Author: BEC

The US government announced dramatic changes to the H1B visa which is used by over 85K individuals each year to work in the US. By some estimates there are over 500K workers using the H1B visa in the US. Now, the estimate is to cut these by a third with new rules that change how much employers… Continue reading H1B Change to Salary are Less of an Impact than Educational Qualifications for the Visa

CB Insights has a blog post on funding in India. Here are the 3 most surprising facts that I gathered from the post. 1. Education and training was the #1 funded industry by category. Business intelligence was in the middle of the pack. I am very surprised. I would have put them in reverse. In fact… Continue reading The Surprising Stats on Funding in India #500strong Shows up High

Most entrepreneurs following the Lean Startup Methodology or the Customer development methodology will tell you that it never really works in a linear, sequential fashion, neither does it follow the prescribed set of steps. The primary reasons are either because you end up getting some feedback or learning during the entire process that changes your… Continue reading Problem Development Learning for Your Startup

As exciting as it sounds, when a business development or partner sales representative from a large company in your domain calls you, it tends to, in most cases, generate more work than get customers in the short term for a startup. The first part of partnering with a large company is to understand when you… Continue reading Understanding the Mechanics of Partnering with “Big Companies”

Ahh, the demo day. The arbitrary day the accelerator decides it is time to throw its babies to the world of investors. The number of accelerator directors I have asked the question “why is your program 3 or 4 months” is probably in the 50’s and the number of times I have not heard a… Continue reading 10 Things from Running 10 Demo Days about #Startup Pitches

I mentioned that many enterprise customers are loathe to talk about the products and solutions they use unless they have approval from their corporate PR team. In many cases they consider early stage startup products as a “competitive differentiation”. Still, there are many companies (such as #Slack, Cloudera) that have done a great job in getting many… Continue reading 3 Techniques to Support “Word of Mouth” Marketing

Many startups have co founders who are best friends. I have heard of many cases when that has worked out well and a few cases when it did not. I would say in more cases than not, it has worked out (anecdotal). Hiring your best friend as the first employee has different connotations for your… Continue reading Hiring Your Best Friend as a First Employee – Pros and Cons

In the initial days of your SaaS startup, when you are doing user development, you may find that your product will help both SMB (Small Medium Business) users as well at Enterprise users. There’s a tendency to then focus more on the “customer” development than the user. Assuming you have spent enough time on the user, there is a… Continue reading Starting With an Smb Focus vs. Enterprise SaaS Companies

I tend to get distracted easily. I have the shiny new object syndrome disease. I tend to take time to understand what made me master a task or a skill and so I tend to make a lot of mistakes. Which is why I have a tool in my box called the “To Dont” list. It is… Continue reading The Power of the “To Dont” List and Why You Should Keep One