Venture Hacks

“Lean startups are built from the ground up for learning about customers.”
– Eric Ries
I recently sat in on Eric Ries’ presentation on lean startups at Berkeley. The slides and audio are below. The presentation is about one hour long and it is gold.

Audio: The Lean Startup (mp3)

Slides: The Lean Startup (pdf)
The audience consisted of students [...]

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William Pietri left a great comment on Books for Entrepreneurs: Agile Software Development:
“Great to see these approaches getting more attention in the startup world. I’ve been soaking in both agile methods and startup companies a long time, and I think they go perfectly together. They provide just enough structure to make everybody effective, without unnecessary [...]

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Watch the master pitch man, Steve Jobs, analyze the market for NeXT workstations in Part 1 of his Chalk Talk. He explains:
“Who is our target customer? Why are they selecting our products over our competiton’s? And what distribution channels are we going to use to reach these customers?”
Steve covers a handful of the slides that [...]

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Summary: If you’re having trouble writing an elevator pitch, try using bullets. And challenge yourself to keep the pitch under 100 words.
I received a cold call elevator pitch yesterday that was very effective. It was short (88 words not including the signature), the company had good traction, and the author used bullets to make his [...]

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John Manoogian sent me this great trailer for The Player, a satire of the movie making system in Hollywood:

(Link: The Player)

Silicon Valley is the Hollywood of startups.

Business plans are scripts, entrepreneurs are writers, engineers are talent, VCs are studios, angels are independent financiers, recruiters are casting agents, lawyers are lawyers, advisors are agents, points are [...]

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Mike Cassidy’s talk on building companies fast is a must-read for all entrepreneurs:

(The slides are here if you don’t see them embedded above.)
Mike founded Stylus Innovation (sold 2 years after launch for $13M), Direct Hit (sold 500 days after launch for $500M), and Xfire (sold 2 years after launch for $110M). Mike is currently the [...]

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I want to give Pinch Media a shout-out for mentioning our post on high concept pitches in their funding announcement. Their pitch is,
“FeedBurner for iPhone developers.”
Can they shorten it even further? “FeedBurner for iPhones”?
I wonder if they used our other hacks too when they negotiated their deal with Union Square Ventures and First Round Capital. [...]

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Anthony Stevens read our article on high concept pitches and decided to write a high concept pitch for his startup:
“So, let’s see: my startup is Crowdify, a tool for brand and reputation managers to discover new insights into consumers’ attitudes about their subjects and make better decisions about marketing and public relations strategy. We [...]

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Todd Vernon, the CEO of Lijit, has written a great article on raising money from angels. I especially like his taxonomy of angels:
“The Family Investor: The Family Investor is likely not really a classic Angel Investor at all but rather a supportive family member that “knows you”. Their motivation is likely out of support (sometimes [...]

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Summary: Raise as much money as possible. With these caveats: (1) maintain control at any cost, (2) monitor your liquidation preference, and (3) act like you don’t have a lot of money. Also understand that if you do raise a lot of money, you will have to (1) “go big or go home” and (2) [...]

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