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Perfecting Your Startup Investor Pitch Deck: 3 Essential Links
One of the highlights of being an entrepreneur is telling people about the amazing startup you've built — whether to attract investors, users, or prospective hires. It's a highlight as well as possibly the most nerve-wracking moment of an entrepreneur's life: that moment when you're before an audience, alone with your pitch deck, trying to communicate why they should care enough to invest their time or money in your company. The art of creating your startup's pitch deck is one that has wrought a thousand and one blog posts. There is a lot of advice out there, given out by angel investors and successful startup CEOs alike. You can even access a host of decks written with startups in mind on Slideshare. Having combed through a myriad of resources, we've concluded that these three links below are absolutely essential to crafting and polishing your startup's pitch deck. Ignore them at your own peril. 1. Reid Hoffman & LinkedIn's Successful Series B pitch to Greylock A decade after it was presented in 2004, this deck is still essential. It's an amazing resource, showing each slide along with accompanying insight from Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn's co-founder (and current investor at Greylock Partners). Hoffman offers advice on how entrepreneurs should approach the pitch process, while providing context for the tech climate of 2004. Best Tips: Open with your investment thesis: what prospective investors must believe in order to want to invest in your company. Steer toward objections. There will be a few issues that could present problems for your financing — address them head on. 2. Guy Kawasaki's Pitch Deck Template Pitch Deck Template by Guy Kawasaki from Quintin Adamis Back in 2012, author, noted entrepreneur, and chief evangelist Guy Kawasaki posted an alternative pitch deck template on his blog. You can download the full PowerPoint here. He discusses the pitch deck formula in depth within the post, giving pointers that he says no investor will actually tell you, because it's always easier for them to smile and say, "That's interesting." Best Tips: When it comes to PowerPoint pitches for your company, think "Hot Or Not", not eHarmony. Your investors decide if your company is “hot or not” in a matter of seconds. According to Kawasaki, the best-case outcome of a pitch is not a request for money wiring instructions. There is a more important goal: rising above the noise and avoiding elimination. You want to “live another day” and get to the next stage: due diligence. 3. Crowdfunder's Investor Pitch Deck Template Over on Forbes, Chance Barnett, CEO of Crowdfunder.com, contributes a downloadable PowerPoint deck template that distills the investor pitch formula down to 11 core slides every deck needs in order to get its point across clearly. Barnett's pitch deck formula is based on his extensive experience raising money for his own ventures, as well as looking at over 10,000 pitch decks on Crowdfunder. You can download his Investor Pitch Deck Template (PPT) here. Best Tips: Including too much information in your initial pitch can be counterproductive. You want to leave some questions unanswered, hit the big points in a clear way, and avoid over-sharing. Put key numbers and traction at the very beginning. This grabs attention and clarifies the market opportunity, especially if the numbers are good. What other pitch deck advice do you have? Do you have suggestions of pitch decks that should join this list? Hit the comments and show us the light.
Long Distance Leadership: Successfully Scaling a Remote Team to 50+ Employees
Nic Bryson is the Senior Director of Customer Support at Wrike. Since joining the company in 2009, he’s grown Customer Support from just one person to a remote team of 50+ members, spread across the globe. In the past 10 years, remote work has grown by 103% in the US alone. Fueled by increased worker satisfaction, greater productivity, and an average cost savings of over $11,000 per worker each year, the growing trend of remote work shows no signs of slowing. The ability to effectively manage a remote team is now a must-have skill, especially for small business and startup teams who need to take advantage of the global talent pool and freelance workforce in order to find workers with the skills they need, on terms they can afford. While the benefits of remote teamwork are compelling, it’s not without challenges—particularly for managers and project leaders. Communication, tracking progress and priorities, and managing resources are all made more difficult by distance, in addition to logistics like time zones and language or culture barriers. Even with the right tools and processes in place to make day-to-day work easier with remote teams, a larger challenge presents itself: that of scaling your team alongside your growing business. How do you successfully train new team members and cultivate a thriving remote team culture? And how do you provide your team with professional development and growth opportunities, when you may only meet face-to-face a few times each year? Here at Wrike, we’ve faced these questions head on with our own Customer Support Team, led by Nic Bryson. Over the last 8 years, he's grown the team from just himself to a group of over 50 people, spread across North & South America and Europe. From onboarding new members to developing and promoting new Support Team leaders, Nic has experienced firsthand the growing pains of scaling a remote team, and shares some of the vital lessons he's learned along the way. Essential Tips for Hiring Remote Workers Not everyone has a temperament that’s suited for remote work. Many telecommuters grapple with isolation, the pressure to be always on, and establishing a healthy work/life balance. That’s why it’s so important to go beyond technical skills and knowledge to consider whether a candidate’s personality is compatible with remote work. When you’re evaluating a potential new hire, what qualities should you look for? According to Nic Bryson, Senior Director of Customer Support here at Wrike, the key is to find someone who’s proactive: who will both seek out the answers to their technical questions, and put in the extra effort to connect with their teammates. In the support world, that means someone who isn’t just waiting for a new ticket to appear, but looking for ways to improve processes and projects. As a manager, this requires you to look deeper than the sheer number of tickets cleared or tasks completed, but the quality of work and willingness to go the extra mile. Who’s not only answering the customer’s question, but also providing them with related resources, or taking the time to follow up a few days later? Who’s considering how the work gets done, and looking for ways to make things more efficient or effective? The other important question to consider: is the candidate a people person? It may seem counter-intuitive that extroverts would pursue a remote position where they likely won’t interact with other people face-to-face, but Bryson says that drive to connect with others is essential. These are the kinds of people who will go out of their way to interact with their colleagues, whether via chat apps or video calls, and contribute to a successful remote team culture. Onboarding Strategies to Keep Remote Workers Engaged from the Start Remote team members can’t simply stop by your office or lean over to a colleague in the next cubicle to ask a quick question, so opportunities to see how other people work and learn through observation are limited. Casual office chats or lunch conversations with colleagues from other departments don’t happen naturally like they can in an office environment, which can limit a new team member’s understanding of how the company functions as a whole. That’s why thorough training is a must when onboarding new team members. Remote managers must make the extra effort to be available to their teams, answering questions, offering ongoing support, and providing the training resources and context that enables cross-department collaboration. Bryson says, “It’s just as important for people to know what they don’t know—and also understand that they’re not expected to know everything. There are no bad questions, and people should always feel comfortable asking for help. They need to be able to self-serve, or know who the best person is to answer their question.” Make sure your remote team has access to ongoing training and is always encouraged to ask questions, regardless of how long they’ve been with your company. "Servant Leadership" and Building a Strong Remote Team Culture Establishing a vibrant company culture is difficult enough when your team shares an office. When you’re communicating via laptop, it’s that much more challenging to cultivate close working relationships and a collaborative atmosphere. And as your team grows, that challenge grows with it. When Wrike’s support team was only a handful of people, new members spent enough one-on-one time training with their colleagues that relationships formed naturally. As the team began to grow, however, Bryson says he made a point to establish a servant leadership mentality. People were promoted to management positions not only based on their job performance, but their willingness to support their teammates. Now, the leadership team consists of people who look for opportunities to help their direct reports and provide them with the resources and mentorship they need to excel in their roles and grow their careers. Tools like Slack allow the team to be in constant contact throughout the day, discussing everything from work-related issues to personal news and pop culture. People are encouraged to be open about any challenges they’re facing and to ask questions. Bryson says this openness helps them resolve process problems, which are more difficult to uncover and diagnose as a remote team where visibility is limited, and people can be more hesitant to admit that they’re struggling with an aspect of their work. The team also relies on Zoom for team meetings, which allows for up to 25 webcams. Bryson says having everyone turn their webcams on during meetings makes a big difference, letting the team get in as much face time as possible. “If someone doesn’t have their webcam on, their teammates will make a point to say ‘hey, we want to see you!’ It’s not just me talking to a black screen,” he says. It's important to remember that it's not just the frequency of communication, it's also the quality. When your team is reading your messages via email, chat, or the comments section of your work management software, important cues like tone of voice and physical expressions are lost. And when you add in language and cultural differences, those nuances are even more difficult to translate. Even common sayings that are second nature to you can be easily misunderstood by remote colleagues who aren’t viewing the message with the same cultural lens. Bryson recalls, “Early on there was a customer communication with a support team rep, where at one point the customer said, “You guys are killing it!” And the support person replied with something like, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that”—they thought they’d done a bad job—and it was just one of those instances where you realize how fast idioms and cultural context comes into play. And you have to make sure your team understands what’s meant by those slang phrases that they might not be familiar with.” As workspaces become more and more informal, the use of emojis and gifs can help make up for some of the context cues and make communicating with your remote team that much easier (and more fun!) Meeting the Challenge of Leadership & Career Development on a Remote Team While offering advice and guidance to your team is tricky when you don’t get a lot of face time, providing opportunities for career development is essential to keeping talented team members around for the long haul. If you want remote employees to grow with your company, supporting career development is a must. For Bryson, this is why weekly one-on-ones are so important. In a culture of constant communication, sometimes one-on-ones can seem redundant. Since Support Team managers are always available in Slack, questions get answered right away and conversations are ongoing. As Bryson explains, “Sometimes there’s this sense of, we’re already talking all the time, so what’s the point of having a separate one-on-one? It comes down to a distinction between training and development.” Training is what the person needs to know to do their job. That’s what’s being offered during Slack conversations and team meetings. It’s where managers communicate the specifics of, “This is what you need to do and how to do it.” The one-on-one is where the team member gets to say, “This is what I want to be doing.” The weekly one-on-one makes career development a priority, giving team members dedicated time to talk about their own goals and professional growth. Plus, it gives managers an opportunity to delegate responsibilities and provide their team members with opportunities to build new skills. How the Most Successful Remote Teams Work Together As more organizations embrace new ways of working, managers will have to do away with the misconception that remote teams only work when they stay small. Teams that embrace structure, transparency, and a culture of knowledge sharing can—and do!—scale just as efficiently as co-located teams. How Wrike can scale your remote work processes Want to utilize Nic's advice and empower your teams to do their best work, regardless of where they are in the world? Wrike's flexible work management platform allows teams to keep track of projects, communicate seamlessly, and collaborate in real-time, all on one platform. Find out more here.
How Buffer is Redefining Company Benefits (Work Management Roundup)
Welcome back to the weekly Work Management Roundup where we share the latest, greatest reads from the web regarding work and productivity. This week we find Buffer doing something innovative regarding worker compensation, we learn more about Uber's recent rebrand, and we discover a reason some people hate open office layouts: germs. Read on for the good stuff! Why We Support Teammates with Dependents (and Why it’s No Longer Part of our Salary Formula) (Medium): Buffer started out paying teammates more money if they have dependents or family members who rely upon their income. But after receiving feedback, they've instead created a new "dependents grant" as a part of their benefits package. How's that for a perk? Seven Strategies For Managing Remote Tech Talent (Forbes): Seven members of the Forbes Technology Council share their best advice for getting the most out of your remote team. Tip: get the right tools and have the right processes in place. Is Your Open Office Making You Sick? (Motherboard): Sure, open offices are not always ideal for quiet productivity, but are they also inadvertently harming our health? According to a few published studies, yes! They're associated with employees getting sick more often. The Inside Story of Uber’s Radical Rebranding (Wired): It's the story that's all over this week's news in the Silicon Valley. Uber's CEO personally took it upon himself to rebrand their logo and portray the evolution of both the founder and the company. The big question that remains: does the logo communicate the brand? 7 Pieces of Wisdom That Will Change the Way You Work (99U): Here's a great piece — seven gems of wisdom regarding work from such luminaries as Kurt Vonnegut, Martha Graham, and Steven Pressfield. More Work Management Reads Think About This: Ask the Market Experts: How Do You Stay Productive and Mindful? (Business.com) 26 Blogging Mistakes That Are Costing You Time, Money, and Credibility (ProBlogger) The Biggest Wastes of Time We Regret When We Get Older (LifeHacker) Siri, Alexa, and Other Virtual Assistants Put to the Test (The New York Times) Go Try This: The Power of Power Naps: Salvador Dalí Teaches You How Micro-Naps Can Give You Creative Inspiration (Open Culture) Running a Remote Blog Network? Streamline Your Processes With Wrike (Blogging Pro) Browse Productivity Works on Flipboard If you use Flipboard on your laptop or mobile to keep up with news, then you may enjoy our magazine full of productivity advice. Check out Productivity Works, or click on the widget below: View my Flipboard Magazine.
How 5 Famous Startups Got Funding
You’ve been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. You're dreaming about launching your own startup, bringing your ideas to life, and surrounding yourself with a team of people all working to build something great. Suddenly your wallet gives you a wakeup call: where are you going to get the money? Unless you win the lottery or know some impressive counterfeiting techniques, you’re going to need to raise a decent amount of cash. There are a bunch of different ways to finance your startup, and we’ve got the scoop on 5 tech giants that each pursued a different funding strategy on their way to becoming household names. 1. Bootstrapping GoPro “I moved back in with my parents and went to work seven days a week, 20 hours a day.” —Nicholas Woodman In 2002, a surfing trip to Australia got Nicholas Woodman thinking: how great would it be to have a camera that could capture his POV as he caught a wave? He took $265,000, scrounged up from personal savings and borrowed from his parents, to develop his camera. Woodman took early products to trade shows, growing GoPro slowly until the company started to generate its own revenue. A fervent proponent of bootstrapping, Woodman held out as long as he could before taking on outside funding. It wasn’t until 2011 that GoPro accepted $88 million in outside investments from five venture capital firms. At its IPO in 2014, the company was valued at $2.95 billion. 2. Charging Google to AmEx "We had to use all of our credit cards and our friends' credit cards and our parents' credit cards....” —Larry Page Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as Stanford University graduate students, later collaborating on a search engine project. Committed to their studies, they ran the program out of their dorm rooms while pursuing their degrees. But by 1998, Google was getting 10,000 searches a day, and the pair decided their project had a real future. They maxed out $15,000 worth of credit cards to buy a terabyte of disk space and drafted a business plan. Page and Brin later went on to raise $100,000 in seed money from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and fellow Stanford alum. At its IPO in 2004, Google was valued at $26.4 billion. 3. Building Apple on 30-Day Credit “It was unbelievable — we were in business. All of a sudden we needed about $20,000 to buy parts.” —Steve Wozniak After partnering with Steve Wozniak to build a personal computer, Steve Jobs approached a local computer store and agreed to sell them fully-assembled computers for $500 each, payment on delivery. The only problem was, the duo didn't have the money to buy the parts they needed. So Jobs took the computer shop’s purchase order to an electronic parts distributor and worked out a deal: if he could get the parts in advance and pay 30 days later, he would build and deliver the computers within that month. Then he'd use the earnings from the computer shop to pay what they owed for the parts. After calling the computer shop to verify the purchase order, the parts distributor agreed. Working round-the-clock, Wozniak and Jobs delivered the computers, paid their supplier, and used leftover profits for their next order of parts. At its IPO in 1980, Apple was valued at $1.7 billion. 4. Fueling Facebook with Angel Investments "I literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month.” —Mark Zuckerberg After launching Facebook from their Harvard dorm rooms in February 2004, Mark Zuckerberg and partner Eduardo Saverin covered operations costs out of their own pockets, along with running a few ads. Later that summer, Zuckerberg met with Peter Thiel, president of Clarium Capital. Thiel was impressed with Zuckerberg’s vision and made a $500,000 angel investment in exchange for a 10.2% stake in Facebook. A year later, Thiel and Accel Partners would go on to invest an additional $12.5 million as Facebook continued to grow past 5 million users. At its IPO in 2012, Facebook was valued at $104 billion. 5. Crowdfunding Pebble Smartwatch “[Paul Graham] was like, 'You guys need to do something wild. What could you do that's wild?’ I thought for a moment and said, 'We could go on Kickstarter.'" —Eric Migicovsky By the end of 2011, Eric Migicovsky had a prototype for a smartwatch and $375,000 in angel investments. It was enough to keep his company afloat for a little longer, but not enough to fund a full production run. When he and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham started brainstorming fundraising options, Migicovsky mentioned Kickstarter. He’d backed a few projects before and thought it might help raise some extra money. Migicovsky studied successful projects, created his campaign page, and set his fundraising goal for $100,000. In the first day alone, backers pledged $600,000, and Migicovsky’s Pebble Watch went on to raise over $10 million from 68,929 backers. Are you ready to fund your startup? Which option would you pick? Check out our 7 Ways to Fund Your Startup Infographic and add your own page to the history books!
Reflections on a Year of Building: A Message from CEO Andrew Filev
We’re now a month into 2016, and I wanted to share a few reflections on our progress as a company from the last year. It’s been a really busy and exciting time, and it’s always refreshing to pause and look back. Since most of you don’t know a lot about me, let me say that first and foremost, my passion is building. That’s why I have so much fun running Wrike as a SaaS business: every day we are both building and delivering a great product, and seeing the results of that product for our customers. It’s one of the reasons that 2015 was such an exciting year. Building the Platform for Everyone Our goal when we design and build software is to create a flexible platform that fits different industries and types of work, so that all our users can quickly adapt Wrike to their needs. That means that a major focus for us last year was the Dynamic Platform — a set of tools that allows you to customize workflows, data containers, and reporting. The first piece of this puzzle was the addition of Custom Fields in late 2014. In early 2015, we followed up with Workflows. Since that release, you’ve created thousands of unique workflows for managing projects and tasks, and used these to get faster visibility than ever before. We further enhanced the Dynamic Platform by releasing Wrike Reports in September. This filled a need for accurate, real-time status reporting that is both easy to produce and simple to consume. So far, we've gotten great feedback on Reports, including success stories, and some thoughtful suggestions for future iterations. We're always grateful for the feedback, and are excited for updates coming to reports in 2016. In 2015 we also built powerful integrations for teams that use Salesforce.com and Microsoft Office to help workers sync through the apps they use every day. This is a vital part of eliminating duplicate work and helping companies achieve optimal visibility. We’ve also doubled down on our mobile efforts by adding several new developers, and released brand new native apps for both iOS and Android. On our team, we’ve added key executives who join us from companies like Google, Microsoft, and LinkedIn. And with the opening of a new office in Dublin, we have added over 100 new Wrikers globally. I’m very thankful for all the talented people who have joined us, and it’s a joy to work with them every day. Exciting Times for Work Management As far as our industry goes, we are in exciting times. The world is going through a transformation in which companies are using digital as a source of innovation, and real-time data is key to finding and exploiting new business opportunities. Knowledge workers need to be as connected to their teams as they are to their devices. The world is beyond the point where Work Management is a convenient addition to your IT stack — it’s now a must-have. And more so than ever, businesses need to consider the cost of being the last company in their field to invest in visibility and collaboration. This isn’t just our bet. In 2015 we raised more investments from Bain Capital Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and DCM Ventures, all of whom are ready for this market to become mainstream. These investments have allowed us to increase our velocity in delivering a leading product, and our users should expect to see their effects even more in 2016. Personally, I want to close by thanking everyone who has helped us get to this point, both our gifted staff members, and especially our customers. The letters I get from our Wrike users are truly inspiring, and our whole company feels a lot of love every day from all of you, around the world. I’m very excited for another year of learning and building. Thank You!
"Be Innovative, Yet Familiar" – the topic of my presentation at the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo SF
What we are facing today is that people, who made Facebook and Twitter an integral part of their personal life, are still often reluctant to use Web 2.0 tools at work. My presentation will explain how vendors should approach Web 2.0 solutions, so that business users can quickly adopt them from day one. The point of focus there is recognizing the existing user behaviors and fitting into their current workflows. There are many examples in the industry where this worked well, and there are also examples where great ideas that didn’t follow this simple rule stumbled along the way. We’ve followed this approach at Wrike, our project management software, and it proved to be very effective, so I wanted to share it with my peers. Wrike is now used by thousands of corporate and SMB teams worldwide. We took on a very complex problem (everyone who tried to implement Microsoft Project Server in their organization knows what I’m talking about) and came up with an elegant solution that people love and instantly adopt. A big part of it was relying on existing behaviors, like sending e-mail, which is the backbone of the majority of online project communications today. So we zealously focused on closing the gap between e-mail and project management. During my presentation, I plan to share how this was done and other examples of making an app that’s comfortable to use, instead of trying to revolutionize people’s working experience in one big leap. As you probably know, Web 2.0 Expo is the biggest industry event that showcases the latest Web 2.0 business models, development paradigms, products and design strategies for the creators of the next-generation Web. This is where industry leaders share new ideas, experiences, case studies, techniques and tactics to reshape reality by means of technology. I hope to see you at the conference. Are there any particular questions you think I should cover in my talk? Go ahead and post them in the comments.
Dos and Don'ts of the Startup Pitch: Expert Advice from 5 Famous Investors
Entrepreneurs are generally confident people, and yet most confess to experiencing tremendous anxiety when it comes to pitching investors. Standing in front of a group of people who can make or break your company and asking them to invest money in your business is an intimidating prospect. How do you start your deck? How long should you present? What kinds of details do you need to include? How do you make a good impression? Well, who better to give advice than the very people you'll be pitching? These 5 serial entrepreneurs and veteran investors outline what you should and shouldn't do when pitching your business: Chris Sacca, veteran VC DO talk about why you are uniquely qualified to follow through on your business idea. What experience or expertise do you have that gives you an advantage over everyone else? What sets you apart from your competitors? DO instill FOMO: "fear of missing out." Most investors have passed up an opportunity that later went on to be profitable, so make them worry they’ll regret it if they pass you up. DO talk endgame. Investors want to know what your plan is for acquisition, ideally in 3-5 years’ time. Give an example of a company that would consider your business an attractive acquisition. DON'T ramble. Keep your pitch short, simple, and specific. You should have a 2-minute version of your pitch that conveys your basic business model, your "unfair advantage," and an exact funding target. You're not trying to raise "between $1.5 - 2 million." You're raising “$1.8 million.” Brian Cohen, Chairman of The New York Angels DO talk about your financial plan. What's your main revenue stream? Discuss why the problem you've identified is profitable, why your solution is viable, and how you're going to make money. DO discuss the market trends that are driving your product. Investors are curious people and want to stay on top of the latest, so satisfy that curiosity and make a good impression by teaching them something new. DON'T be vague when discussing how the investment will be spent. What are you raising money to do, exactly? And why now? Chance Barnett, CEO of Crowdfunder DO find someone in your network who can introduce you to investors (ideally someone with a strong reputation). Send whomever you’re asking to make the introduction a short email blurb with suggested language and a link to your online profile, so they can easily forward it along. DON'T present a series of bullet points. Tell a story instead. Barnett advises all pitches follow this general format: “There is a huge opportunity to do X as a giant business. We’ve cracked the code, and this is how my company is doing it and will dominate this market. Here’s who myself and my team are, and why we’re the only people to back in this space. It’s working, and now we need money for X and Y to grow.” Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist DO research the investors you're pitching. What businesses have they backed in the past? If you know what they’re interested in, you can tailor your presentation to give them the info they want. DO remember it’s more important for the right people to say yes than for everyone to say yes. Investors can offer more than just money — they can be valuable advisors too. So pay attention to potential investors who are asking interesting questions and are excited about your product, market, and the problem you’re trying to solve. DO show, don’t tell. Instead of saying you understand your customers needs, provide quotes from credible customers. Avoid superfluous adjectives and adverbs like “very.” Hoffman says these words act like a poker tell, signifying points you’re most nervous or unsure about, and that he's more likely to ask probing questions about those key points. So be specific and straightforward. DON’T shy away from areas that are problematic or risky to your business. Just because you don’t address them, doesn’t mean investors won’t see them. And by showing you've already identified and understand potential concerns, you’re building confidence instead of instilling doubt. DON'T end with a generic "Q&A" slide. End with your most important slide, something that you want on screen while you’re answering questions that will linger in investors minds long after the meeting’s over. David Rose, serial entrepreneur & angel investor DO keep it short. Angel pitches should be 15 mins; VC meetings less than half an hour. DO show your integrity, passion, and conviction to succeed no matter what. Investors are backing YOU first and foremost. DO prepare a handout with more detailed information on your business. Just remember: your presentation is not your handout. Your handout should stand alone without you, and give investors the chance to deep dive into what you’ve presented. DON’T read your speech or stare at the screen. You’re trying to connect with investors, not your PowerPoint slides. So make eye contact, pay attention to your body language, and follow good presentation practices. Are you ready for your pitch? Follow these tips to ace your pitch and impress investors. And remember, VCs and angels aren't the only source of startup funding. Check out this infographic for 5 other ways to raise money for your business. Sources: Ted.com, ReidHoffman.org, Forbes.com, Business News Daily, This American Life
18 Top Networking Sites for Startup Founders (Infographic)
If you're founding a startup, networking isn’t optional. It’s your lifeline. Entrepreneurs need support from all sorts of people — partners, investors, customers and employees — but most importantly, they need to tap into great communities to make those connections in the first place. We found 18 thriving networking sites especially for entrepreneurs to help you find advice, capital, co-founders, or just have some fun! Find the best sites for you in our latest infographic: Share this infographic on your site with this embed code: Wrike Project Management Software Read Next: • The Ultimate List of Legal Resources for Startups • 7 Ways to Fund Your Startup (Infographic) • Top 10 Reasons Startups Fail (Infographic)
How to Build the Perfect Team: Q&A with Award-Winning Author & Business Coach Nancy Butler
There's no magic wand you can wave that will transform your team into the Avengers. However, there are qualities that you can see and others you should avoid when building your new team. We spoke with Above All Else author and business coach Nancy Butler about how to build the right team from the ground up. In this interview, Butler talks about her "Only Touch Things Once" theory, discusses the best ways to train your team, and reveals the biggest obstacles she's faced while building a business. 1. As a business owner or manager, how do you choose the right team? I discovered three things about building a team: first, what are the things I do well, and if I did them all day, would I leave at the end of the day feeling energized? Second, what are the things I do well, but if I did them all day I would leave exhausted and miserable? And third, what are the things I do because I feel I have to, but am not good at and shouldn’t be doing at all? Instead of searching for people that were the same as me, I looked for the opposite. The goal was to get as close as possible to everyone doing the tasks that they really enjoy, they're good at, and make them want to come to work. And although this may not be 100% possible, I was able to get extremely close. I have since sold that business, but last I checked everyone was still working there. Everyone has been employed there at the same small business for over 15 years in an industry that often has high staff turnover. 2. What is your "Only Touch Things Once" idea and how does that help teams work more efficiently? I have a rule that, whenever possible, I only touch things once. Most every business has tasks or projects that are worked on many times throughout the day, month, or year. Whenever there is a repeatable task, there should always be a well documented system in place to enable greater efficiency and effectiveness. Technology can be a great tool to help automate many processes. Figure it out once, document it, and then follow the plan. You do not need to reinvent the wheel every time the same task needs to be completed. Here is an example of how this strategy can be effectively implemented to save both time and money: whenever a client called the office for a service issue the staff would give me a note to call them back. That was extremely inefficient and time-consuming for both the client and me. Instead, a system was put into place; the staff was trained on what to ask the client, and they set a next appointment right then for when someone in the office (which may or may not be me) would be calling them back to address the issue. The staff was also trained on how to research issues that clients may have, and to provide me the documentation needed to handle the issue appropriately before my phone appointment. That way, in one touch, we look over the information and already have a specific time to connect with the client with an answer to their question or to update them on the status of their request. I no longer had to call and call to try to reach the client again, and the client could usually be contacted only once, in a reasonable period of time, with an answer to their issue. "There should be a well-documented system in place to enable efficiency&effectiveness." 3. What do you think about cross-training people vs. having them specialize in one area? Which is better, and how do managers decide? It is important that the success of the business is not reliant on any one person, including the owner. If someone was out sick, away on vacation, quit, or was out for any reason, systems should be in place to enable others in the office to easily step in and see what needs to be done and have the skills to complete it. Cross-training and documenting all systems in an office is imperative not only for the smooth running of the office, but also for your clients. One reason this was so important to me for my former business is that I was managing other people’s money. There was a time when I became very ill, in and out of the hospital many times in six months, including an emergency surgery. If I did not have a qualified, reliable person to step up in my place, what would my clients do? I would also run the risk of losing clients because of my unpredictable circumstance. Since I did have good systems in place, not a beat was missed and everyone was well taken care of — which also took a lot off of my mind, so I could focus on what I needed to do to get well. 4. What was the largest obstacle you faced during the growth of your company, and how did you overcome it? The largest obstacle I had to overcome is one that many small business owners have: when to hire more staff. I knew I had reached a point where I could no longer do it all myself, but I also knew the business wasn’t bringing in enough income to afford hiring staff. I started by bringing on a high school student a few hours a week to do the simpler things like filing and stuffing envelopes. The first time I tried to find a very important paper and couldn’t access it because it had been filed incorrectly, I quickly learned that you get what you pay for. The lesson learned is: do not wait until you can afford staff to hire them. If you hire the right person for the job, they will more than pay for themselves. For me, this meant someone else could do the simpler tasks, allowing me to spend more time doing a better job for my clients and bringing in more money to the business. Once I took the leap of faith and hired the right person at an appropriate level of pay, my business took off very quickly. "If you hire the right person for the job, they will more than pay for themselves." Now Your Turn: What are some qualities you look for when building a team? We'd love for you to share your tips in the comments. About Nancy Butler: Nancy D. Butler, CFP®, CDFA™, CLTC is the owner of “Above All Else, Success in Life and Business”, a national professional motivational speaker, award-winning author, business coach and continuing education instructor. After twenty-five years building a very successful financial planning and asset management practice, to approx. $200 million in assets under management, while a single parent with no other source of income and only $2,000 to her name, in 2007 Nancy sold her practice and now uses her knowledge and experience to help others reach greater levels of success in their personal and business lives. She helps business owners do a better job for their clients and improve their bottom line and helps individuals live more successful, fulfilling lives and realize their dreams. Nancy has been quoted in Money magazine, Forbes, The National Business Institute, The New England Real Estate Journal, The Financial Planning Association magazine, USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, The Day and many more. She has been a speaker for major corporations such as Pfizer, General Dynamics and Dow Chemical. Nancy has been a guest on many radio and television shows and is the author of the book “Above All Else, Success in Life and Business” published in 2012 and “A Realtors Guide to Greater Success, Above and Beyond the Competition” published in 2014.
How Will the Internet of Things Shape the Future of Your Business? (Infographic)
By 2019, the Internet of Things (IoT) industry will be more than double the size of the smartphone, PC, tablet, connected car, and wearable markets—combined. It’s predicted to become the largest device market in the world, adding $1.7 trillion in value to the global economy in the next two years. But what does this up-and-coming industry mean for your organization's future? Internet of Things technologies will lead to a slew of innovations that will have a significant effect on businesses of all sizes and industries, including: Greater efficiency for business operations: Connected devices will enable companies to harness data to improve their efficiency and effectiveness. New business models and revenue streams: New processes will speed up time to market and respond faster to customer needs. Global visibility: Large enterprises will be better able to track effectiveness across multiple locations, provide remote work essentials, and monitor the entire supply chain. Tighter cybersecurity: More data means a greater potential for cybercriminals to steal sensitive business information. Learn more about practical business applications for IoT devices, the concerns organizations have about adopting these new technologies, how major companies like Coca-Cola have deployed IoT, and what the experts have to say about this growing field in the infographic below. Source: Exigent Networks What Does the Future of Work Hold for You? Learn more about the trends and technologies shaping how we’ll work in the years to come. Read our work management survey report to find out what thousands of today's professionals believe are the most important changes coming to the workplace. Why wait? Get better work results today by starting a free trial of Wrike.
The 7 Deadly Sins of Bad Startup Leaders
Threats to your business don't just come from external factors like competitors or changing markets; internal problems like flawed leadership can be just as fatal. Stay away from these 7 deadly traits that keep struggling startup leaders from succeeding. 1. Arrogance Great leaders are humble. It’s easy to hand off less desirable tasks to employees that are “in the trenches," and focus on high-level strategy instead. But by staying humble, rolling up your sleeves, and working alongside your team, you'll stay connected to both your colleagues and your customers. Making genuine relationships with your team makes them more likely to stick with you, something you’ll be especially grateful for when you hit rough patches (and you will). Staying humble means you’ll have help through the down times, and it also means you won't get so cocky during the good times, leaving room for an underdog competitor to surprise you. 2. Stubbornness Don't refuse to pivot in the name of perseverance. If you're captaining a sinking ship, it won't do any good to insist your team keep rowing instead of scanning the horizon for a new port. Keep an open mind, and a strategic move could turn a bleak prognosis into a million-dollar opportunity. After all, YouTube was originally a floundering dating site. 3. Vanity It’s easy to start measuring your success by the wrong metrics: the number of press mentions and interview requests, the size of your new office, or the number of products your logo is printed on. But don't let surface-level shine distract you from digging deeper to focus on what matters, and insist on the same from your team. Lead by example by prioritizing foundational targets like the number of active users, churn rates, revenue growth, etc. 4. Wrath It’s not that great leaders don’t have high expectations or demand a lot from their employees. But you can’t expect your team to do every task exactly as you want it, every single time. Even if they did, mistakes and miscalculations are an inevitable part of human nature. And when those situations pop up, you can’t fly off the handle. So keep your team happy. Yes, your office should be professional, and so should your relationship with your team. But that doesn't mean your workplace should be cold, or that you should act like a drill sergeant. People are more productive when they're in a good mood. Happy people have more energy, creativity and motivation, make fewer mistakes, and work better with others. They fix problems instead of whining about them. A positive work culture built around your team’s happiness is just as essential to profitability as your product. 5. Selfishness Good leaders need a confident sense of self. Independence and self-reliance are admirable traits, so be driven. Pursue your goals without distraction. But listen as often as you speak. Build relationships that will last — with your team, with investors, with customers. Selfish leaders ignore customer needs in pursuit of their own vision and run with their favorite idea without evaluating or asking for feedback. They refuse to accept ideas that aren't their own, reject constructive criticism, and see themselves as lone geniuses. Just remember: you can't do it all by yourself. Even Tony Stark had Pepper Potts and The Avengers. 6. Laziness Planning, launching, and running your own business takes a lot of hard work, and few people would accuse any entrepreneur of being lazy in the traditional sense. Pushing yourself and your team and taking calculated risks is at the heart of the entrepreneurial spirit. But once you've found success, don't get complacent. Even if your product has millions of happy, devoted users and your brand is a household name, you need to keep moving forward or you'll fade into obscurity. (Just ask Blockbuster, Pan Am, or Tower Records.) Always ask yourself, your team, and your customers: "What's next? What can we do better?" 7. Greed Your vision should go beyond making piles of money so big you can swim around in them like Scrooge McDuck. People want their work to mean something. In a study by The Intelligence Group, 64% of respondents said they would rather get paid $40,000 for a job they found meaningful than $100,000 for a job they didn't. So create a tangible vision for the kind of impact you want your company to have, rooted in something meaningful, and keep it at the forefront of everything you do. You'll not only attract top talent that's dedicated to their work, you'll keep them around. What companies are successfully avoiding these deadly sins? Head to the comments and tell us which startup leaders you most admire! And if you're looking for a good read, pick up some more leadership tips in these 15 Books Every Manager Should Read.
Citrix Agrees to Acquire Wrike
I am excited to announce that Wrike has agreed to join the Citrix family to create the next frontier in the digital workplace revolution. This partnership could not happen at a better time, given the market shifts in 2020, the much-anticipated transition to the "Next Normal," and the exponential growth in the demand for work management solutions. Why Citrix? The Citrix mission is to empower people to do their very best work. Wrike’s mission is to help you do the best work of your life. Sound similar? When the missions align, the stars truly align, and there can’t be a better match of the minds. That is why I am extremely thrilled to be embarking upon this journey with Citrix. We are two companies committed to defining the best future for work, and we will make great strides working as one. Better together Being a part of Citrix will enable us to accelerate our mission. Together, Wrike and Citrix will build the workplace of the future to empower employees to achieve their best. Citrix delivers a frictionless experience for employees through unified, secure access to work resources. Wrike brings teams, data, and applications together in a digital platform. By combining the power of a unified workspace infrastructure and collaborative work management, organizations can accelerate business results by enabling employees to focus on the work that matters the most. A market shift 2020 has permanently changed the way we work, and the office as we know it will never be the same. With large-scale remote working and the shift to digital, organizations are facing the pressure to keep employees productive and engaged. This has led to quantum leaps in digital transformation initiatives. Further, organizations are concerned with employee burnout and digital fatigue. To succeed in this environment it is critical to enable employees with the tools they need to be productive wherever they are and whatever the context. We will bring more than a decade of innovation in this space to help the industry ease into the next normal. Unified workspace infrastructure + CWM = The workplace of the future With pioneer investments in AI technologies by Wrike, this is a marriage of innovative leadership that delivers the vision of intelligence and automation needed to build the workplace of the future. Over the last several years both companies have innovated feverishly to drive digital innovation. A leader in multiple categories of workplace technologies, Citrix offers end-to-end offerings to enable and empower the modern workforce. By joining hands with Wrike, Citrix will now be able to offer a complete solution that optimizes productivity across all aspects of work. Win-win for our customers As we step forward in this new phase of our journey I am extremely grateful to our customers who have helped us get here and supported us all along. This is exciting news for our customers for many reasons. First, as part of the Citrix family, we will be able to scale our product and accelerate our roadmap to deliver capabilities that will help our customers get more from their Wrike investment. We have always listened to our customers and have built our product based on their feedback - now we will be able to do more of that, faster. Second, we will now be able to empower and partner with IT departments by enabling cross-functional workflows, connecting with the systems across the organization and becoming the single digital workspace. Wrike has established a strong customer base with business users, and Citrix has built deep relationships with IT customers, enabling us to bring two ecosystems together. As the market moves toward the connected enterprise, the time is ripe for a partnership like this to enable the vision for hybrid workspace. The joint solution brings incredible value to both business users and their IT departments that support this new hybrid ecosystem. The path forward This partnership also brings exciting possibilities for the market at large. More than a decade ago, we saw a huge opportunity in the Project Management space. We wanted to take an innovation that was largely restricted to a few mature practitioners within the organization, and unlock its potential for every single employee whether they were technical or business users. In this endeavor, we created the Collaborative Work Management category that changed the face of work for all types of users across every department and use case. Last year, as we navigated our customers through the transition to remote work, Wrike became the core part or digital workplace. As one of our customers very eloquently put it, “Wrike is our new office.” Now we are seeing an even more powerful opportunity to take the enterprise to the next level by connecting and automating workflows to create an intelligent digital workspace. This next step in our journey is a very promising one for the entire Wrike ecosystem, one made possible through the commitment of our employees, the support of our customers, and the conviction of our investors. We are proud of the advancements made in collaboration with our most recent investor, Vista Equity Partners, who enabled us to accelerate our growth and innovation to advance Wrike’s mission and prepare us for this new chapter. Now, by partnering with Citrix, we want to expand the value of collaborative work management from thousands of organizations to hundreds of thousands. Today, CEOs, CIOs, CMOs, and CHROs are grappling with the second wave of transitions coming up in 2021, and I hear a lot about the hybrid workspace. 2020 was not easy but helped us validate that collaborative work management is indeed the backbone of the future of work, whether that’s in-office, remote, or a mix of the two. As we embark into 2021, we are ready to help the market navigate this next transition and unlock the workspace of the future to hundreds of millions of users. Looking forward to the next wave of innovations as part of the Citrix family.
12 OKR Tips from Google, LinkedIn, Twitter & Intel
Everybody sets goals. But success hinges on the ability to execute them. The OKR planning method is all about distilling your goals, focusing on the most important ones, and then following through. OKRs were first developed in the 1970s at Intel by then-president Andy Grove, who wanted to answer two questions: Where do we want to go, and how will we know we're actually getting there? His colleague John Doerr learned the method and later spread it to Google and other top Silicon Valley companies. If you've learned the details of OKRs but aren't sure how best to implement them at your own company, check out these 12 tips from top execs on adopting OKRs successfully. John Doerr, VC at Kleiner Perkins & former Intel salesperson Tip 1. Be patient. You probably won't perfectly nail the OKR process the first time you try it. There’s usually a trial-and-error period, so don't be surprised (or discouraged) if it takes your company a couple of quarters to really figure it out, or if the process doesn't pan out exactly the way you expected. Tip 2: Find an OKR champion. Identify someone (ideally someone in leadership) who’s 100% supportive of OKRs and fully understands them, and enlist them to help educate the rest of the team. They can assist with tracking and grading progress and help fine-tune the process. Tip 3: Go all in. OKRs need to become part of your company culture and DNA. New employees should be trained in the process, all OKRs should be public, and grade and progress reporting should be prioritized. That’s how the process becomes successful and sustainable. Tip 4: No dictators. There must be consensus on collective team and company OKRs, so that they're supported across the entire organization. Tip 5: Ideas should flow up as well as down. Although every team member should link their goals to corporate objectives, corporate goals should also be inclusive of ideas created at the individual level. This keeps senior leadership in tune with the organization, and it gives individuals ownership over what they'll be working on day in and day out. Rick Klau, Partner at Google Ventures Tip 6: Get everyone on board. Everyone. A half-hearted effort will fall flat and is a waste of time, so make OKRs a commitment company-wide. Leadership in particular needs to make it clear that OKRs matter. Check out this email from a Google product manager calling out his team members who hadn't yet posted OKR grades: Tip 7: Find tools that support visibility. Decide what you'll use to capture OKRs and how they’ll be shared — whether it's Google docs, internal Wikis, or another collaboration tool. If you're a Wrike user, take a look at this how-to guide for using OKRs in Wrike. Tip 8: Keep the process lightweight. Don’t weigh it down with heavy documentation or a tedious series of unnecessary meetings. You should be doing the work, not talking about doing the work. Tip 9: Always check the big picture. Draft your personal/team OKRs, then check them against company OKRs to make sure it’s all contributing to high-level objectives. Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn CEO Tip 10: Use OKRs to make your mission actionable. Too often a company’s mission is vague, or just a banner taped to the wall. Use OKRs to make your mission real, feeding your company's culture and sense of purpose. Link your objectives directly to your company mission, where the means are clearly defined as key results. It will keep the entire company unified and moving in the right direction. Tip 11: Show individuals that they matter. Effective leaders show how each person in the company can make a real difference when it comes to achieving high-level goals — every day and every quarter. So when you meet to define individual OKRs, make sure they support important company objectives in a tangible way to keep every employee engaged and motivated. Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO Tip 12: Prioritize communication. Remember that OKRs aren't just a way to measure progress: more importantly, they're a communication vehicle that shows other teams what you’re working on and what you’re trying to accomplish. Make sure teams are looking at each other’s OKRs and talking about them in order to encourage collaboration. Want to learn more about OKRs? If you're curious about using OKRs in your company, take a look at this Slideshare for an outline of the entire process: Related Reads:If You're Not Using OKRs for Quarterly Planning, Stop and Read ThisHow to Use OKRs in Wrike: A 6-Step Guide + Templates5 Tips for Better Annual Planning Sources: http://blog.betterworks.com/keys-okr-success-qa-john-doerr/; http://pando.com/2013/12/06/what-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-learned-at-google/; http://firstround.com/article/the-management-framework-that-propelled-LinkedIn-to-a-20-billion-company; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJB83EZtAjc
The Four Disciplines That Propel Companies Forward
The Wrike Way is a tried and true methodology built from the insights we’ve discovered partnering with thousands of industry leading companies. Here’s a breakdown of the four disciplines of the Wrike Way along with best practices your team can start implementing today:
