Startup Compass

A Deeper Look At Blackbox’s Data On Startup Failure And Its Top Cause: Premature Scaling [Infographic] Earlier this week, we covered Blackbox, the young company responsible for creating The Startup Genome Report, an ongoing, collaborative R&D project designed to take a comprehensive dive into what makes Silicon Valley startups successful — and not. (Read our initial coverage here.) On Tuesday, we covered the company’s launch of what it calls the Startup Genome Compass, a benchmarking tool for startups that helps founders monitor their progress in different growth categories. Since then, more than 6,000 startups have signed up to use the Compass. Along with the diagnostic tool, Blackbox also released a new research report on the major causes of startup failure, including perhaps more significantly, the primary cause of startups kicking the bucket: Premature scaling.

Useful documents To date, when we have advised on seed rounds, we have used a simplified version of Series A documents. We have now decided that we should go further and produce a set of investment related documents reflecting the needs of the investors, founders and the company now and not try to anticipate what might be needed at the Series A round. These documents are made freely available in the hope that they will help to educate the entrepreneurial community and speed up the investment process, not to mention keep costs to a minimum. Alongside the documents themselves, there are explanatory notes on the investment agreement and the articles of association. Visualizing Startup Hubs: The World's Top Startup Locations - SeedTable Blog (click here for a larger image) Because SeedTable compiles statistics on a city basis it doesn’t always reflect the importance of hubs which can be composed of multiple cities. This is especially important when it comes to ranking the leading startup locations around the world, so to solve this we’ve produced this infographic which reflects hubs and not just cities. These are the cities we’ve classified into hubs:

10 Best New Cloud Apps for Business (Especially SMBs) - SMB Nation Blogs I wrote late last year about a handful of indispensible business-oriented cloud-powered web apps that I didn't think most readers would have known about yet. In only a couple of short months, I've found dozens and dozens... and dozens more. Most of them are free, too, which is just an amazing testimony to the good work that coders all over the world are doing. Some of these apps are so amazing that I wish I had been charged for them. How to name your startup Choosing a name is one of the parts of a startup I find the most difficult. It’s also something you can easily get hung up on. We all know that the key thing is to move on to actually building something we can put in front of users. Here are 3 steps I would take if I was naming a new startup: 1.

Startup Tools Startup Tools 1. Startup Tools Click Here Lean Startup Lean startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products. The methodology aims to shorten product development cycles by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning. The central hypothesis of the lean startup methodology is that if startup companies invest their time into iteratively building products or services to meet the needs of early customers, they can reduce the market risks and sidestep the need for large amounts of initial project funding and expensive product launches and failures.[1][2]

6 Productivity Apps for Small Business Integrated with Google Apps As you must probably know, Google Apps is a free (for less than 50 users) productivity suite. Implementing and integrating your applications with Google Apps has several benefits. For one, it increases your bottom line. This is because Google Apps is free or does not cost much (for more than 50 users).