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Focus. Persevere. Hustle. Follow your gut. Put customers first. Don’t reinvent unnecessary wheels. This is just some of the smart, helpful and brief advice that iStartupLabs CEO Peter Corbett got from CEOs and founders over Twitter. Here, he shares the wisest words.
Declining cities could attract start ups/SMEs and create local incubators by offering (really) cheap real estate, equity investment, and more…
Many declining cities already have a consequent amount of underutilized and cheap real estate. These places could be transformed into shared office space, in order to create centers of innovation (similar to the Hub in San Francisco -acknowledging that SF is already a vibrant city, or Haarlem, Netherlands), which can inspire in the longer run locals to be more entrepreneurial and create their own companies. During the inspiration phase, many contributions pointed out examples of using empty building (in Seattle, New York, London and Bilbao, as well as Detroit). In Seattle, the project is a program of the City of Seattle, funded through multiple city departments along with various neighborhood groups, business improvement associations, and merchants’ associations.
“Incentive package” for the start-ups
— Cheap real estate: The city can give away free or very cheap buildings.
— Furniture: Steelcase could provide tables, chairs and other setup for offices (Thanks Ken) and common work facilities (kitchen, TechShop type of place, etc.) (Thanks Craig).
— Other amenities such as affordable housing (Thanks Josh).
— Funding:
For non-profit partners, corporate sponsors could underwrite the utilities to get these workspaces up and running, literally “empowering” a cause and their brand (ThanksCatherine).
Advantages for the city / the sponsor
— Tax revenue that the city wouldn’t be getting if the offices / buildings sit vacant.
— Shares in the companies: In exchange for free rent, you could issue the city some kind of convertible shares in the company. If the company ends up doing well (i.e., it’s the next Apple, Google, etc.) then the city reaps the upside and if not, then the shares aren’t worth anything and the city did its best to try and seed innovation (Thanks Rob).
— Places like these act as ideal laboratories for studying the way people work and collaborate, similarly to Workspring, a project that was spun off from Steelcase (Thanks Melanie).
— The biggest advantage of all: job creation. As Rob phrased it:
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Image source: Zfein.com
In the last year I’ve seen thousands of startup pitches while working with the AngelList crew, coached 100+ founders on how to communicate their product, traction and team, and worked with startups in fine institutions like 500 Startups, AngelPad and Bootup. I’ve also dissected 500+ emails from a recent seed round fundraising to map investor response. Here’s what I’ve learned.
Through thousands of pitches, I’ve found that fewer that 5% tell a great traction story.
Here are 10 tips that can help.
But first, let’s get one thing straight – this is the only thing that matters to investors ( ^ ) //follow the upper link to get the whole article
This is the best article about getting your startup on AngelList that I’ve ever read.
In the last year I’ve seen thousands of startup pitches and coached hundreds of founders while working with the AngelList crew. I’ve also seen how quickly the AngelList platform improves, giving startups new ways to reach investors with every push. This is about using those tools.
Raising money is one of the hardest things to do as a startup entrepreneur. It takes a lot of time to find willing investors, pitch them the right story, and negotiate with little leverage. Sam Zaid has a lot of experience pitching VCs – and a lot of experience closing deals, too. Sam has had several high-growth startups including the 2011 TechCrunch Disrupt Winning startup Getaround.com.
Scout London is raising funds for Films on Fridges on Kickstarter! Films on Fridges is a pop-up cinema coming to East London this summer and located directly adjacent to the 2012 Olympic Stadium.
It was my first time as Grammarian at Toastmasters and here you can hear me criticizing everyone. I was immediately followed by an inspiring speech from Gerard O’Donovan. He did something epic.
Conferences are the best way to quickly extend a business network and, if done correctly, attendance and the follow up is an arduous but rewarding endeavour. Uninitiated networking professionals commonly attend conference days in hope of stumbling across opportunity whilst floating amongst their peers, but without discipline, the majority of business opportunities are likely to go unrealised.
You may have problems when coding in HTML with table’s TR. You want a certain height for a line and can’t get it, so you say <td height=”2″> for example, but your <tr> will still have a height of 12. that may be because you have some in your <td> </td>
to fix that, just set the font-size to what you want 🙂 cheers!
If you want a very quick primer on all the stuff nobody ever tells you about raising venture capital check out this video where Mark Jeffrey & I break it down on This Week in VC.
