Here’s a great post about what really drives sophisticated venture capital investors in the online service space: Reid Hoffman: My Rule of Three for Investing I think the point about capital efficiency is the one that entrepreneurs often miss. Numbers 1 and 2 are defining
At R7 Solutions, we’re experimenting with website and server monitoring services. So far, we’ve tried AlertBot and Pingdom, two of the industry leaders. These services provide one or more remote locations from which websites or services are tested for availability. If a site is unavailable,
If you’re like me, you’ve got 15 different passwords for 15 different online services. There are online banking passwords, website hosting passwords, online store passwords, server and e-mail passwords. Everything is online. What’s worse, you might not be like me, and you might have one
For me, as an entrepreneur, obvious keywords include the names of businesses in which I have an interest, products that I follow, and executives and others who need an eye kept on them at all times, lest they do something brilliant or dastardly without my immediate notice. Wouldn’t do.
You probably know this already, but keeping your website up to date, edited and organized can be a challenge for even the well-funded startup venture. There’s just so much going on that it can be hard for an entrepreneur to make the time to get
I judged the Oklahoma Governor’s Cup business plan competition a couple of weeks ago. It was 8 hours of tough, solid work, but it was rewarding. Meeting enthusiastic groups of students presenting promising businesses – some of which are already well on their way to launch
Friend of mine who has recently become director of operations at a hardware/web 2.0 company (yep, pretty exotic), put out a request asking for recommendations for building a world class customer service organization. Good for him! So, how do you build world class customer service?
Pay for performance not for effort. Of course, every entrepreneur knows this, because this is how they pay themselves. But they sometimes forget that money and performance need to be closely aligned throughout the company and that rewards need to flow downwards based on actual
Keep the vision alive. Starting a business can be boring, long, tedious, and bureaucratic. It really isn’t romantic. But don’t forget what you started out to do. Take specific times, events, meetings to talk about and review the vision. Don’t get so caught up in
I’m judging at the Oklahoma Governor’s Cup Collegiate Business Plan Competition this weekend. This is the Oklahoma state business plan competition for undergraduate and graduate students that draws teams from around the state to compete for $200,000 in cash, $50,000 of in-kind awards, $40,000 in fellowships