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In twenty years of covering the startup industry, this may be a first: A top VC advises people don’t follow in his footsteps. Specifically, Union Square Ventures Fred Wilson talks about his route to venture capital and how he succeeded by timing, luck, and taking longer to learn parts of the business than he may have if he’d had operating experiences.

He also talks about the ascendancy of the New York ecosystem, as a man with one of the most valuable front row seats. We talked about the ups and downs of several of his largest investments, including Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and Zynga, and he addresses the dangers of a lot of corporate venture capital groups… and putting too much time in building hype.

Fred Wilson: I was a slow starter. I...

Ever struggled to properly measure productivity within your business? You’re not alone.

A lot of growth-driven business owners have a hard time pinning down the productivity (and efficiency, for that matter) of their team members and of general operations.

As managers, we all care about productivity and the impact it has on the stability and success of our businesses. That’s why we often find ourselves thinking hard about questions like, “What is the monetary value of an employee working at maximum capacity?” and, “What processes are negatively impacting our bottom line because they’re inefficient?”

We all know how to identify productive and unproductive behavior, but the problem is, we don’t all inherently know how to best measure product...

“I remember the first time I got my own CRM system, nearly 10 years ago” recounts author and sales coach Adam Metz. “It cost a few hundred dollars all in and it was actually a desktop app that synced to the cloud once a day for backup. It now seems kind of quaint, but, it helped me start my book of business that today has over 10,000 contacts in it. I can say that I’ve had a personal conversation with almost every single one of them. And that’s thanks for the most part, to good data management.”

There are two main reasons CRM adoption fails for sales teams trying to increase their performance. But first let me get the basics out of the way to get everyone up to speed on the terminology and what a CRM is.

Download the checklist of the key f...

Let’s talk about the “f” word. No, not that “f” word. Let’s talk about startup fundraising.

We’re living at an exciting time for startups and funding. For a long time, access to capital was restricted to the elite “in-crowds” in marquee cities like New York and Silicon Valley. If you didn’t live in one of those select few areas, you basically didn’t have a prayer of seeing a check from an angel or a VC.

But the tide has started to turn. Innovation can come from anywhere, and now, thanks to the Internet, the JOBS Act, and the rise of crowdfunding, so can startup funding. Even VC’s are getting wise to the fact that the best investments may not all come from the same zip code.

So now that we’re living in this brave new world of democracy...

Are you the same person you were a year ago? Ten years ago? Of course not. We’re all destined to evolve due to a variety of factors, whether through sudden, life-changing experiences or a slowly morphing sense of self.

Why, then, are we as businesspeople shocked when team members no longer seem to be ideal for their roles? Shouldn’t we anticipate and plan for this reality? And if we did, wouldn’t it be so much easier to move our talented co-workers into positions that make more sense according to who they are, not who they were?

Entrepreneurs everywhere would be wise to think like a Vegas dealer and consider shuffling the deck once in a while to realign everyone’s priorities.

Why Employee Misalignment Happens

When businesses start out, tea...

Lisa Wang spent four years building SheWorx, a female entrepreneur networking group and community that helped nearly 20,000 women entrepreneurs build and scale their companies. Now, the company has been acquired by the equity crowdfunding platform, Republic, with the goal of expanding their reach even further.

While SheWorx focused primarily on addressing the gender gap in venture capital funding, Republic has traditionally focused on equity crowdfunding. But Lisa tells Startups.com that her thinking about “what it actually takes to close the funding gap” for “diverse entrepreneurs” has changed during her time running SheWorx.

“If you’re going to create any significant change, you can’t keep going down the same old path you’ve always been ...

On a first foray into crowdfunding, a founder might find that things are more complicated than they thought at first. What are the best practices? What type of crowdfunding should they do? Which of the many, many sites should they go with? It becomes clear very quickly that while they might be experts in their fields, they’re certainly not crowdfunding experts.

There are plenty of perspectives out there on what to do and what not to do; plenty of crowdfunding experts who are offering their advice to new entrepreneurs. (If we’re being honest, there are probably too many.)

The same issue comes up: How do you know who to trust?

So a good plan when tackling a crowdfunding campaign is to ask the experts. From other entrepreneurs who have been t...

I’ve been a digital nomad (or “slow traveler” or “location independent worker” or whichever buzzword you prefer) for over five years now. I quit my life in 2011 after the Great Recession meant there was no way out of my dead end job as a social worker and bought a one-way ticket to Argentina. Since then, I’ve lived in more than 20 countries, worked in coworking spaces, cafes, and on trains, planes, and — yes — automobiles. And everywhere I go, the one thing that people always ask me is “What’s your favorite place you’ve lived?”

My response is immediate: Guatemala. And, to be more specific, the colonial town of Antigua Guatemala.

Four things are important to digital nomads and bootstrapping startups:

1. Reliable wifi.

2. Low cost of living.

As is the case with most big projects, crafting a business plan is one of those things that takes an incredible amount of diligence and no shortage of courage. After all, your business idea is probably more than just some passionless money-making ploy — it’s your dream that you’re getting ready to lay bare for the world to scrutinize!

Never fear!

We have 4 sample business plans here to make it all less scary.

If you approach this with a firm understanding of what key information to include in each section of your business plan and know how each section works together to form a cohesive, compelling, and — above all — persuasive whole, it will make the writing process a whole lot less daunting.

We’re about to help you do exactly that by deconstru...

There’s the developer’s vision of a mobile app and then there’s the reality of the app in the hands of users. The only way to make sure that the two are one and the same is to conduct beta tests.

If you find beta testing complicated – or you’re not even sure where to begin – then Ubertesters is the tool for you. Ubertesters is a cloud-based platform for managing the beta testing process of mobile apps “to ensure an accurate, fast and cost effective mobile testing process that results in a high-quality, flawless, mobile app.”

Figuring out if beta testing is right for your mobile app, as well as the perfect time for testing, is a good place to begin. Kissmetrics offers excellent recommendations to help make these decisions.

At some point, ho...