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by Steven Loeb - February 19, 2013
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How startups can gain from gamification best practices

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, August 20, 2012 | Comments

Vator Spark panel on gamification with CEOs of Badgeville, Bunchball, Trada

At Vator’s first Spark event, the focus was on gamification. Here's the video of the panel: "How startups can benefit from gamification techniques and best practices." On this panel were Raja Paharia, CEO and founder of Bunchball, Niel Robertson, CEO and founder of Trada, Kris Duggan, CEO and founder of Badgeville, Tim Roberts, VP of interactive design at Fitbit and moderator, Brian Blau, research director at Gartner. Here ...

Make your users do the work

by Nir Eyal, August 9, 2012 | Comments

How can making your users work more create retention?

The belief that products should always be as easy to use as possible is a sacred cow of the tech world. The rise of design thinking, coinciding with beautiful new products like the iPhone, has led some to conclude that creating slick interfaces is a hallmark of great design. But, like all attempts to create absolute rules about how we should interact ...

Lying on your resume

by Steve Blank, August 6, 2012 | Comments

It's not the lie that will catch up with you, it's the coverup

It’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the coverup.Richard Nixon and Watergate Getting asked by reporter about where I went to school made me remember the day I had to choose whether to lie on my resume. I Badly Want the JobWhen I got my first job in Silicon Valley it was through serendipity (my part) and desperation (on the part of ...

Unrequited love

by Steve Blank, August 3, 2012 | Comments

When your 'partners' aren’t putting up proportional value, it’s not a relationship

If there’s only one passionate party in a relationship it’s unrequited love. Here’s how I learned it the hard way. The Dartmouth football teamAfter Rocket Science I took some time off and consulted for the very VC’s who lost lots of money on the company. The VC’s suggested I should spend a day at Onyx Software, an early pioneer in Sales Automation in ...

Making a dent in the universe

by Steve Blank, July 23, 2012 | Comments

	Results from the NSF I-Corps Our goal teaching for the National Science Foundation was to make a dent in the universe. Could we actually teach tenured faculty how to turn an idea into a company? And if we did, could it change their lives? We can now answer these questions. Hell yes. The Lean LaunchPad class for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Over the last six months, ...
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Tenacious

by Steve Blank, July 19, 2012 | Comments

Keep your eyes on the prize, not the obstacles

TE·NA·CIOUS/TƏˈNĀSHƏS/ Adjective: Not readily letting go of, giving up, or separated from an object that one holds, a position, or a principle: “a tenacious grip”. Not easily dispelled or discouraged; persisting in existence or in a course of action. When I was a entrepreneur I’d pursue a goal relentlessly. Everything in between me and my goal was simply an obstacle ...

VC to founders: Help us help you

by Ethan Kurzweil, July 18, 2012 | Comments

Put them to work and vet them as much as you would a C-level hire

You’d think that as often as “VC is dead” is bandied about the Valley, we’d have seen a spoof video by now. Yet here we are. Still investing in companies. Still evaluating new ideas. Still helping portfolio partners succeed. And occasionally – perhaps more frequently than many realize – we’re doing it damned well. So while we’re here doing what ...

Vision takes a whole lot of zigging and zagging

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, July 18, 2012 | Comments

Online advertising pioneer Jeff Dachis shares his lessons learned building out his companies

In 1995, Jeff Dachis founded Razorfish, a pioneer in online advertising, which Dachis eventually led through a public offering during the dot-com boom of the late '90s. Today, Dachis presides over The Dachis Group, a social media marketing firm that's raised $30 million in funding to capitalize on the brand dollars moving online into social marketing campaigns. In this interview, ...

Running a startup is not a job, it's a lifestyle

by Bambi Francisco Roizen, July 16, 2012 | Comments

Paul Thelen, founder and CSO of Big Fish Games, shares lessons learned about entrepreneurship

Paul Thelen is a first-time entrepreneur, having founded Big Fish Games almost a decade ago. Fast forward and Thelen is doing pretty well. Big Fish Games is on a run-rate of $200 million in revenue and it's recently acquired Self Aware Games, the producer of Card Ace: Casino, a leading grossing app on the iPad. In this interview, Thelen shares ...

Zynga, Path CEOs spill on mobile missteps

by Krystal Peak, July 10, 2012 | Comments

Failure is a necessary step in building mobile apps according to Mark Pincus and Dave Morin

Even when every company is rushing to create and improve their mobile presence, two well-known CEOs made it clear that the road to mobile is a bumpy one -- no matter how established the business is. Zynga's CEO and founder Mark Pincus and Path’s CEO and founder Dave Morin both spoke at the Venture Beat conference held in San Francisco ...

Leveraging your partners to grow and develop your team

by Fred Wilson, July 9, 2012 | Comments

	Rule No. 1 is demand that your investors help you grow and develop your team (Fred Wilson is a VC at Union Square Ventures, based in NY. In this opinion piece, he writes about five ways to leverage investors.) This is the final post I am writing in this MBA Mondays post on People. Next week we will start with the guest posts and I've lined up about a half a dozen of them. I ...
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The art of manipulation

by Nir Eyal, July 1, 2012 | Comments

	When Is creating addictive products moral? Let's admit it, we in the consumer Web industry are in the manipulation business. We build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. We call these people "users" and even if we don't say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly addicted. Users take our technologies with them to bed. ...
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