Long hours with your startup colleagues developing a product with cutting-edge features can prove frustrating when those features end up in a competitor’s offering. Nitin Gupta of LawPivot and Eric Hutchins of Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP offer tips for entrepreneurs building a patent portfolio.…
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Lessons from Billy Chasen’s epic pivot to Turntable.fm
Billy Chasen, the co-founder of Turntable.fm, talked on Thursday night about his pivot away from his barcode-scanning startup Stickybits. It was a tough decision to pull the plug on a mediocre success, but it's worked out for him. Here are some lessons from his big restart.…
Read MoreCapLinked hits $10 billion in listed deals, opens to pro investors
CapLinked, an online platform that brings together companies and private investors, said it has eclipsed $10 billion in private deals listed on the platform since it launched a year ago. Now, it's opening up the platform to professional investors with a new product called DealRocket.…
Read MoreTop 5 things you should know about term sheets
Many entrepreneurs are in the process of fundraising. However, many are unaware of the most favorable terms for raising money from investors and confused about what terms to focus on in a term sheet. Jay and Yusuf explain how to navigate these sometimes tricky waters.…
Read MoreNYC SeedStart Media class pushes crowdsourcing, commerce
NYC SeedStart, a New York incubator program founded by NYC Seed along with a handful of VC partners, just graduated its summer class focused on media. The seven startups cover a range of topics, but a few themes emerged like crowdsourcing, commerce and content management.…
Read MoreThree start-ups to watch: Take the Interview, Re-Vinyl, AppAddictive
DreamIt Ventures graduated its first New York class yesterday, sending 14 new start-ups into the wild. The summer class tackled education, e-commerce and app publishing and a few used video conferencing in interesting ways. Here are few that stood out to me.…
Read MoreGigaOM Euro 20: The European startups to watch
For years, Europe’s startup community has been painted as the undernourished younger cousin of Silicon Valley. In reality, Europe’s web scene is now thriving. and we’ve compiled a list featuring some of the best and brightest European web startups — what we’re dubbing the GigaOM Euro 20.…
Read MoreAirBnB gets $112M in new investment
AirBnB, a San Francisco–based person-to-person room-, apartment- and house-rental startup, has raised $112 million in Series B funding from a group of investors including Russian Internet investor DST Global, General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz. AirBnB has raised about $120 million. More details after the fold.…
Read MoreFinTech startups wield data and smarts
The FinTech Innovation Lab, an accelerator program for financial tech startups, graduated its first class on Friday. This first batch of companies is bringing some impressive ideas to bear on data, analytics and payments and showing there's room for new approaches in the financial sector.…
Read MoreEurope’s accelerator bubble is ‘a double-edged sword’
GigaOM readers agree that encouraging European entrepreneurs is vitally important to the long-term health of local startups. But they have differing opinions about the sharp growth of accelerator programs and bootcamps across the continent: will startups end up being fed to the sharks?…
Read MoreWhat Sheryl Sandberg shows us about the future of work
The profile of Sheryl Sandberg in the New Yorker this week purports to be about women in technology, but it’s also a glimpses into the evolving state of the workplace in an entrepreneurial and highly connected world -– the future of work for the professional class.…
Read MoreAdmob Founder’s Digital Gnome & Other Notable Startups at TC Disrupt
Former AdMob Omar Hamoui's Churn Labs, his first venture after selling mobile ad company to Google for $750 million, was one of the early highlights for TechCrunch Disrupt's Start-up Battlefield, a showcase for dozens of emerging start-ups. Here is Hamoui's startup, plus three more.…
Read MoreYoung, Experienced Co-Founders Are Key to Success
The key to success in startups is making sure you're young, experienced and not the only founder. That's the takeaway from a new survey being conducted by SV Angel of successful startups that have gone on to or are projected to have big exits.…
Read MoreTechStars NYC Class Shines at Demo Day
TechStars, the pioneering start-up accelerator, just graduated its first New York class today, introducing a strong and polished class with a lot of promise. Here are some standouts from the class of 12, which introduced themselves at a demo day today.…
Read MoreAre Crappy Startups Wall Street’s Fault?
The Kauffman Foundation claims in a new report that high-paying jobs in the financial sector have drained the prospective pool of startup founders until it's pretty shallow. It may even be responsible for allowing "potentially weaker" startups to gain funding. Here's a look at the arguments.…
Read MoreBritain Woos Entrepreneurs With Its Own Startup Visa
It’s no secret that the political machine in Washington can be slow. The Startup Visa Act was first discussed in 2009, and in the meantime, Britain has managed to pass their own version, despite a change of government, heated debate, and necessary changes to immigration laws.…
Read More5 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When Getting Mentored
Mentorship is a critical catalyst for passage, transition and development as a pre-entrepreneur. But mentorship, like entrepreneurship, can break down in the nitty gritty details. Larry Chiang offers his advice in avoiding the mistakes many entrepreneurs make when they try to get mentored by a VC.…
Read MoreAccelerate Your Startup: Develop a Repeatable Sales Model
Different phases of a startup’s lifecycle require different approaches to spending. VC David Skok explains how startup CEOs need to manage their burn rate as they fine-tune their sales process and their sales team to prepare themselves for the next stage.…
Read MoreAccelerate Your Startup: Get the Right Product/Market Fit
The two most common mistakes startups make are spending too much money and not spending enough. VC David Skok, of Matrix Partners, explains how hard CEOs should press on the startup accelerator pedal when the company is trying to fit its product to the right market.…
Read MoreStartup Strategies: Aim Your Sales Efforts
For startups to grow, they need to adopt some big-company practices, especially concerning the sales team. In the first post of a three-part series, entrepreneur-turned-VC Mark Suster shows how growing companies should assess the deals in their sales pipelines and help sales teams focus their time.…
Read MoreWhy Startup Visas Don’t Go Far Enough
Silicon Valley investors are campaigning to broaden immigration rules to let more would-be technology entrepreneurs into the United States. The movement, which is gaining momentum, has the right motivations - but history suggests that campaigners must gather support form outside the traditional hi-tech bubble if they want to turn their proposals into law.…
Read MoreCan Austin Ignite the Fire of Entrepreneurship?
Austin is not a stellar city for startups seeking venture capital, but it's a great place to start a business, and there are more and more resources devoted to making Austin a home for entrepreneurs like the city is a home for live music.…
Read MoreThe Stuff Success is Made of
I’ve spoken with a lot of entrepreneurs lately about how they’ve built successful businesses, and have also seen through my own experiences…
Read MoreNetworking Tip: Help People Help You
I’ve been talking with a lot of entrepreneurs lately, and one thing I can say for certain is that, as a group,…
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