3 Reasons to Look to the Angels for Start-up Funding -
Along with these three, angel investors tend to have fewer investments than VC’s allowing them to give more attention to your startup. The extra attention can be invaluable, especially for first time entrepreneurs.
VCs can pack a powerful punch. But here’s why you should hold that thought.You’re starting a business. You need capital. All the headlines say that venture capital firms (VCs) are looking for the next great thing, and you’ve got it.But at the initial seed financing stage of your start-up, VCs are not always the better option In fact, angel investors often have more to offer.
Want Your Startup to Succeed? Stay Home -
I think this article could be paraphrased as “be where you have the biggest network.”
A new study shows that startups do better when they’re launched in the place where their founders were born or have lived for a long time. Makes sense, but the reasons why are surprisingly complex and modern. Our first guess was that the key to startup success is the founder’s ability to go to their parents’ house to cadge a hot meal. And that’s not entirely wrong.
How to protect customer data -
There’s been renewed attention on the cloud after a series of high profile cases, such as Yahoo!, Linked-in, and Dropbox, where confidential customer data has been compromised.
The information that is entrusted to your business by its customers must be protected not only for the sake of your brand and businesses bottom line, but also any breaches could result in heavy fines. The Data Protection Act states that businesses must take all possible action to protect the data they collect from customers.
Steps to Hiring Your First Employee (Infographic) -
Not to add to the pressure, but the first hire in a startup can be make or break. Getting the right individual is critical for the on-going success of your venture.
How Y Combinator Built A Billion-Dollar Brand For Startups -
Airbnb took off at YC Demo Day and it’s now worth $1.3 billion. Seven years ago, Paul Graham and his now-wife Jessica Livingston founded a startup accelerator, Y Combinator. Since then, it has become the most competitive startup program in the world. Its acceptance rate is compared to that of an Ivy League school, with similar prestige stamped on each graduating startup.
Don't Ignore These 4 Start-up Lessons -
A start-up can spring from an innovative idea, but founders often overlook key elements that can turn an idea into at nightmare. Entrepreneurs have innovative minds that can turn a crude idea into a great business opportunity. They tend to know more about their own product or service than anyone else, and they have the ambition that could lead the company to success. However, there are four lessons that they often dismiss.
From School to Startup: Bain’s StartUp Academy Matches College Students With Portfolio Companies -
Mitt Romney is growing his own. Well, sort of. His old firm, Bain Capital, is taking on the problem of hiring talented tech workers by training them itself. Bain’s StartUp Academy, launched by the company’s VC arm Bain Capital Ventures, recruits students from top universities and plants them in positions at the tech companies…
Read more about Bain Capital’s new program
What does India's Power Failure Have to do with Startups? -
Most startups and startup teams are optimized for growth, often at the expense of critical maintenance and infrastructure designs. India’s economy has boomed over the last decade. Despite the vast increase in energy needs and consumption, mis-management has prevented any upgrades to the core infrastructure. This has all come crashing down in the last two days as nearly a half-billion people found themselves without power. It’s embarrassing and would concern any investors. If you can’t (in this case literally) keep the lights on, how can one manage growth?
Large outages aren’t a death kneel. Twitter and Tumblr had their periods and are doing well today. But the likely had to make costly changes that may have been cheaper had they been done earlier in their lifecycle.
Read more about the indian power outage
NBC Says It Was Twitter's Idea To Kick That NBC-Critical Journalist Off Twitter -
Startups have been the biggest adopters of Twitter as a platform. They had a great API and it was a straight forward, easy-to-use, and popular service. However, their recent moves should have any developer worried about making it a core piece of their strategy or application.
Yesterday we were introduced to Guy Adams, the journalist whose Twitter account was suspended after he tweeted out the—already quite public and now very, very public—email address of an NBC exec. Adams was also using Twitter to shred NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. Doesn’t NBC have better things to do than track down and silence its critics? Maybe so. According to a story in today’s Daily Telegraph , the idea of suspending Adams’ Twitter account came from Twitter
Understanding the New ROI of Marketing -
In order to justify their continued existence to families, co-founders, and investors, most startups are very focused on measurement. However, the most accurate metrics in the world have little meaning if they measure the wrong business facts or are interpreted incorrectly.
If you’re tracking monetary return on investment (ROI) as the sole criterion to determine if your marketing programs are working, then you need to catch up to the 21st century because you’re missing a big part of the picture. No longer does ROI stand only for return on investment.
