Friday Link: Venture Math 101

Do entrepreneurs really understand how VCs make money?  Another great post from StartupCFO Mark MacLeod: Venture Math 101

Friday Link: Technology – It matters less than you think…

I’ve written about how technology matters less than many people think before in Investors, Magic and Mythical Creatures.  I thought this piece by a web designer was a great example of how it can apply to sales too…

Never Say WordPress When Selling a Web Design Project

Friday Link: Understanding the Consequences of the Business Decisions You Fudge On

This story hits two hot-buttons in startup management for me.  The importance of decision making, and the need to act quickly with staff:

Understanding the Consequences of the Business Decisions You Fudge On

Read and enjoy…

Friday Link: Optimizely Magic?

Arthur C Clarke famously said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.  I find it easy to see how a mobile phone would appear like magic to someone from 100 years ago, but as a technologist I have very seldom experienced the illusion myself*, much less from a website.

Optimizely did it to me.  I did a double take and said to myself “that’s just not possible”.  I still marvel and wonder at the feat of technical ingenuity that makes it possible.

Until I discovered Optimisely, I saw A/B testing of web pages (to test the effectiveness of different copy and design)  as a hideous collision between design, marketing, statistics and technical implementation.  Simple in principle, it sounded fiddly and complicated in practice.  Setting up alternate versions of pages, deploying them, managing them, and analysing the statistics generated sounded like an error-prone minefield.

Optimizely changes all that.

Optimizely allows you to edit your own web page in-browser almost as if it was a word document or design package.  You can create different variants to test, group them into experiments, and and view the statistics of the results of those experiments.  This is all done interactively through a single, simple control system.  The ONLY change you have to make to your own website is the addition of ONE line of javascript code to the header of pages you wish to experiment on – for many sites this will only have to happen once in the master template.

If someone had told me they were going to build this system, I would have admired their ambition and laughed at their naivety in thinking so complex could be made to actually work.  I would have been wrong.

Watch the video on the Optimizely homepage to learn more.  Even if you’re not interested in A/B testing, you might enjoy the magic show.  It’s implausible folks, but it’s real.

* The last time I had a real “wow” moment was when the iPod Nano 6th generation came out.  It’s tiny, but with smooth flowing graphics and a touchscreen UI.  Even though I have owned one for around two years, I still find it a little implausible…

Friday Link: Pricing

A very Happy New Year to all my readers.

Today I’m posting a couple of articles on pricing that I’ve found really interesting in the last few months.

The first is from a web startup on their experiences in launching and pricing forFilePicker.io, a product that helps developers access users content from their apps.

The second is in interview format: Ramit Sethi and Patrick McKenzie On Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More.  It’s by no means applicable to every situation, but there is some great content in there about how bold pricing can do more than just incrementally increase revenue.

Great positive thoughts for the start of a new year!

Friday Link: Unsung Heroes

Mark Suster is a 2x entrepreneur (one of his companies sold to Salesforce.com) who is now a VC with GRP Partners.  He writes a blog I really enjoy called “Both Sides of the Table” focussed on early-stage technology companies.

This piece particularly caught my eye however: The Valuable Unsung Heroes of Startups.  Given how I spend my days, it will probably come as no surprise that agree that good advisors and mentors can make a huge positive contribution to the success of a Startup!

Friday Link: Why a VC Funded a Lawsuit

First Round Capital funded a lawsuit against retail Giant Best Buy.  Not a normal activity for a VC perhaps, but they wanted to make a stand and send a message to big companies that start-ups are not easy targets.

http://redeye.firstround.com/2012/12/why-first-round-capital-funded-a-lawsuit.html

I think it’s great to see a VC supporting their portfolio in this way, although I hope it won’t need to happen too often…

Friday Link: John Waddel – Keeping Archangels top of investment tree!

I saw this interview with John Waddell in the Scotsman and I thought it was worth sharing  Interview: John Waddell keeping Archangels top of investment tree

One of the companies I work with, ATEEDA, is an Archangel investee, most recently raising £1m earlier in the year.