Here are the 20 the most capital-dense start-up communities in the US, according to research by Richard Florida, Co-Founder and Editor at Large at The Atlantic Cities
Which of these are you most surprised to see in the list?
News About Startups, Entrepreneurs & Angel Investors
Mindjet has compiled this fun infographic that outlines the different personality types and how each of them contribute to the success of any team.
Which personality type are you? And do any of these profiles fit other members of your team?
Here is a list of questions that angels and VC’s will ask startups when deciding whether to invest or not. If you have answers to these questions up your sleeve, you should be pretty well prepared.
The Idea:
Traction:
The Market & Competition:
Marketing:
The Founders & Team:
The Financials:
The Deal:
The Exit:
Have I missed any out? What other questions do you think an angel or VC might ask?
This infographic from Wishpond collects data from a Social Media Examiner study into one, easy-to-read visual, looking at the top benefits achieved by social media by more than 3,000 marketers in 2013.
Highlights include:
The results from Havas Media Group’s 2013 Meaningful Brands study statistically demonstrate that meaningful brands outperform the stock market by 120%. It demonstrates, in hard financial terms, how the relationship between people and brands can benefit from measuring, communicating and delivering increased wellbeing.
Meaningful Brands – Havas Media Group’s new metric of brand strength – is the first global analytical framework to connect human wellbeing with brands at a business level. It measures the benefits brands bring to our lives. It’s unique in both scale (700 brands, over 134,000 consumers, 23 countries) and scope.
It measures the impact of a brand’s benefit alongside its impact on 12 different areas of wellbeing – health, happiness, financial, relationships and community among others – for a full view of its effect on our quality of life.
Building a successful business is every entrepreneur’s goal – but only 1 in 12 succeed. Why do startups fail? The Startup Genome project analyzed data from 3,200 companies and came up with some answers.
At the core of any successful business are two things: a good product and a large market for that product. In other words, a startup should be able to scale. And to scale properly, it must balance the growth of five core dimensions: customers, product, team, business model, and funding.
The dominant reason for failure: premature scaling of one or more of those dimensions. View the infographic for more!
A study conducted by CB insights has revealed a lot of details about VC backed companies across the country. The focus of the study was on the three largest players in tech startup; New York, California and Massachusetts.
Key Stats
40% of funded companies have two founding members, and they raise 19% more money on average than companies with one or three founders. A common scenario is one founder focuses on the technical and product side of the business, while the other handles more of the business and marketing. A two founder company has the advantage of a greater depth of knowledge, while still keeping decision making simple compared to larger teams.
Founding teams based in California, raise more money than the other two states. On average 67% more than teams in Massachusetts and 59% more than Nee York based teams.
On average, all Asian teams raise:
• 74% more than all white teams
• 82% more than mixed teams
• 207% more than all black teams
Founders According to Race and Gender
Most founders are white males, but on average Asians receive more funding. Massachusetts has a higher percentage of women founders, compared to New York and California.
Median Funding Received by Race:
• Asian Pacific – $4 million
• All White – $2.3 million
• Mixed – $2.2 million
• All Black – $1.3 million
Median Funding Received By Gender:
• All Male – $2.2 million
• All Female $2.2 million
• Mixed $4 million
Age and experience factors
Older age does not automatically translate into more funding. What is rewarded is more experienced founders.
Median funding Received by Age Range:
• 35-44 ($2 million)
• 26-34 ($2.5 million)
• 45-54 ($2.4 million)
• 18-25 ($1.4 million)
Former Titles and Roles
An interesting statistic is the breakdown of the previous job title and job role of founding members.
Former Title Breakdown:
• Other role – 46 %
• Sales & marketing – 13 %
• Product development & management – 12 %
• Engineering – 11 %
• Business Development – 8 %
• Software – 6 %
• Strategy – 4 %
Former Role Breakdown:
• CEO/Founder – 39 %
• Other title – 28 %
• Director – 10 %
• Vice President – 9 %
• Senior Vice President – 5 %
• Manager – 5 %
• Consultant – 4 %
Which social media sites are small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) using for business?
Facebook (as usual) leads the way, with 19 percent of SMEs favouring this platform, ahead of LinkedIn (14 percent), blogs (13 percent) and Twitter, with the latter being used by just 4 percent of these firms.
While 81 percent of small businesses see the value of using social media as a business tool, just 25 percent spend 6-10 hours per week on social media, and 14 percent don’t separate personal and professional updates on these channels.
This data comes courtesy of an infographic via Sage UK, who collated results from several sources to produce this visual as part of their small business guide to social media.
Here are 20 tips to bootstrap your start-up and drive your business forward without spending a lot of money:
Clever bootstrapping is proof that you have the most important elements of company building: passion, dedication, resourcefulness, focus and vision, which will make you and your company much more attractive to angel investors and venture capitalists. So make sure you spend wisely! Be sure also to hire reputable payment processing companies for your business.
What have I forgotten? Let me know your top bootstrapping tips and strategies.
Adding social sharing icons to your email marketing messages can increase your click-through rate (CTR) by as much as 158 percent. Email marketing campaigns with social sharing buttons saw a CTR of 6.2%, compared to a CTR of just 2.4% for those who used email alone.
Have you noticed anything that has improved the results of your email marketing?
Kraettli Epperson talks about some of the bad pitches companies make to investors at the spring beta 2013 conference.
According to a recent report from Dow Jones VentureSource, German seed investor High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) is the most active investor in European companies – with 16 completed deals in the first quarter of 2013. Danish VC firm SEED Capital with 12 completed deals in the same period.
The UK retained its position as the favoured destination for equity financing in Europe with a 34% share of all investment into European VC-backed companies.
While European venture capital declined in the first three months of the year – dipping 13 per cent in the number of funds and five per cent in amount raised from the previous quarter – VC investment into European companies experienced a slight increase.
For the full list of most active investors in Europe and other interesting stats on the European venture capital industry, check out the infographic below…