Q: When to Incorporate and Options for IP protection
Some quick answers to common questions about how to protect your intellectual property (IP) and when to incorporate.
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Questions to Answer Before You Start Negotiating
Here are some questions to ask yourself before you start negotiating a complex business relationship: for example a software license, SaaS subscription, or a reseller or OEM relationship. Entire books are written on negotiation, I am trying to highlight some questions that can get overlooked.
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Newsletter: Effective Delegation
One of the balancing acts of entrepreneurship is when to keep control and when to delegate. Our November/December 2016 newsletter explores the challenges of creative and effective delegation.
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Quotes For Entrepreneurs–November 2016
You can follow @skmurphy to get these quotes for entrepreneurs hot off the mojo wire or wait until they are collected in a blog post at the end of each month. Enter your E-mail address if you would like have new blog posts sent to you.
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Elena Krasnoperova on “Learning Hacks for Bootstrappers” Fri-Dec-2
Elena Krasnoperova has been a regular attendee at the Silicon Valley Bootstrappers Breakfasts® for more than three years and I was delighted when she accepted my invitation to be a featured attendee and talk about her entrepreneurial journey. She plans to share some heuristics for learning faster than your competition and immediately applying your knowledge in
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Cofounder Legal Challenges and Solutions at Hacker Dojo Tue-Nov-29
Sean Murphy will moderate a panel of three experienced startup attorneys on November 29 for a Silicon Valley Cofounder Academy event at Hacker Dojo on “Cofounder Legal Challenges and Solutions.”
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Thanksgiving 2016: Bootstrappers Potluck and Reflections on Mayflower Compact
For Thanksgiving 2016 we hosted the Bootstrapper Potluck for the third year in a row, it’s becoming a tradition we really enjoy.
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Nine Rules from Monetizing Innovation
I am at the Intrapreneurship Conference in Palo Alto today and “Monetizing Innovation” by Madhavan Ramanujam and George Tacke. The book is a fast read that incorporates a some pricing theory into new product introduction, here are nine rules they offer for a successful innovation.
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Veterans Day 2016
A thank you on Veterans Day 2016 to all of the men and women in our armed forces who made the United States possible, in particular this Silicon Valley oasis of invention and innovation I get to call home. Some quotes to meditate on follow.
Discovery, Invention, Growth, and Renewal
Entrepreneurs need to invent their future: this requires a cycle of discovery, invention, growth, and renewal.
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Quotes For Entrepreneurs–October 2016
You can follow @skmurphy to get these quotes for entrepreneurs hot off the mojo wire or wait until they are collected in a blog post at the end of each month. Enter your E-mail address if you would like have new blog posts sent to you.
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Innovation Principles from Ken Iverson’s “Plain Talk”
Ken Iverson wrote “Plain Talk” 1997 to document the management and innovation principles that led Nucor from bankruptcy to the number three position in the steel industry in the United States. Since the publication of the book Nucor has become the number one player.
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Q: Helping Customers On Hold
It’s important to understand who your customer is and what their critical business needs are. Helping customers is only possible once you have identified who you are truly serving (who will pay you) and which of their needs or problems you can help them address.
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So Good They Can’t Ignore You
“So Good They Can’t Ignore You” by Cal Newport offers a very good model for creating a good career or prospering as an entrepreneur.
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What a Mixmaster our dreams are for our memories
I take a fair amount of inspiration from dreams, which I believe are a way for the mind to reprocess memories into new configurations, the same way that a mixmaster can beat eggs or potatoes into a smooth consistency. I think dreams are a way of reprocessing experiences and distilling additional insights and learning.
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Founder Story: Steven Kim of edify.me
An interview with Steven Kim, founder of edify.me which provides very well written summaries of business and personal improvement books. I think his summary of the Lean Startup is by far the best and most useful, I profiled it last year in “E-Book Summary for Lean Startup”
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How Do I Move From Being Capable to Offering Expert Consulting?
Offering expert consulting means developing a specialization and focus that enable you to execute with distinction. The phrases “finding the niche for your product” and “product market fit” are essentially equivalent. A key definition of a market is that members reference each other’s buy decisions and therefore building up a set of references lowers your
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Vinod Khosla on the Need for Vision and the Value of Youth
A review of some remarks by Vinod Khosla on “Silicon Valley Vision” in 2012 and the value of youth from the Nasscom conference in November 2011. I contrast that with an earlier article by Jim Collins on “Built to Flip.”
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Something Ventured: Make Money and Change the World for the Better
One documentary worth watching to get some context on the history of entrepreneurship and venture capital is “Something Ventured.” It’s a series of interviews with venture capitalists talking about their investments and their risk mitigation strategies in the 1950’s through 1970’s. It’s clear that they paid a lot of attention to “minimum viable products” and
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A Childhood Memory or Two
I had strong memory this morning of riding my bike down a hill on the street in front of our house. The air was skin warm and after the heat of the summer was a delightful caress, going downhill I did not have to pedal and it was like flying. It’s hard to recapture the
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