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Home Prochain live: Web TV commerce Enterprize swbru Startech startech retail web Mind&Market marketplace WinWin e-commerce Innovation Marc Verhaeren - Funds for good Vous recherchez un financement pour votre projet? Vous souhaitez être informé de l'ouverture des inscriptions? A la Une Bruxelles encourage les femmes à créer leur propre activité« Women In Business » est une plateforme de soutien aux femmes qui entreprennent à Bruxelles. Compétitivité des PME et entreprises innovantes : l'Europe mobilise 11 Mds € pour 2014-2020L’Europe lance COSME, le nouveau programme pour la compétitivité des entreprises et des PME. Portraits de startups Newsletter Rejoignez les 1549 abonnées à la newsletter Enterprize.be SPONSORED BY CONTACT US 40, Avenue Joseph Wybran 1070 Bruxelles Belgique Tél: 02/529 59 18 Fax: 02/529 59 22 prangoni@enterprize.be

There Aren't Many Exits Over $100mm I was reading Mark Suster's latest blog post (actually its a presentation embedded into a blog post) and I came across this slide. I don't know what the source of this data is and I don't know if this is just M&A exits or if it includes IPOs as well. It really doesn't matter for the basic point that Mark is making with this slide. Based on the NVCA statistics on the venture capital industry, there are on average 1,000 early stage financings every year. I suppose a few of those 1,000 financings are for the same company, but I doubt that many are. So we can use 1,000 as an approximation of the number of companies that get funded in a given year. And somewhere around 50 and 100 of them exit for more than $100mm every year. At at time when the average Series A round is now north of $20mm (based on very anecdotal evidence and not at all scientific), this poses challenges for the VC industry. Are we in a valuation environment that is challenging for early stage VC investors?

The Strategy Trap: Why focusing too much on strategy could be ki “They were worried that I would get bogged down in wanting to do things, not just create strategy.”- David Polinchock / @lbbinc One of the topics covered during the #LikeMinds Summit this past weekend was precisely this: The chasm between strategy and execution, especially as businesses struggle to understand how to leverage, integrate and operationalize Social Communications (what you do with social media platforms) in the coming 6-24 months. Unfortunately, because the C-suite tends to look to itself when it comes to “strategic masterminding,” the focus too often shifts from execution at the customer level (the most important thing a business should be focusing on on) to… being the guy who came up with the game-changing strategy that will secure more funding and increase influence within the organization. When this happens, strategy becomes a product, and that’s bad. Strategy isn’t a product. Any idiot with a powerpoint deck can deliver a “Social” strategy: Um… yeah, except… no. 1. 2. 3.

9 YouTube Tips and Tricks for Teachers Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates and/or follow me on Twitter. Info on how to contact me is on the About page. YouTube is still the best place to find videos to use in the classroom, despite being blocked in many schools. Remove the clutter: Often, the biggest problem with YouTube isn’t the video content, but some of the inappropriate comments that can occur in the space below the video. 1. 2. 3. 4. (Update – sadly XL is no more. Other YouTube Tricks 5. If you now use this link as a hyperlink in your IWB software or PowerPoint, the video will start playing at the point that you chose. 6. 7. Don’t forget that you can choose the video quality of the video, where available. 8. If available, you can turn on subtitles by clicking on the CC button. Click on the CC button and then choose “settings” to change the size, font and colour of the captions. 9. Many videos now also have an interactive transcript. Like this: Like Loading... Related

A Brilliant Touchpad Mouse for Touching Yourself [SFW Video] | Co.Design Famous designers love doing vibrators. Designing them, we mean! Tom Dixon, Arik Levy, Marc Newson, Yves Béhar: They've all dabbled in the sex-toy biz, and sure, it sounds a touch gimmicky -- a vanity project for the designer, a cash cow for the manufacturer -- but it actually makes a lot of sense. This is your most intimate object. Anyone who can make a floor cleaner sexy can easily make silicone sexy. So Béhar and Jimmyjane, a year after giving the lonely-hearted world his first vibrator, FORM 2, is back with FORM 3. The key is a flexy membrane at the center of the vibrator. Béhar created FORM 3 for the high-design sex depot Jimmyjane along with company founder Ethan Imboden. For more steamy design coverage, peep here. [Images via fuseproject]

chris dixon's blog / Notes on raising seed financing Last night I taught a class via Skillshare (disclosure: Founder Collective is an investor) about how to raise a seed round. After a long day I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, but it turned out to be a lot of fun and I stayed well past the scheduled end time. I think it worked well because the audience was full of people actually starting companies, and they came well prepared (they were all avid readers of tech blogs and had seemed to have done a lot of research). I sketched some notes for the class which I’m posting below. I’ve written ad nauseum on this blog (see contents page) about venture financing so hadn’t planned to blog more on the topic. But since I wrote up these notes already, here they are. 1. 2. 3. 4. By far the biggest influence on investors’ opinions of a startup is the opinion of other investors. 5. Make sure you have good Google results (this is your first impression in tech). 6. 6. 7. 8. 9. Have a short slide deck, not a business plan. 10. 11. 12.

How New Ideas Almost Killed Our Startup Odysseus resisting the Sirens Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter. On my three year startup journey that lead to Yipit, I had over 30 other completely unrelated ideas. To be clear, the “ideas” I’m referring to are the ones that have nothing to do with your current startup. In our case, Yipit had always been about organizing local information and we had been working on it for a while. Social version of delicious (summer of 2007)Tool to recommend the best version of the online video you were currently watching (spring 2008)140it.com: Bookmarklett that smartly shortens your tweet to less than 140 characters. I now think of these new ideas as the Sirens of the startup journey. The Temptation To understand why these new ideas can be so tempting, I refer you to the incredibly insightful startup transition cycle. The Danger The Solution

Opening up a world of educational content with YouTube for Schools When I was in school during the 90s, watching videos in the classroom was a highlight of any week. The teacher would roll in a television on a cart, pop in a VHS tape, and then we’d enjoy whatever scratchy science video my teacher had checked out from the school video library that week. Sight, sound and motion have always had the power to engage students and complement classroom instruction by bringing educational topics to life. We’ve been hearing from teachers that they want to use the vast array of educational videos on YouTube in their classrooms, but are concerned that students will be distracted by the latest music video or a video of a cute cat, or a video that might not be appropriate for students. While schools that completely restrict access to YouTube may solve this distraction concern, they also limit access to hundreds of thousands of educational videos on YouTube that can help bring photosynthesis to life, or show what life was like in ancient Greece.

Startup Marketing Blog - By Sean Ellis Redpoint Ventures: Making Money the Old Fashioned Way Last week we broke the news of the impressive-but-not-jawdropping $200 million acquisition of Cloud.com by Citrix and the stellar year of returns that Redpoint Ventures is having. What makes Redpoint’s record so unique is that the firm is having a good year despite the fact that they’re not in one of the big five: Zynga, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Groupon. Hell, let’s make it a big six and throw in Pandora since the IPO made so much noise. The venture world has never been more polarized between have and have-not firms. Meanwhile, there are dozens of venture firms on the other side of this divide who are going out of business. My best guess is there are dozens of them, but there could be more. Part of the reason for such an industry disconnect is the polarity of returns. All of that is what makes Redpoint’s winning 2011 such a hopeful sign that there’s still something in between the two extremes.

Harnessing Entrepreneurial Manic-Depression: Making the Rollercoaster Work for You The sky is falling! Ever since the media’s Chicken Little response to the tremors in the financial markets, I’ve felt like shouting from the rooftops “now you know how it feels to be an entrepreneur!” I just lost 9% overnight?! Fill a bathtub and get the toaster. This is a guest post on capitalizing on — vs. countering — the “entrepreneur’s disease” (manic depression) through 4 cyclical stages. The author is Cameron Herold, former COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, whose professional resume includes: -Helping build revenues from $2 Million to $105 Million in 6 years (no debt or outside shareholders) -Building a PR team that landed more than 5,000 stories in those same 6 years -Hiring 220 people in 4 months -Leading the sale, branding, and integration of 450+ franchise locations. I first saw this presentation at an Entepreneurs’ Organization (EO) event in Omaha prior to my successful Warren Buffett quest at the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting. Cameron: Stage 1 – Uninformed Optimism Do not: