Bijan Sabet: Terms of Service
Most web services or applications comes along with a terms of service. The terms of service is basically the rules of the road and what users agree to when using the service.
When startups are just being born, they often can’t hire lawyers to do a proper terms of service, nor can they imagine…
Source: bijan
The magic behind crowdsourcing @kickstarter explained by co-founder Creative Mornings / New York
Source: hugovanvuuren
The story of Keep Calm and Carry On
You’ve seen the now-famous Keep Calm and Carry On poster and its many many variations, but did you know that this British WWII poster was never distributed to the public and was discovered only recently in an English book shop?
(via ★interesting)
(via hugovanvuuren)
Source: jkottke
Books
Entrepreneurial Stories
Do More Faster by Brad Feld and David Cohen
Blue Mountain by Susan Polis Schutz
Carnegie by Peter Krass
iCon by Jeffrey Young and William Simon
iWoz by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith
My Start-Up Life by Ben Casnocha
Starting Something by Wayne McVicker
The Cure by Geeta Anand
The MouseDriver Chronicles by John Lusk and Kyle Harrison
The PayPal Wars by Eric Jackson
The Search by John Battelle
Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston
Fiction (it’s ok to have some fun)
JPod by Douglas Coupland
Personal Development
The Start-Up of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
Philosophy
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Robert Bach
Product Development
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank
Democratizing Innovation by Eric von Hippel
FAB by Neil Gershenfeld
Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham
Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky
Startup Company Tools
Venture Deals by Jason Mendelson & Brad Feld
The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
Startup Weekend by Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen, and Franck Nouyrigat
Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson
Bootstrapping Your Business by Greg Gianforte and Marcus Gibson
Term Sheets & Valuations by Alex Wilmerding
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law by Constance Bagley and Craig Dauchy
Strategy
Blueprint to a Billion by David Thomson
Partnering with Microsoft by Ted Dinsmore and Edward O’Connor
Venture Capital
Venture Capital and the Finance of Innovation by Andrew Metrick
The Business of Venture Capital: Mahendra Ramsinghani
Mastering the VC Game: Jeff Bussgang
What is Business Development?
“I do biz dev.”
Few times in history have more ambiguous words been spoken. Ask ten “VPs of Business Development” or similarly business card-ed folks what, exactly, is business development, and you’re like to get just as many answers.
“Business development is sales,” some will say, concisely.
“Business development is partnerships,” others will say, vaguely.
“Business development is hustling,” the startup folks will say, annoyingly.
The amalgam of varied and often contradictory responses to the basic question of “what is business development” reminds me of the way physicists seek to explain what, exactly, is the universe. With conflicting theories on the nature of black holes and bosons, the ultimate goal for those scientists is a Grand Unified Theory, a single definition that can elegantly explain how the universe itself operates at every level.
Lacking any concise explanation of what business development is all about, I sought to unite the varied forces of business development into one comprehensive framework. And eureka, for I have found it - the Grand Unified Theory of business development:
Business development is the creation of long-term value for an organization from customers, markets, and relationships.
There is elegance in simplicity, but perhaps this definition leaves you wanting more. At its heart, business development is all about figuring out how the interactions of those forces combine together to create opportunities for growth. But a theorem requires a proper proof, so let’s break that statement down: first, what do I mean by “long-term value?”
In its simplest form, “value” is cash, money, the lifeblood of any business (but it can also be access, prestige, or anything else a company seeks in order to grow). And there are plenty of ways to make a quick buck for you or your company. But business development is not about get-rich-quick schemes and I-win-you-lose tactics that create value that’s gone tomorrow as easily as it came today. It’s about creating opportunities for that value to persist over the long-term, to keep the floodgates open so that value can flow indefinitely. Thinking about business development as a means to creating long-term value is the only true way to succeed in consistently growing an organization.
The ”customers” portion of the definition may be slightly more obvious – customers pay the bills. They are the people who pay you for your products and services, and without them you won’t have any business to develop. But not everyone is a natural customer for your business. Maybe your product doesn’t have the features I’m looking for. Maybe your product is perfect, but I don’t even know your company sells it. Or maybe you’re not reaching me because you’re not knocking on my door.
That’s because customers “live” in specific markets. For example, take the Pet Owners market. The customers who live there, of course, are people who own cats, dogs, fish, etc. Petco is a company that clearly sells to customers who live in the Pet Owners market. I, on the other hand, do not have a pet. I don’t live in the Pet Owner market. So what if Petco wanted to sell something to me? Then they’d need to find a way to enter into a market where I do live.
For example, I live in New England and have pale skin and, one of the markets in which I have the misfortune of living in is the ”Prone to Spontaneously Combusting When Exposed to the Sun” market. If Petco wanted to sell something to me, perhaps they can find a way to enter into that market by offering sunscreen, hats, or sun-reflecting aluminum foil suits. Now, determining whether that’s a good idea or not for Petco to do so is a job for the business development team – and another story for another blog post.
And then there were “relationships.” Just as the planets and stars rely on gravity to keep them in orbit, any successful business development effort relies on the underlying foundation of strong relationships. Relationships with partners, customers, employees, the press, etc. are all critical to the success of any business development effort and as such they demand a bolded spot in any comprehensive definition of the term.
So, is business development actually sales? Is it partnerships? Is it all about hustling? Well, frankly, yes. It’s all of the above and as we’ll see in future blog posts, it’s much more. It’s a complicated and fascinating discipline that deserves a clear understanding, so that we can marvel at the beauty of a well-done deal as much as the stars.
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
In the past few months
Brad Feld - Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist
Peter F. Drucker - Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Marty Cagan - Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love
Rich Mironov - The Art of Product Management: Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator
Harvard Business Review - HBR’s 10 Must Reads
Dave Balter - The Word of Mouth Manual: Volume II (free PDF download)
Matthew A Russell - Mining the Social Web
Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company from Concept to Creation in 54 Hours
J’aime Paris
