knotice specializes in unified direct digital marketing. The firm develops and manages sophisticated digital marketing efforts across a wide variety of platforms, including web, emails, display and text. Among the many familiar brands Knotice has worked with are Bayer, Cannon, Crocs, Ghirardelli and TiVo.
The IBM Institute for Business Value found that 60-65% of business leaders who believe that consumers follow their brands on social media sites because they want to be a part of a community. Only 25-30% of consumers agree. The top reason consumers follow a brand? To get discounts – not exactly ideal for a company’s bottom line.
On top of trying too hard to engage with consumers via social media, marketers are generally pushing out too much information, causing people to over-think purchase decisions and making them more likely to change their minds about a product, be less confident in their choice and less likely remain loyal to the brand.
4.) Tell a story.
This speaks to the last step in idea creation, which is in expressing it to others. “Everybody understands that a story should be told well. But an idea should also be told well,” says Silva. “And I think we can take the techniques that we use to tell a good story – sequences and narratives and applying those same principles to [expressing ideas]. Aesthetics matter. Unfold the accordion and stretch the idea out and see if you can turn the idea into a narrative.”
Entrepreneurs teach VCs, not the other way around. And I was lucky early in my career to back Seth Godin, who taught me a lot. When I met Seth, he was writing books and building a web company. I backed that web company, Yoyodyne, which exited to Yahoo! a few years later. But books were always Seth's passion and he's written a bunch of them. He's also deconstructed the book publishing business and pushed it to do things that were considered unacceptable. I recall when he put out a free pdf of one of his books six months before the book came out. And increased the book's sales numbers in the process. He did that in the 90s.
There are special entrepreneurs who teach you so much. Seth and Perry are two of them. I've been blessed to work with dozens in my career. Like Seth and his big advance, it is not the money that is the big payoff in the work that I do. It is the people and the ideas that enter your life and change your world. It is the art of important work, of making a ruckus and of inventing the future.
Maybe President Barack Obama's motivation for "coming out" and affirming his support for same-sex marriage was politically calculated. Perhaps the president's statement, as hard as it may be to imagine, had nothing to do with politics. Maybe the president's statement supporting an opportunity for a lesbian or gay couple to enter into a legally recognized, binding, civil, marriage covenant and contract was an expression of his true conviction.
But whatever his motivation, Obama's statement of support for same-sex marriage is far more genuine than the unholy response of opposition his statement has received from too many clergy. Ordained pastors thundering their opposition based on their view that God, through the Bible, teaches that marriage is between one man and one woman are just wrong.
Such a view is at best shoddy, biblical scholarship. At worst, it is a very cruel lie.
The Christian Bible contains remembered stories, teachings, written memories of historical events and settings which -- in some places in the text -- had their origin in traditions that were over 4,000 years old by the time of Jesus' birth. In all that time, the rules of engagement as well as the definition and practice of marriage changed a number of times.
So, to assert that the Bible reveals an unchanging and unchanged definition and practice of marriage is a monstrous fabrication. Then, to go on and claim in the very same breath that the Bible advocates the civil practices of marriage as understood and defined by Western culture in the 21st century is just plain holy smoke.
For the most part, marriage in the ancient world of Palestine and in the days of Jesus' physical presence on earth was all about ownership of property, lines of inheritance and the recognized status of the landed, ruling class of a carefully defined economic and religious class of men. It had nothing to do -- unless by happy, unintended consequences -- with a relationship of mutual love and emotional support.
In terms of legal status, spiritual value and sexual behavior, women were not valued or protected in the same way as men. It is why Jesus challenged this spiritual and civil discrepancy by, among other things, intervening in the stoning of the woman "caught" in the act of adultery, (government in the bedroom again) challenging the way in which divorce was practiced and by embracing children not as property but as being the best living example of the nature of the kingdom of God.
The Bible does not teach marriage as being between one man and one woman in a covenant of exclusive, spiritual and legal mutuality as well as an expectation of sexual fidelity. This is why Jesus was so clear in challenging the excessive and repressive practices of civil marriage that abused women and which were sanctioned by the all-male priesthood.
What is of greater importance to various writers of the 39 books of the Hebrew Bible and the 27 books of the Christian New Testament than a definition of marriage is the value and integrity of committed relationships. In regard to this critically important teaching, we still struggle in getting it right. And if anything, perhaps too many of us clergy, as well as many others, are not practicing what the Bible actually teaches.
One more time and for the record: Clergy preaching that the Bible, in the name of God, defines marriage as between one man and one woman are wrong. Further, the hostility, self-righteous bigotry and condemnation of gay and lesbian couples that their "priestly" comments enflame are examples of the very same religious bigotry that Jesus challenged 2,000 years ago.
What the Bible really teaches is the importance of a loving, committed relationship that liberates the heart and soul from the power of hate, loneliness and despair.
Are we not all entitled to have such a relationship recognized and protected by law? I believe such a relationship is already blessed under heaven.
The Rev. Kenneth W. Chalker is the senior pastor of University Circle United Methodist Church in Cleveland.
You have to be willing to sleep in your car and laugh about it. You have to be able to laugh at many things because when you think of the worse things in the World that could happen to your company, they will happen. Imagine working for something for two years and then have to throw it out completely because you see in one day that it's wrong. You realize that if your team is having fun and can always laugh that you won't die, and in fact, the opposite will happen: you will learn to love the journey and look forward to what you do everyday even at the lowest times. You'll learn not to get too low when things are bad and not to get too high when things are good and you'll even give that advice. But you'll never take it because being in the middle all the time isn't exciting and an even keel is never worth missing out on something worth celebrating. You'll become addicted to finding the hardest challenges because there's a direct relationship between how difficult something is and the euphoria of a feeling when you do the impossible.You realize that it's much more fun when you didn't have money and that money might be the worse thing you could have as a personal goal. If you're lucky enough to genuinely feel this way, it is a surreal feeling that is the closest thing to peace because you realize it's the challenges and the work that you love. Your currencies are freedom, autonomy, responsibility and recognition. Those happen to be the same currencies of the people you want around you.
Based on my 30+ years of entrepreneurism I couldn't have written this any better.
In fact, I think many programs distract would-be entrepreneurs on what they should be doing – following their passion and making something worthwhile. I’m not saying that entrepreneurs don’t need help. We all need help. But too many programs are using the wrong approach by trying to “teach” entrepreneurs. I (strongly) believe that entrepreneurs can’t be taught. They’re categorically ADD, they “think differently”, and they can’t stand still. They prefer action to passively absorbing. They know that life isn’t about mid-terms and finals – its a daily grind with constant tests. They’re a fire, ready, aim breed.
But everyone keeps trying to “teach them”. From government programs & college and university courses to online education, videos, and books. They don’t work.
The reason mentorship works is because its based on experience. And it only works when its based on experience, in the form of “when you did x how did it turn out and why? How would you do it if you did it again”. It follows the adage “if I knew then what I know now”. It’s borrowed experience. And that’s how entrepreneurs learn, through doing.
Scott Annan sounds like a kindred soul, a brother from a different mother.
In your life, you've probably had a setback or two. When you stumble, it's tempting the throw in the towel and accept defeat. There's always an attractive excuse waiting eagerly, hoping you'll take the easy way out. But the most successful people forge ahead. They realize that mistakes are simply data, providing new information to adjust your approach going forward.
I can certainly relate 100% and then some!
March has brought an apocalyptic movement to the online world; Google is modifying its algorithms to regulate SEO to a purely foundational stance. Sites that are heavily optimized and backed by purchased, bulk backlinks will soon find themselves penalized at best - and de-indexed at worst.
As an alternative, sites featuring quality content - like the kind Centerline Digital creates - now have a better opportunity to show up on the search engine result pages (SERPS).
What this means for brands is that they will need to become producers of their own content. This is something that early adapters like IBM, Coca Cola and Old Spice have already begun doing, and we're guessing it's a trend that will continue picking up steam.
Great video on Coca Cola Content 2020 Plan.
Phil Libin remembers the moment he left childhood behind. It was nearly four years ago, when the funding for his Internet start-up fell through. He was 35.
It had all been so much fun until then. But at 3 a.m., out of cash and having waited in vain for a venture capitalist or angel or CEO or anyone at all to return his increasingly desperate calls, Libin knew that he would have to pull the plug on Evernote, a software application that helps people remember things. "I realized I was going to have to wake up tomorrow and lay off everyone in the company," he says.
Exhausted and demoralized, he was reaching for the light switch when his e-mail dinged. A momentary blast of hope—but no, just a message from a fan, something he had been getting more and more of lately. This one was from some guy in Sweden, a fellow software entrepreneur, and it was the usual "Evernote has changed my life" sort of thing. Libin almost missed the last line: "If you ever need any money let me know."
Feeling more awake, Libin typed back: "It just so happens we could use some cash. How much did you have in mind?"
The answer came right back: "Would half a million dollars be enough?"
Alas, the entrepreneurial flame is easier to put out than to light or relight. Governments across the world are determined to promote high-growth companies and the other accoutrements of an entrepreneurial society: can it be long before Kim Jong Un announces a North Korean venture-capital fund? But a collection of policymakers and academics assembled in Liverpool by the Kauffman Foundation, which promotes enterprise, all made it clear that this is easier said than done.
Policymakers have proved inept at promoting enterprise. For one thing, politicians focus on short-term election cycles and tend to junk their predecessors’ policies, good or bad. But there are also two bigger reasons. The first is that policymakers confuse promoting enterprise with promoting small businesses, regional development or job growth. In fact, serious entrepreneurs want to create big businesses, not multiply small ones. They don’t give a fig about regional development. And they habitually disrupt established patterns of employment rather than simply creating new jobs on top of the old.
The second is that policymakers are obsessed by Silicon Valley. The Russians claim to have built a clone of it near Moscow. Latvia aspires to create its own venture-capital industry. Universities everywhere are building high-tech “incubators”. Yet there is little evidence that the model is transferable. Most incubators are a bit like roach motels: would-be entrepreneurs check in but never leave. The venture-capital industry is in trouble in Silicon Valley itself, given the high rate of failure of start-ups, and is unlikely to flourish in Latvia. Rohit Shukla of the Larta Institute in California says policymakers should stop obsessing about clusters (which are usually the product of accident, not planning) and embrace global networks instead. The rise of the internet, the growing importance of emerging markets and the proliferation of networking organisations like the Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE, a group with members across 14 countries), all make it easier to link talent with opportunity around the world.
if indeed Northeast Ohio has a true entrepreneurial economy (which I beg to differ with the same as I do with the existence of a so called "entrepreneurial ecosystem") "Cleveland-Style" economic development and Ohio politics, which are in bed together, will destroy it.
Now, says Leonard A. Schlesinger, president of entrepreneurial mecca Babson College and former COO of Limited Brands, “people don’t fail. They pivot.” If the original business concept isn’t working, the entrepreneur tweaks it, until he or she gets it right—or realizes it was all wrong in the first place and tries something else.
In Just Start!, a new book Schlesinger coauthored, he looks at how serial entrepreneurs who built businesses with revenues ranging from $200 million to the billions—actually behaved when starting a business. And, contrary to the popular image of entrepreneurs as swashbucklers who routinely take crazy risks, many turned out to be pretty careful and analytical. “What surprised me, quite honestly, is the fundamental difference between the myths we structure for entrepreneurs and the reality,” he says.
The first thing serial entrepreneurs do when starting a business, the authors found, is to take a small, “smart step” toward something they desire to achieve. Next, they stop and reflect on what that action accomplished. Finally, they decide if they still want to move forward, given what they have deemed to be their “acceptable loss”—or, as Schlesinger put it recently— “how excited you are about an idea against what you have in time and money.” With each step they take, they go through the process again until they either bail out, shift in another direction or succeed. Of course, they act quickly. Moseying through the steps doesn’t work in a fast-paced, global economy.
The entrepreneur in us sees opportunities everywhere we look, but many people see only problems everywhere they look. The entrepreneur in us is more concerned with discriminating between opportunities than he or she is with failing to see the opportunities.
- Michael Gerber
Interesting conversation in Charleston SC about the actual impact of senior leaders in organizations. The popular mythology has it that “tone is set at the top.”
I would argue otherwise that the tone at the top becomes the glass ceiling for the rest of the organization. Low ceilings sustain pessimism and high ceilings sustain optimism. When tone ceilings are low, even people with great passion and optimism adjust downwards to the ceiling established at the top. The top becomes the organization’s “set point” of happiness.
The Yelp executives join Facebook Inc. investors Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. founder Elon Musk on a short list of ex-PayPal employees poised to generate big-time riches from pending IPOs. PayPal, which developed an online payment system, was purchased by EBay Inc. for $1.5 billion in 2002, making many of its early employees rich and eager to pursue new endeavors.
“PayPal did a great job of producing a very talented class of entrepreneurs,” said Eric Jackson, the company’s first marketing director and author of “The PayPal Wars.” “They’ve gone on to do amazing things in Silicon Valley and the tech industry.”
Stoppelman, 34, co-founded San Francisco-based Yelp in 2004, after serving as PayPal’s vice president of engineering from 2000 to 2003. Levchin, 36, has been chairman of Yelp since 2004. After working as PayPal’s chief technology officer, he founded Slide Inc., a Web application developer that was purchased by Google Inc. in 2010.
Both executives were among a group of colleagues who came to be known in Silicon Valley as the PayPal Mafia. The moniker was codified by an article in 2007 in Fortune magazine.
Commissions on sales for affiliate links vary widely, but they average around 5 percent. After SkimLinks cut, that'd be 3.75 percent (although SkimLinks says they can sometimes negotiate deals that would keep the percentage closer to the original number).So, Pinterest has 10 million users. Let's say that the average across all of them is that they buy items valued at $10 in a month through affiliate links on Pinterest. That's $100,000,000 of sales for which Pinterest would get credit. That's $3.75 million in monthly revenue, or $45 million of annual revenue.
Is that going to make you the next Facebook? It doesn't look like it when your user base is 10 million. But what about when the site has 100 million users? Assuming revenue scales linearly, affiliate revenue would stand at $450 million. And if the site had 800 million users like Facebook? That revenue would go to $3.6 billion, just $100 million less than Facebook's 2011 haul.
Some tips:
Create categories.
Take a cue from Warby Parker Inc. of New York, with its Pinterest profile showcasing the brand's eyewear, combined with other images that are intended to say something about its culture and mission. Notice how its profile is separated into categories, or "pin boards," with themes such as "Fresh New Frames" and "Sunglasses are a Must."
Use images with personality.
"The images that get shared the most are funny, inspiring or emotional," says Jason Keath, a social-media analyst in New York. You don't need to invest in professional photography. However, the images you post to Pinterest should be visually striking. "People share images that make them look good," Mr. Keath says.
Be selective.
Highlight only a few of your most popular or newest items so your profile doesn't look like an advertisement.
If you own a service-based business, use images that show what your brand is about. Balance Yoga Studio LLC of Woodinville, Wash., for instance, shows photos of magazines and books on healthy living, plus graphics with inspirational quotes like "Keep Calm and Carry Om."
"It's just creating more of a yoga community online for us," says owner Michelle Michael, whose 20-employee company launched in October and created its Pinterest profile last month.
Write breezy descriptions.
The images you pin to your profile from a Web page will automatically include an embedded link to that page—but not a caption. Use this space to give users updates on what's new with your business, as well as to describe product.
"Happy Valentine's Day! We added Coral to our colors! This is the Light Duty Fish Tail Bracelet," wrote, Survival Straps, a Jacksonville, Fla., maker of utility-cord bracelets that recently started using Pinterest, in a pin earlier this month.
Use the widgets.
Add a "Pin It" or "Follow" button to your company website by going to Pinterest's "Goodies" page and following the instructions provided. You can also download the Pinterest logo to your site from the same page.
Add many links.
By clicking "Settings" and filling in the prompts, you can include links to your company website, as well as your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles from your Pinterest profile. Then, add links to back to your Pinterest profile from each of those pages.
By creating these trails for consumers, you'll help lead them to your site. "It's like a breadcrumb strategy," says Larry Chiagouris, a professor of marketing at Pace University's Lubin School of Business.
If 2011 wasn't the year of Mobile, 2012 will. I'm excited to be part of the Mobile App Roadmap Report and Event with Barb Cagley to help organizations learn how to effectively launch mobile initiatives.
Vision
There are millions of lifelong learners across the globe who do not have access to the world's greatest institutions of higher learning, but do have an Internet connection. The Faculty Project showcases incredible Professors in an unprecedented series of free online courses that will dynamically engage this audience.
Educators
The Professors involved have been recognized by their students and peers for their excellence in teaching or have shown a remarkable talent for educating. They are intelligent, diligent and care about their students. Most importantly, they are interested in sharing their knowledge to more people and creating a lasting mark in the community.
Structure
The Faculty Project will be launched in early 2012 and the courses will be taught through online video, PowerPoint, PDF, and articles on Udemy.com. Each course will have a discussion board where learners can interact with each other and the instructor. The content will be available for free, forever, to anyone who wishes to consume it.
Very cool!
AKRON, Ohio and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Jan. 26, 2012 -- /PRNewswire/ -- Knotice, a leading provider of direct digital marketing software and services, and Gigya, the #1 social choice for websites, today announced a strategic partnership that will transform the way marketers can leverage permission-based Facebook data across addressable, direct digital marketing channels.
Through the partnership, marketers can seamlessly fuse the wealth of permission-based social identity information (such as Facebook likes, check-ins, and interests) with existing customer data and cross-channel activity (such as purchase history, clicks, and search activity) within Knotice's on-demand software platform Concentri®. The Knotice-Gigya partnership allows social data collected and stored within Gigya's Identity Management Platform to be blended with the customer profile and activity data collected and stored via Knotice's proprietary Universal Profile Management system, opening the ability to drive actionable analytics and stronger cross-channel execution based on more relevant information.
This allows for a truly unified view of consumers across channels, which directly supports the findings and recommendations of Forrester Research Inc.'s recent report "The New Messaging Mandate" (January 2012) in which Knotice is featured.
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks.
The term platform is overloaded with meanings in the technology industry and this is particularly the case in mobile telecommunications where it has been used to describe carrier infrastructure, hardware devices, operating systems and most recently, a commercial framework for publishing and selling content.
For some time mobile operators have tried to work out how to provide service delivery platforms (SDP). They have been pushed from one end by the vested interests of their telecoms equipment providers and from the other by falling voice call revenues and the need to build new lines of business around data. While this infrastructure is as critical as other choices as to how networks are plumbed, its functional differences have little direct impact on end subscribers.
Excellent perspective from the UK on where the mobile industry is headed.
Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.
I agree. Although today you need fewer resources than in the past to get started.
At dinner parties and business meetings, I'll frequently ask who has Prime and what they think of it. The number has grown from one or two in seven to three or four out of seven folks over the past five years. My circles tend to be people like you, which is to say more technically sophisticated (and good looking).Prime is at a tipping point.
