Tag archives: best
Tag archives: best
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The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint
A classic post from Guy Kawasaki on the art of crafting a great pitch deck. This has been a go-to resource of mine for years.
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ULTIMATE GUIDE: How To Create A Winning Presentation
A great collection of resources for entrepreneurs trying to create a compelling pitch deck.
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An endless series of difficult but achievable hills
It’s all about choosing the right hills, according to Seth. Some great advice.
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“Jamie: ‘Human nature is odd. We crave new things, but simultaneously dislike change.’
“Phil: ‘Not that odd; we like to choose and hate to have things forced on us. We usually embrace the changes that we have chosen for ourselves.’”
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Hey CEOs, THIS Is The Right Way To Apologize For A Mistake
A good lesson on how to apologize. I personally don’t think the resignation was necessary.
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DON’T Do A Startup, You Will FAIL
This is nothing short of amazing – Dave McClure at his finest. Totally hilarious. If any of these things apply to you, that sucks.
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A.G. Lafley vs. Steve Jobs
Should you listen to customers or tell them what they want? This post discusses how both strategies can be effective, depending on what kind of market you’re addressing (mature or nascent).
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UX Won’t Save You
Great post by 52 Weeks of UX about how UX (user experience) is just one piece of the puzzle.
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How To Launch In 10 Steps With Less Than $2,000
Video of Adeo Ressi, founder of TheFunded and startup accelerator Founder Institute, explaining how to launch a startup on the cheap. TechCrunch provides a great summary.
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10 Common Entrepreneur Fibs That Are Huge Red Flags To Investors
This is probably one of the most helpful pitching posts for entrepreneurs I’ve seen. I feel like it’s really important not to make these mistakes…serious investors will take you much more seriously…
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The Practical 8-Step Survival Guide For Startups
This is a good list. I particularly like “temper theory with reality”, which advocates working in the industry that you plan on entering with your startup before you take the plunge. Zwilling says:
There is no substitute for domain experience. No matter how well-educated you are, and how certain you are that you understand all the nuances of a business area, it is a good idea to work in a similar business for a few months to get a feel for the market and observe the unwritten rules before taking the plunge. This is especially true for students tackling their first venture.
Or just first time entrepreneurs in general. With TenthRow, I got into two things that I didn’t understand as well as I thought I did:
- Working in the music industry in general – working with bands, labels, and publishers (I was actually least prepared to work with bands, who tend to be less much less Type A than I am).
- Producing concert videos – there are a million things that can go wrong that are beyond your control (the band has a bad night, the crowd isn’t great, technical problems with the band’s instruments or the venue’s PA system, problems with your own recording gear, etc.).
Had I worked in the music industry and/or produced concert videos before starting TenthRow, I would have much better understood these things and adjusted the business model accordingly. The other approach, which probably would have been better in my case, would have been to bring on a concert video producer as a co-founder very early in the process. If you haven’t worked in the industry yourself, make sure that someone on the founding team has.
Anyway, I also really liked “find and use top-notch advisors” (this is one thing I did pretty well) and “manage your time” (this is one thing I didn’t – I was doing way too much…should have delegated more).
The whole list is definitely worth checking out.
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“You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly.”
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Life is 10% How You Make It and 90% How you Take It
Great post by Mark Suster, former entrepreneur and VC at GRP Partners.
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The Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity
Finally got around to reading this, and it is AWESOME.
This is probably my favorite one (I used to do it all the time when I used to work in an office):
Hide in an iPod.
One of the best and easiest ways to avoid distractions in the workplace is to be wearing those cute little IPod earbud headphones (or any other headphones of your choice).
People, for some reason, feel much worse interrupting you if you are wearing headphones than if you’re not.
It’s great — a lot of the time, people will walk up to you, start to say something, notice the headphones, apologize (using exaggerated mouth motions), and walk away.
This is great — half the time they didn’t actually need to talk to you, and the other half of the time they can send an email that you can process at the end of the day during the second of your two daily email sweeps.
Here’s the best part: you don’t actually have to be listening to anything.
Hell, you don’t even have to have the headphones plugged into anything.
The whole thing is well worth the read. I do a lot of these things already, but I still check my email too much…need to get better at that…
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“I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.”
-- Jeff Bezos, from the commencement speech he delivered to the Princeton Class of 2010
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How to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen
Fantastic post by Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby. Anyone who has an idea for a website but doesn’t know how to get it off the ground should read this and do exactly as he says. Wish I would have read this like 4 years ago…
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Dear Woot Employees, Here’s Why We Just Sold To Amazon
CEO Matt Rutledge’s email to employees on being acquired by Amazon. Freakin’ hilarious. I hope I’m in a position to and capable of writing such an email one day. Courtesy of SAI.
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Competition Is Overrated
Great post by Chris Dixon about NOT being discouraged if others are already trying your idea. More than anything, it’s market validation. You should be worried if others AREN’T trying to compete with you.
I would add to this that you shouldn’t give your competitors too much credit before they launch their product, no matter how good of a job they do marketing / promoting it. The product you imagine they’ll be launching is often a lot better than the product they actually launch.
Obviously this doesn’t hold in all cases, but the point is that all you can do is focus on the quality of your product – the thing that you can control – and not waste too much time worrying about your competitors or responding / reacting to them. You’re much better off focusing on your customer, as Chris Dixon emphasizes in his post above.
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Bad call, great apology
Great perspective from 37Signals on the botched Galarraga call and how the umpire handled it (by admitting his mistake profusely and being a man about it), which is hugely admirable.
There’s a lesson here about how to handle your mistakes. Nobody’s perfect so you’re going to mess up from time to time, but how you handle those situations makes all the difference in the world.
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How A Web Design Goes Straight To Hell
Hilarious and all too true. Timeless advice for any non-technical founder or any business person in general who needs to build a website for their business.
Unfortunately, I was very much the client during my first experience with building a website. Not quite that bad, but I could have been a lot better. Lesson learned. (The hard way, unfortunately.) Wish I would have read this comic before I started…
Hugely helpful resource for any wannabe entrepreneur. Sequoia Capital is one of the best VC firms of all time, and this is what they look for in good companies. They also provide a really helpful outline of what to include in a business plan (i.e. pitch deck).