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Just this morning robotic process automation (RPA) firm, Blue Prism, announced enhancements to its platform. A little later the company, which went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2016, announced it was raising £100 million (approximately $130 million) by issuing new stock. The announcement …
The hefty investment was led by Sequoia National, with participation from new investors Upfront Ventures, Airbnb, and existing investors NEA and WeWork.
Hot Startups This Year
We're half-way through 2017 and its time to showcase some startup stars. We chose a metric called a "valuation step up" to select this list.
How Bad Ideas Become Good Ideas Haunting, miserable and heartbreaking failure is nothing anyone every thinks will happen to them. Yet, failure is a necessary step says this Inc process post every startup should read.
Inc's focus is on how bad ideas impact design, but truths shared, far from self-evident, are good to learn. Bad things become good things by recognition and listening. Bad design becomes a good design by tweaking, testing, and more listening.
Meshing Explained In 3 Minutes
We decided to let the experts speak directly to key concepts of our Five Planning Disruption Tips for SMBs by editing TED Talk videos into 3 minutes of concentrated detail on a speaker such as Lisa Gansky. Gansky covers "startup thinking" via her book The Mesh and our topic Meshing Mashups.
Find our more, watch the video and share your SMB planning tips on Curagami: http://www.curagami.com/five-planning-disruption-tips/
Beekeeper, the Switzerland and U.S.-based startup that provides a mobile-first communications platform for employers that need a better way to communicate..
Google's Branded Search is exciting, new & going to blow ecommerce up in five ways. Learn more and see our infographic on the new search revolution.
Google Ideas, the company’s think tank, is relaunching as an incubator named Jigsaw (warning: autoplayed audio) to invest in and develop tech solutions to..
Rendezwho Could Be Fun, Cool
Rendezwho matches you with anyone in the world, for life. Find your next friend. People all over the world are now connected to their new friend. Embark on an adventure to an unknown destination with the reward of meeting someone who is also looking for you.
Marty Note
I signed up though how their algorithm can use those questions to find a doppelganger I have no idea. The lunch question had no good answer so maybe "least bad" works too (lol). The romantic idea that 1. there would be an unknown friend somewhere in the world and 2. that they would be on Redezwho may be a bridge too far only time will tell.
When we read about content marketing successes, we so often hear stories from glamorous industries with substantial budgets, but YNAB is not one of these stories. In fact, it couldn’t be farther from that reality. It is however, a success story of David vs Goliath proportions, building a thriving community of users in a highly
Super Forecasting
So much of what we are taught or think we know is wrong. LIstening to Super Forecasting after seeing it as the book of the week on Fareed Zakaria's GPS last Sunday I know the folly of our untested ways. The HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) Syndrome drives way too many marketing, sales and business decisions.
Super Forecasting was just discussing how WRONG medicine was until just recently. Thankfully bleeding is out of favor, but quakes with strong opinions ruled for a long time.
The web can be like that too. Another favorite point is the longer our forecast look into the future the worse they become. Super Forecasting discusses the weather as a massively non-linear system capable of being changed by a butterfly's wings.
The web is non-linear too. The web's non-linearity is why I like to compare it to weather. Systems brew up, move across the plains and die down. Anyone who tells you they KNOW anything about the web is trying to sell you something.
What we know after making more than $30M online is weather happens NOW. Yes we can forecast or predict, but the only truth is NOW and to the extent we say or act otherwise we are fooling ourselves, our clients and the next generation of web developers and startups..
The next generation of web developers and startups are going to use algorithms like we use CSS and HTML now. They will be NOWISTS and treat the web as what it is - a living almost sentient thing capable of turning on a dime and throwing a tornado at you faster than you can say the word tornado :). Marty
Book site
http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/227815/superforecasting-by-philip-e-tetlock-and-dan-gardner/
Amazon (with a small Cure Cancer donation if you buy the book after clicking on this link)
http://bit.ly/Super-Forecasting-on-Amazon
Yunmake, a Hangzhou-based smart bike maker, has raised a Series A led by Shunwei Capital, the investment firm led by Xiaomi chief executive officer Lei Jun...
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DOPE's Clean Slate Branding Tips
Serial entrepreneur Rob Grough shares ideas on how to create a million dollar brand in this video interview:
- Good People
- Big Multiples (tech, marijuana)
- Business as a Game
- Quality Value Add
- Great Name
A mediocre idea can become great with good people
7 + 3 Lessons From Failed Startups
Great Inc post on lessons from a failed startup include: 1. Consider the entire experience 2. Raise money when you can not when you need too 3. Don't give away equity too soon or too fast Read the other 4 from the Inc post: https://www.inc.com/yoram-solomon/7-lessons-you-should-learn-from-my-failed-startup.html I'd add three of my own lessons from my "failed startup": 1. Don't think in terms of success and failure, win and lose. Think about impact, learning, and potential. Startups require a more nuanced sense of win/lose. 2. Don't hire your friends even if they are the right people because you are probably blind to faults, issues, or other "round peg in square hole" problems with friends. 3. Create any startup in collaboration with customers. Don't do the "mad inventor" thing and go off and think you've created a better mousetrap. You won't. Instead, collaborate and build on what you learn from real customers facing immediate problems.
Failure Not So Bad, But Learn The Ropes This Fortune post is encouraging and informative. Encouraging because fewer startups fail than urban myth predicts and informative because insights shared about learning the rules of the road are accurate to our startups experience.
If you think creating a startup is unstructured and free you'd be wrong, very wrong. Startups have an intricate ballet of rules, gatekeepers, and customs. Ignore any of those things at your startup's absolute peril.
I don't think my startup failed due to impolite attention to rules and regulations. We failed because we didn't have the right people sitting in the right seats on the bus. Friends and business partners can be one and the same, but hiring friends creates more work not less.
When hiring friends you need to guard against your assumptions and playing rough can be harder with friends. Playing rough is needed because every startup is a life or death struggle against time, competition and the evolution of markets. This post shares all of that and more. A good read for any wannabe startup entrepreneur.
Via Jay
SOT Startups Times
If Algorithmia's raising $10M without breathing hard isn't a sign of the startup times where AI, algos and math rule we don't know what is.
Medium's Read Time App and Scoop.it's Lean Content
This Curagami post shares KUDOS for Guillaume Decugis and the @scoopit team. Medium's making their read time app, somethg they call Readism, available across the web is sure to hasten every prediction Guilluame and company made about lean content marketing several years ago.
Medium's new "app" is a Chrome extension. If you are creating content and NOT using it you're nuts. We decided to make two posts instead of one when we saw six minute read time on our lean content + tools riff.
We wanted to add a few tools to Scoop.it's Why Lean Content Is The Future of Content Marketingpost. We wanted to add:
- Haiku Deck (like more than Slideshare)
- Feedly Pro (so you have a site)
But their side did say "many more", so we will save our 1,000 word six minute read content curation tools post for tomorrow. In the meantime, if you're not using Medium's read time app Readism and you use content to market online you're nuts.
http://www.curagami.com/lean-content-marketing-medium-cool/
Get paid for blogging! If you have something people want to read, share it on blogbank and make money in the process.
Marty Note o Startups and Davids
We may be at a powerful inflection point. Size and scale have always been such giant Goliaths imagining a David capable of toppling them felt all but impossible. Not so much anymore. Surrounded by scaled systems and many free fot the taking Davids now have plent of rocks to sling as this post shares.
Quirky Toy Company
Reading about Fat Brain's openness to innnovation and innovators reminded me of trying to sell my magnetic word game, Poetryslam, to Milton Bradley.
Every major toy company DOESN'T WANT (or didn't want) to talk to innovators. So sure where they your pitch would be something they already had in their files.
Stupid is as stupid does and this post about Fat Brian shows what a nimble competitor can do against such petrified thinking. Post reminded us of Quiryk.com. Our company, Curagami, is about to pitch several major clients on why they need a Quirky-like playground where innovators share, talk and receive the legitimacy they need.
If that sounds like we will be hatching a handful of mini-Milton Bradley's powered by ideas, smartphones, laptops and cool ideas you got it right. And why not? Fat Brain may get it, but they are still in the miniority in the less digitally innovative than they need to be toy biz.
Brands should take inspiration from the motivation behind love letters when they communicate with their customers. Marketers can unlock the value of users’
Moon Audio's Startup Recipe For Success Friends +Drew Baird and +Nichole Baird at my favorite #startup http://www.Moon-Audio.com reminded me why they and the company they've created for high-end audiophiles is so special:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/martysmith1980vc
I've met many #startups and most have a single issue on their mind - how to scale, win and be heroes. Drew, Nichole, and the team at Moon-Audio.com demonstrate what it takes to succeed daily:
* Love what you do
* Do what you love no matter what
* Express your inner artist in product and treatment of people
* Share, Share and Share some more
* Be more generous than deserved
* Rinse and Repeat
We live in a strange time, a time where it is easy to forget what really matters. I had to battle #cancer to discover the single word answer to what matters - people. Life is always about relationships you create, experiences you value, and the journey you and we are all on.
Sirens sing a seductive and misleading chorus. I like +Amazon.com's low prices, but I LOVE +Moon-Audio.com because Drew and Nichole are a light in the tunnel, a light for all garage bands, growth hackers and dreamers. Do what you love, love what you are doing and who you are doing it with and life is good, scale happens and you hear guitars and trumpets you've never heard before.
What’s content shock? It’s a term coined by Mark Schaefer two years ago, when he observed that “content supply is exponentially exploding while content demand is flat.” The logical consequence of supply continually outstripping demand is that on average content articles will get … Continued
Startups Must Read
Remember building forts when you where a kid? We all do and thus the power of the universal metaphor my friend and Startup Factory founder Chris Heivly's new book. Chris organize the book around 5 things startup entrepreneurs must do to be successful:
1. Socialize their idea 2. Partner with good and trustworthy people 3. Gather assets close to you 4. Create a collective purpose 5. Build the fort
To say Chris' book is a must read is to be grossly inaccurate. If you are a startup or ever want to become an entrepreneur you must read Build The Fort.
Buy on Amazon
http://bit.ly/build-the-fort-amazon
Visit Chris' site
http://heivly.com/
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