Wednesday, July 14, 2010Healy Jones - Vice President of Marketing, OfficeDrop
I attended the AlwaysOn Venture Summit East last month, and was just sent a survey of venture capitalists in the Northeast that came out of that conference. Happily, our local VC friends are pretty optimistic about the rest of the year. You can get the survey here. In particular, they think that the number...
Wednesday, July 14, 2010Siamak Taghaddos - Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Grasshopper Group
1. Target influencers, not customers * Do more with less: targeting 100 influencers can help you reach thousands of customers. * Research heavily: Finding influencers is not easy. Do your homework. Find out who the best people are to have talking about your brand...
Tuesday, July 13, 2010Mike Volpe - Vice President of Marketing, HubSpot
This week's topic on Fizzlosophy is: What are 3 startup marketing strategies to build a buzz around your company and product? Today's guest contributor on Fizzlosophy is Mike Volpe - Vice President, Marketing at HubSpot in Cambridge. Mike's response: 1) Blog like a media company...
Tuesday, July 13, 2010Rob Go - Co-Founder and Partner, NextView Ventures
This is a build off my last post which was a primer on the Micro VC market. Often, I hear investors talk about companies that are “venture scale”. These are usually the kinds of companies that have the potential to drive meaningful returns for a top VC fund. Because of the high risk of early stage...
Monday, July 12, 2010Micah Rosenbloom - Founding Partner, Founder Collective
As I write this following July 4th, I can’t help but begin by being a bit patriotic. We are amazingly fortunate to live in a country with an inherent entrepreneurial culture and even healthy respect for valiant, but failed ventures. I’ll never forget when my grandfather came to visit my first...
Monday, July 12, 2010Keith Cline - Founder, VentureFizz
NextView Ventures is a new micro VC firm that was started by David Beisel, Rob Go, and Lee Hower. They made their first investment last week, as they participated in the $1.4M round of funding closed by thredUP in Cambridge. Other investors included Founder Collective, Trinity Ventures, and...
Friday, July 9, 2010Michelle Hipwood - Executive Director, The Capital Network
About 80 entrepreneurs, early stage VCs and angel investors came to Nutter McClennen & Fish’s Seaport office a few weeks ago for The Capital Network’s first Venture Fast Track Boot Camp. The theme of the interactive FastTrack was to give entrepreneurs an in-depth understanding of what it takes to raise early stage capital...
Thursday, July 8, 2010Carl Stjernfeldt - General Partner, Castile Ventures
3 things I like to see in a first meeting: 1. "Special sauce". Usually a combination of technology, team, market traction/size/growth, capital efficiency, competitive landscape, and timing that makes us believe THIS team, at THIS time, with THIS solution, in THIS market will be a great...
Wednesday, July 7, 2010Jeffrey Glass - Managing Director, Bain Capital Ventures
The entrepreneur has passion for the idea and is uniquely qualified to go after it. I know, it totally cliché, but a great entrepreneur can turn lemons into lemonade. Besides the usual list of skillsets, passion creates drive and drive creates success. It’s also helpful if the entrepreneur/ team have some...
Tuesday, July 6, 2010Keith Cline - Founder, VentureFizz
Just when everyone started to power down and think about the long holiday weekend....Google gave us some early fireworks with the acquisition of ITA Software for $700M in cash. Back in April, there were rumors circling around about the potential acquisition. Congrats to the team at ITA Software...
