Venture Hacks - Good advice for startups. 4 essential ways to attract investors (Editor’s note: Doug Collom is vice dean and an adjunct lecturer on venture capital and entrepreneurship for Wharton | San Francisco. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.) There really isn’t a one-size-fits-all formula that can be followed for optimizing the chances of attracting professional investment. Each company is different and faces challenges and issues that can be overcome only through creativity, perseverance and resolve.There are, however, some elements that are so basic they cannot be ignored. Is it a company or is it a product? The mobile application market is a good example of a product category that, in general, doesn’t offer a sufficient foundation to support a company. How big does the market have to be to attract investment? In 2011, there is far more latitude, depending on the business plan of the company. As a result, companies with online business models, for example, may not require nearly as much capital as they once did.
Motivating Virality in Facebook Games Motivating Virality in Facebook Games [Editor's note: Brenda Brathwaite is a game designer with over 20 years of experience and credits on classic titles like Jagged Alliance and the Wizardry series. She is currently creative director at social game developer LOLapps, and a regular Inside Social Games contributor.] Getting players to post to the viral channel is a challenge every game designer faces when he or she is making Facebook games. It’s known that players are most likely to post when they’ve just started a game, but what motivates returning players? Four things: It helps me. Does this mean we should only include virals which fit the above themes? In fact, there is a whole class of player for whom “playing the feeds” has become a pleasant meta-game to the game it supports. Ultimately, your only defense against subpar virals is playing your own game. Sponsored Post Hands-On Social Media Training for Beginners
What To Look For In A Company Board At any company level, the board of directors has a direct impact on the organization’s product strategy, hiring, fundraising and much more. And startups have to be very selective in choosing board members who will advise the company in the right direction. In the big company realm, both the media and the company’s shareholders have questioned Yahoo’s board, which continues to employ a floundering Carol Bartz as CEO and supports a bizarre product and business strategy. As we saw with HP, even huge, established companies need to make changes in board structure as a company’s strategy shifts. The fact is that the board plays an extremely important role in some of the major events for any company with shareholders. Lightbank partner Paul Lee echoes this thought, telling me that entrepreneurs have to be “very careful” about how they put their board together. In later stage companies, it makes sense to add seasoned execs who have run a successful companies in the role of the “CEO Coach.”
chris dixon's blog / The problem with taking seed money from big VCs I recently met an entrepreneur who was raising money for his startup. Six months prior, he had raised seed money (<$1M) from one of the increasingly popular seed programs big venture firms are offering (big venture firms = roughly $100M fund and larger). As a potential investor, the first question I asked him is “is the big venture firm following on?” Even in the good scenario when the VC does wants to follow on, you are likely to get a lower valuation than you would have had you taken money from other sources of funding (angels, micro-VCs like Y-combinator). Why are big VCs doing this? These seed programs are relatively new so we are only starting to see the wreckage they will eventually cause. Disclosure: I sometimes compete with big VCs for investments, so I am not disinterested here.
Top 5 Elements for Virality of Social Games | Demystifying Digital Commerce For today’s social game developer, virality is key to driving user growth and lowering customer acquisition costs. Here’s a look at five elements that boost the virality of social games: 1. Publishing updates about the game through users Every game developer should allow users to publish their top scores or milestones on their news feeds and Twitter streams. By doing so, their games will be promoted to all of their users’ friends and likely attract new players. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Waiting for the Accelerator Bubble to Pop Since Paul Graham launched Y Combinator in 2005, the field of startup incubators and accelerators has exploded in the U.S. and overseas, with new entries emerging in all manner of oddball shapes and sizes, from a 80,000-square-foot space in San Jose, Calif., dedicated to tech companies hoping to do business in China, to a program that offers entrepreneurs cash to develop their business in Chile. There are accelerators for green tech, health tech, ed tech, the cloud, and every other tech flavor du jour, and accelerators everywhere from Baton Rouge to Durham, N.H., as cities across the country lay claim to the title of the Silicon Valley of [insert industry here]. There’s Unreasonable at Sea, a 100-day program on an ocean liner, which encourages entrepreneurs to “combat the greatest challenges of our time” while sailing among ports in 13 countries. The result is that venture capitalists have begun to predict that accelerators are going to fail. There are already signs of paring back.
Beware the trappings of liquidation preference (Editor’s note: Scott Edward Walker is the founder and CEO of Walker Corporate Law Group, PLLC, a law firm specializing in the representation of entrepreneurs. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.) A reader asks:: I’m the co-founder and CEO of an e-commerce startup, and I’ve been meeting with different VC firms regarding an initial round of funding. I’ve started doing some reading on term sheets and the issues we will need to address and I’m a little confused with some of the VC terminology. Answer: Welcome to the world of venture capital. Let’s start with the basics: A VC investor will be issued shares of preferred stock, not common stock. The word “liquidation” is broadly defined in VC documentation to include not only the actual liquidation of the company (i.e., the disposition of the company’s assets) upon dissolution or bankruptcy, but also the sale of the company (whether via stock, assets or merger) to a third party or a change of control.