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It’s hard to overestimate the importance of a startup name — which is why naming a business can feel so harrowing. A great name can help push your company to the next level, but a terrible one can sink you before you even started. So how do you find a great business name?

While there probably are as many approaches to coming up with a company name as there are failed startups, one great place to start is with idea generators. These quick, handy online tools spit out word combinations that can be a great jumping off point for you and your team.

Once you’ve found a company name you like, you can use the Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) to find out whether or not a business name has been trademarked. You should also use ICANN WHOIS to...

After almost two decades of decline, music industry revenues are finally starting to recover again and a lot of the credit goes to one guy: Daniel Ek, Founder of Spotify. Ironically, Spotify was backed by the guy who helped enable all that piracy to begin with: Napster’s Sean Parker.

It was no small thing for the Recording Industry to learn to love Spotify… or any Internet music company for that matter. It was also no small thing for Ek to start Spotify with the stance of not wanting to “Disrupt” music labels—he wanted to help them.

It took Founder Daniel Ek two years to get his first deals in Sweden, and another two years to launch in the US. He and his partner invested largely their own money until they showed traction, and likely would h...

Big brands know the value of teaming up. Starbucks and Spotify, Lucasfilm and Covergirl, and IKEA and Dreamworks have all forged lucrative partnerships.

Nearly every company can benefit from a good partner. My own company, bluemedia, fabricates and installs experiential activations for some of the biggest brands, events, and venues across America.

We’ve had plenty of success, but our partnership with a variety of key vendors in our space has helped us forge meaningful relationships to fuel our growth.

This teamwork helps us reach our clients’ goals faster and more efficiently. On top of that, the clients are happy because they’re getting two steps of the process done at the same time.

How partnerships help business

With a successful partne...

Google AdWords is a heavyweight when it comes to understanding and monitoring the desires and questions of Google searchers, and ultimately understanding what affects the overall decision making that drives clicks.

By digging through and analyzing data, one can find explanations for budget leakage, and reasoning for campaign renovation. Using AdWords, in combination with multiple tools, users can conduct an accurate analysis of a campaigns current performance, both to discover strengths to continue taking advantage of and areas to improve.

For those of you looking to discover new ways to analyze your campaigns and make large and small scale changes to your account, join us for this ultimate PPC account analysis.

Tools and Resources Used:

I...

One of our favorite interviews we’ve done was with Yahoo! Co-Founder Jerry Yang. Not just because of what he’s done, but because of the time we did it.

There are a lot of interesting moments in history to interview Yang — ours was just after Alibaba went public in the largest global IPO in tech history.

This was a massive vindication for Yang, who originally brought the deal to Yahoo!, and argued against Yahoo! selling half of its stake off years later. He needed the vindication: Yang was supposed to be the Steve Jobs founder hero coming in to save Yahoo! back in 2008. He initially turned down a $40 billion acquisition by Microsoft, was eventually ousted as CEO, and Yahoo!’s long slide continued.

It’s hard to assess his legacy: On the one h...

Venture capital (VC) is an important driver of the U.S. economy, spurring both economic growth and employment. But traditional VC rewards shareholder profit over shared prosperity, accumulating the benefits of that economic growth in just very few hands. Instead, can we leverage the upside of VC financing to fight poverty where economic growth and employment are most needed both at home and abroad? Some of us think that we can.

How much does VENTURE CAPITAL drive the U.S. economy?

This is the question that two scholars set out to answer. They quantified the long-term impact of venture capital in the economy of the United States, considering only publicly traded companies — those for which reliable information is available.

As of 2013, VC-b...

What is an angel investor?

Angel investors are typically high net worth individuals who make investments very early into the formation of a new startup company, usually in exchange for convertible debt or equity. The role of angel investors serves as a critical bridge between the early stage startup financing needs of a company and their larger capital needs later on from venture capitalists, corporate investors, all the way to becoming a publicly traded company.

Who can be angel investors?

In order to be an angel investor, a person does not have to be an accredited investor. However, a lot of angel investors are accredited investors.

In order to be an accredited investor, according to the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), a person mus...

What exactly does bootstrapping your startup mean?

For the uninitiated, a bootstrap startup basically means that you self-fund your business, i.e. using the existing resources and internal revenue to drive your business, instead of raising any external funds. Given the wide scale availability of angel investors and venture capitalists, it’s hard to resist the chance to build a steady business without accepting external funds.

In fact most startups today forget the importance and the advantages of starting out on a shoestring budget. At this point, I can almost feel the startup founders scoffing at the idea of starting out with a minimal budget, but hear me out. Granted, bootstrapping your startup isn’t exactly a bed of roses. It’s rather a...

If you'd like to see some samples - we've got 4 awesome business plans for you here.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: starting a company is hard work. Growing a startup from scratch is like jumping out of an airplane and trying to make a parachute using a thread and needle as you plummet towards the earth. Needless to say, when it comes to startup growth, there’s a lot that can go wrong – as Sean Sheppard knows firsthand.

“Growth needs to be done in a way that makes it safe for humans to tell you the truth. And that requires humility and a growth mindset.”

As the co-founder of Silicon Valley-based venture capital fund and market Development Accelerator GrowthX, Sean has seen hundreds of companies come through the door. Some of those companies have gone on to big wins – and others have stalled before they even g...