Congratulations. You’re the CEO of a startup. You’re doing the hardest job in business. You’ve raised money from venture capitalists and turned down better-paying jobs elsewhere. You’ve mastered complicated things such as capitalization tables and common things, such as payroll. You’ve fought with competitors, coworkers, friends and even yourself without losing your way or your wits. You’ve inspired others to work beside you each day to make your dream a reality. I salute you.

Now, everybody else calling himself or herself a CEO—listen up, this is for you: stop it. Just stop calling yourself a CEO.

Stop putting “CEO” on the business cards you printed last week at Moo.com for YourLastName Consulting LLC. Take it off your LinkedIn page. Remove it from the résumé you’re passing around in hopes of getting hired. Self-titling as CEO is an atonal homage to structurally mandated social hierarchies, not a statement of your iconoclastic self-determination.

Maybe it’s generational. Steve Jobs’ early business card read: “Vice President, New Product Development,” in part because he recognized he didn’t have the skills to run the company he wanted to build. At least not yet. Bill Gates went with the classic and somewhat understated “President.” But today’s tech titans have opted for something much more conspicuous. If you were one of the folks to get an early Mark Zuckerberg card, you may remember the supercilious line: “I’m CEO, Bitch.” Way to stay classy, Zuck.

Facebook aside, title inflation is bad for business. Calling yourself the CEO will label you as either an egoist or someone with confidence compensation issues. That will make people less willing to work with you or help you. Taking the top title in a company also suggests a limited vision of what your company can become. Ask yourself: would you still be CEO if it were a $100 billion business or would you require what’s euphemistically called “adult supervision?”

So stop pretending to have attained a title you didn’t earn and start doing what you need to do to get to where you want to be. Here’s how:

Attract Awesome People

Jobs had Wozniak and later, Markkula. Clark had Andreessen. McNeally had Bechtolsheim, Joy and Khosla. A remarkable CEO should be like the moon, illuminated by the reflected light of all the stars he or she has brought into orbit. Awesome people act as accelerants to whatever you’re doing. They push ideas forward, execute with aplomb and challenge you to new heights.

If you can hire, hire. If you can’t hire, bring them into your orbit as advisors, friends and fellow travelers. Get them to invest their creativity and energy.

To get the true benefits of awesome people, focus on diversity. You want to have as many different perspectives on a problem as you possibly can, so bring on the best people from as wide array of backgrounds and from different generations. They’ll learn from each other and the confluence of their experiences will be the basis of company creativity for years to come.

Most importantly, attracting awesome people to your company precludes retreat. You carry too valuable a cargo of energy and confidence invested by others to turn back.

Build an Experience, Not a Product

Eric Ries has put the concept of the minimally viable product (MVP) front and center in the minds of Silicon Valley startups. But this focus is somewhat misguided. Products give you utility and then may be discarded. Products are the one-night stands of business. Experiences give you memories and good experiences will bring you back for more, it engenders a long-term relationship. The best CEOs know this instinctively and do all that they can to create and cultivate an attractive experience for their customers.

Once you’ve got a good experience, cement it with the bond of buying. A funny thing happens when people buy your product: they invest their energy into the choice and will find reasons to justify their action. In the early days of Apple, customers loved their computers because they had to pay a boatload of money for them. They found aspects of the experience they could rave about just to justify their purchase to others.

That price tag is valuable to you too. It focuses the mind tremendously and forces you to deliver a unique and memorable experience of real value. When you offer a product for free, you aren’t forced to justify your existence to customers or show a useful benefit. That’s why we see half a dozen Instagram clones.

A CEO doesn’t market a product to users. A CEO sells an experience to customers.

Learn Finance

If you wanted to be a rock star, you’d have to learn to read music and if you wanted to be an award-winning novelist, you’d have to learn basic grammar. It should not come as a surprise that if you want to be the CEO of a business you should learn finance. Yet we regularly see founders blowing off finance or outsourcing major financial decisions to hired guns.

There’s no secret to learning finance. There are plenty of good books that can take you through the basics of accounting up to the execution of liquidity preferences under preferred stock agreements. Interview friends that have run their own companies, worked in banking or had P&L experience for a division in a larger company. Start using QuickBooks. Today it’s easy to find help online from corporate finance communities such as Proformative.

For startups, there’s one important financial metric that matters more than any other: months left to live given your current burn rate. Real CEOs know this number and manage it religiously.

Define a Big Goal and Take Small Steps

Plenty of wannabe Silicon Valley CEOs have read Jim Collins and will tell you about their BHAG (That’s their Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal). They’ll tell you that they want to revolutionize the datacenter, or change the face of mobile payments, or create a new paradigm for social sharing, or something equally nebulous. That’s great. But it’s the ability to both set that goal and show how you’re going to achieve it that marks a real CEO.

Successful CEOs balance aspirations with operations. They focus on things that can be done today to secure customers and growth over time—not on the title they put on their business cards.

Editor’s note: Alexander Haislip is a marketing executive with cloud-based server automation startup ScaleXtreme and the author of Essentials of Venture Capital. Follow him on Twitter @ahaislip.

via TechCrunch

SolarCity, the cleantech company backed by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, filed for an IPO this past week. But there’s hardly been a peep about it compared to most offerings.

That’s because under the recently passed JOBS Act, SolarCity didn’t have to publicly share anything about its financial performance when it filed. This is unlike LinkedIn and Pandora, which had to publicly release three years of data in filings that were more than 150 pages long. In SolarCity’s case, the company merely put out a two-paragraph statement saying that it had confidentially filed with the SEC and planned to have an IPO.

This is the new world under the JOBS Act, which was hastily passed last month. SolarCity qualifies as an “emerging growth” company, or one that’s had less than $1 billion in total revenues in the most recent year. If SolarCity does move forward with an IPO, it won’t have to release data to the public until 21 days before the investor roadshow. On top of that, those documents won’t have to meet the same auditing requirements that more mature publicly-held companies have to address. It will also only have to show two years of data, instead of three.

At least two other CEOs I’ve talked to who run later-stage companies and are planning to file in the next three to 12 months say they would consider it. But they’re leaning toward the old route because they’re concerned about how investors will perceive confidential filings. (The SEC FAQ on confidential filings is here.)

Are the changes good? Are they bad? Honestly, it’s hard to say because regulation usually has long-term ripple effects that are hard to see without hindsight.

So let’s consider. The JOBS Act was really a mix of several ideas: crowdfunding, loosening the 500-shareholder rule and the relaxing some of the post-Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley rules that made it expensive for smaller companies to go public.

It gives companies more flexibility in staying private or going public. On the one hand, it’s less difficult to become publicly-traded. But it’s also easier to stay private too since a company doesn’t have to release financials until it has more than 2,000 shareholders excluding employees, up from the previous 500-shareholder limit.

Net-net, it’s hard to say how this will affect the average time-to-IPO. While private secondary markets have become more important over the last five years, they are simply not large or liquid enough to give venture firms the exits they need right now. So companies still need to tap public markets. This could change over the next 10 years though. Who thought founder liquidity would have become as widespread as it is a decade ago?

The downsides to confidential filings are obvious: The public gets left in the dark for a little bit longer (though not forever). The two years of financials, instead of three, means less data to show the kind of hockey-stick growth curve that investors usually like to see. Giving “emerging growth” companies a five-year grace period to adjust to new auditing requirements means fewer controls to prevent the kind of disastrous accounting restatement that Groupon had to make earlier this year. (No, the current rules did not prevent the Groupon snafu, but does that mean we should make them even weaker?)

Now let’s go onto the positives. So first, an IPO candidate can covertly test market appetite. If there isn’t as much demand as they thought, they can pull out without the negative publicity. Secondly, if the IPO window suddenly shuts down because of market volatility like last August, the company’s not left dangling out in the open for the better part of a year.

The world has also changed quite a bit since 80 years ago, when the original legislation establishing these rules was passed. Three weeks is eons in an interconnected world where bad news spreads faster than you can say “tweet.” There are also plenty of investors like Yuri Milner’s DST and other individual accredited investors who have stepped up in secondary markets on the belief that the modern online and social media provides more than enough information to make educated investment decisions. (But Milner gets special access given how much he invests and SecondMarket usually requires the company to make some disclosures, but the company gets to choose what and with whom they share their information.)

Overall, confidential filings don’t seem bad in and of themselves, so long as the public eventually gets the information before they can trade the stock.

But as we loosen regulations, we should always remember that the system only works if investors have trust in the companies and documentation they’re seeing. What people forget is that what we have now was born out of the Great Depression, when regular people lost or were swindled out of untold fortunes. When the original Securities Act was passed in 1933, president Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote a letter to Congress, saying that the “issue of new securities to be sold in interstate commerce shall be accompanied by full publicity and information.”

He went on to say that the old Latin saying, “Caveat Emptor,” or “Buyer Beware,” should be expanded to read “Let the seller also beware.” He said, “It puts the burden of telling the whole truth on the seller.”

That burden isn’t, well, so burdensome in private markets. For pre-IPO companies, the reality is that most of the sources that journalists and the public have access to are people who are highly incentivized to make the company seem better than it really is. It’s no coincidence that most of the media attention on Groupon before it revealed its financials was all rah-rah all the time. Most every source that journalists had access to were investors or employees. These were the people who plowed nearly $1 billion into the company thinking it would be a quick 2 or 3X return by the time the lock-up ended.

In fact, in several cases so far this year like Groupon and Zynga, private secondary markets — which have less information and are much less liquid — have been far more generous with the valuations they award.

Ironically, in this tech “blubble” or whatever you want to call it, it’s the public markets that have been more judicious.

Disclaimer: This article’s sole purpose is to address the core principles of advertising in a new and edgy  way. This is not for the faint of heart or those highly sensitive to socially charged public issues. So suck it  up and buckle up. You’re about to be taken to school (of hard knocks). Class is now in session.

Everyday we surge past the homeless never stopping to consider the power they possess to  advertise effectively with no budget(literally). Startups could learn a thing or two from these highly misunderstood band of street-smart entrepreneurs.

Seriously, they ARE testament to the fact that you and I have hard-wiring to market to others in attempts to meet our survival needs(both in business and in life). Carefully observe how these 5 use cases display the 5 levels of advertising power.

Note: You’re probably working at a business right now that’s been founded on one or more of these five principles. Observe carefully.

The Screamer

“The truth isn’t the truth until people believe you, and they can’t believe you if they don’t know what you’re saying, and they can’t know what you’re saying if they don’t listen to you,. . . unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.” - William Bernbach (1911 – 1982), Founder of DDB Int Agency.

The Screamer curses yelling absurdities to get attention. His audience doesn’t understand his message no matter how loud) and they avoid him like the plague. To survive in business it’s essential to have at least ONE clear message. Lack of empathy for prospects could cost us our lunch.

Hype works the same way, it’s divorced from a target audience and falls short of connecting with target audiences and what’s meaningful to them.

The Beggar

“Advertising is a tax for having an unremarkable product.” -Robert Stephens, Founder of the Geek Squad.

Begging is the oldest profession. He’ll get face-to-face asking directly for what he wants. “Change please?”, or the more ambitious, “Got five dollars”. He gets results by asking clearly for what he wants. Though his business is severely limited by the steep investment of time and energy.

It’s easier to receive payment when you can ask clearly and directly… if you ask enough people.

The Cardboard Holder

“Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read.” - Leo Burnett (1891-1971), Advertising Executive, Named New York Times 100 Most Influential Men of the 20th Century.

These guys invented automated advertising. He finds heavy traffic(literally) and posts his message (Ad) for the world to see. The message gets leveraged across 1000’s of eyeballs everyday with little to no effort on his part. As a business using leverage to his benefit. His message appeals to an almost infinite number of people. He’d make a kick-ass Search Engine Marketer.

His strategy is to present clear compelling messages in front of large audiences.

The Street Performer

“Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.” - William Bernbach (1911-1982), American advertising creative director.

The street performer presents his talent to a captive audience. He salts the crowd, incites interaction, and gets involvement, making them a part of his own show. Using juggling, strumming, and dancing as sweat equity he demonstrates entertainment value. All the while risking lighting himself on fire (risk liability). As a business he’s a step above, understanding the power of giving value up front and then asking for money after delivering. This keeps them coming back for more, over and over again.

The talent model is one of exhaustive effort yet generates customer loyalty through participation.

The Funnel Builder

“What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.”- David Ogilvy  (1911-1999), Dubbed The Father of Advertising

These kids were tossing money off the pier. They were playing a game made by a homeless guy. He had made it out of cardboard, cups, and a blanket. People tried to get their money into the various cups ‘winning points’ in hopes to sink one into the elusive jack-pot!

It was a cash(coins) machine(asset), accumulating wealth while he was on the beach getting tan sipping mojitos somewhere. It was a funnel that attracted prospects with a value proposition. A perfect example of a user driven experience (giving the audience tools to play the game.)

Building an automated funnel that generates cash while you’re not around (no labor, low overhead) is the zenith of entrepreneurship. Do this and your golden ticket to financial freedom is guaranteed.

Live Your Own Dream

Does that sound familiar to any of us? The entrepreneur’s dream; raking in dough while sipping margaritas on the beach. Here’s the recipe to turning your startup into an automated advertising cash machine.

1. Listen to your customer carefully.
2. Use one clear and direct message to speak to their needs.
3. Find out where your prospects already are, then place your messages in front of them.
4. Give value up front. Incentivise them to take action.
5. Build your product around their secret hopes / desires or fears / frustrations.

Follow these timeless and proven laws of advertising to supercharge your start up, blow past your break even point, and wiggle into profit. Live it up my friends and make an asset that will pay you in your sleep (on the beach).

Editor’s note: Evan Peelle is a Los Angeles-based marketer with experience in web-based startups and conducting online marketing campaigns, including PPC, mobile, and search marketing.

via TechCrunch

The program is an extension of the Administration’s StartUp America campaign to catalyze job growth through the engine of small business entrepreneurs. Most importantly, according to Sean Greene, a Special Advisor for Innovation at the SBA, the new fund will inject much-needed capitol in to what the Administration feels are underfunded areas outside of the typical startup zones (i.e. California and Massachusetts).

According to Greene, the important details of the project are that a fund must raise at least $20 million in capitol to receive up to another $20 million in matching funds. “This is too small for Sequoia. The more realistic scenario is a small fund in Austin, or Minneapolis,” Greene tells me at the annual Milken Global conference in Beverly Hills, California this week. Venture funds must have “an established track record with good returns” in early stage investments and be able to demonstrate a solid business strategy to the SBA. To be competitive, Greene says that a venture fund should be within the top “quartile” or “half” of their venture peers.

Contrary to the myth of a perfect market, venture funding isn’t a cold, calculated process of pouring over the best ideas from around the country. The dumb luck of meeting at VC at a party or having mutual a friend can often be just as important as having a good idea. Since the entire population of tech entrepreneurs can’t squeeze into San Francisco’s already-crowded housing market, the SBA is hoping to give some attention to smart technologists outside of Silicon Valley.

The open question is, can the SBA overcome earlier failures to achieve an important economic goal?

Greene seems aware of previous criticism of the SBA’s earlier investment programs and it’s current incarnation. A previous equity-based program in the early 2000s was inundated with complexity, and collapsed along with the Tech bubble. “We’ve restructured the instrument”, he says, to make it simpler, with a match-granting program to companies that have a proven track record of success. This is the so-called “fund of funds” model: instead of the government selecting companies, it simply allows already successful private funds to continue what they do outside of the normal cities.

In addition to the problem of location-sensitive investing, Greene says that there’s a trend, especially among institutional investors (banks, pension funds), to manage fewer projects and therefore to make larger investments. Additionally, for reasons he would not speculate, viable businesses outside of California and Massachusetts could be worthwhile investments, were there capitol flowing to those regions. As a result, the SBA hopes to close the gap and spur innovation in some of the hardest hit economic areas of the United States.

To learn more about the fund and application process, visit SBA.gov

via TC

As Ned Flanders would say, education in the U.S. is in “a dilly of a pickle.” At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the cost of education has become unsustainable. Student loan debt is over $1 trillion, unemployment remains high for the recently graduated, and non-traditional students — older people, single mothers, workers looking to re-train — are returning to academia and learning programs in droves, putting even more competitive pressure on already-scant on-site resources. Higher ed institutions struggle with the cost of expanding to meet demand. Yale, for example, recently decided to add 250 students to its incoming class, which came with a price tag of a quarter of a billion dollars.

Luckily, a number of startups are tackling the problem, which, along with the maturation of online content distribution channels, are helping to lower the cost of higher, primary, and continuing education — both making it easier for teachers to do what they do best as well as transforming learning into something that’s more engaging and personalized for students. Startups like Khan Academy, 2tor, ShowMe, Udemy, Udacity, Grockit, Coursera, and StraighterLine are all beginning to show how easy it is to flip the educational process — in other words, to use video and advanced web platforms to make learning more affordable and effective.

However, while these startups should be recognized for their mission-driven approaches, some of these startups evidence undercooked business models, obviously a problem for for-profit businesses when the funding (if there is any) dries up. There’s also plenty of money to go around in Silicon Valley right now, and many startups have become way too focused on raising seed and Series A financing, which can be detrimental to the system and a distraction for founders.

That’s why the story of Lynda.com has such relevance in today’s landscape. Founded in the ’90s, the company is, compared to the slew of year-old edtech startups, an old-hand. For those unfamiliar, Lynda.com offers a virtual video library of over 1,200 educational, how-to videos. Unlike the awesome Khan Academy, Lynda’s video courses are taught by industry experts, working professionals, and veteran teachers, served up in installments for a monthly subscription fee of about $25.

In 2010, Lynda delivered over 1,000 hours of content, and while it provides its paid online learning content to individuals, today it also works with nearly all of the Ivy League schools as well as companies, like Disney, Time Warner, Sony, Pixar, ABC, and HBO to supplement their learning content. What’s also different about Lynda, and perhaps old-school given today’s emerging DIY online video models, is that it produces 90 percent of its content in-house. It’s a big video production operation beyond simply being an online distribution platform.

Since the beginning, Lynda.com has been focused on tech content, offering videos how-to videos on some of the most popular apps from Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Microsoft — on everything from web design to learning to use Excel in a way that doesn’t make you want to blow your brains out.

Content companies have struggled to monetize on the Web, and there has been plenty of debate over the effectiveness of paywalls. Newspapers are finally starting to see growth in their circulations, and ABC’s figure for daily Times paid digital subscribers was 807,000, with the WSJ in second at 552,288. Of course, as the NYTimes points out, under audit rules, newspapers can count paid digital subscribers more than once if they have access to multiple platforms, like apps, tablets, etc.

This means that, as a content company, Lynda.com is looking pretty good in comparison. Yes, the Times’ digital offerings are much younger, but Lynda currently has over 1 million paying members, and saw 42 million uniques over the last 12 months, a 20 percent increase from the year prior. That’s not mind blowing, as there are a number of digital publications and blogs that see that much unique traffic in a month, rather than a year. But the real kicker is that Lynda hit $70 million in revenues in 2011.

Co-founders (and couple) Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin started by sinking $20K from their savings into Lynda. They were profitable, Heavin says, within a few weeks, and they haven’t taken a penny of outside funding since. And that’s not for lack of offers, as both founders hinted that sizable investment offers have been put on the table on a number of occasions, but the company has been content to fly under the radar and rely on word-of-mouth marketing, subscribing to a “if you don’t need money, don’t take it” policy.

The real key to the company’s success is how it’s become an alternative to the Demand Medias and eHows of the world. Lynda.com won’t blow you away with shiny graphics or interactivity, its videos often consist of basically what is the equivalent of screen-sharing, with narration from experts laid over it. But, as the company now has some-300 employees and has a serious studio north of Los Angeles, the production quality of its videos is high.

Compared to Khan, or YouTube how-tos, or eHow, Lynda’s videos are offered in installments, and depending on what users want to learn, they can graduate to more advanced content that goes high up the ladder. For example, Lynda is about to publish its 500th course on Adobe apps and software. CS6 begins shipping on Monday, and Lynda already has courses for the creative suite ready to go.

These courses on advanced PhotoShop, for example, may include up to 10 hours of content, broken down into 60-odd subgroups. While it’s not true for every subject, Lynda.com can be as basic or as advanced as you’re willing to go. And, with the growing interest in programming and coding education, the buzz around CodeAcademy being one example, the company is beginning to get very serious about expanding and diversifying its content around programming languages and web development.

For educators and teachers, part of the appeal of Lynda is that they’re guaranteed a paycheck for the content they help produce. Since Lynda is a veteran of the publishing industry, Lynda’s compensation model is not unlike book deals. Once teachers are vetted (and the co-founders told me they find more than 50 percent of the time that authors don’t necessarily make great teachers), they’re given an advance for their work. From there, the company offers a cut of revenues depending on the popularity of their videos.

Even if their videos don’t blow up, they’re guaranteed that supplementary revenue stream. But, somewhat surprisingly, the co-founders tell us that nearly 90 percent of its educators earn their entire annual income by producing videos for Lynda.com.

In the end, having been able to weather the stampede of content producers to the Web, and grow its business to $70 million in revenues, it seems that its founders might have some valuable perspective for startups and young entrepreneurs looking to do the same. Like many others, the co-founders began the process with other income streams, and it took almost 5 years before its online content was outpacing the number of courses they themselves were teaching in the classroom.

But what they kept coming back to was the fact that they started their business not as eager young people looking to get rich quick or find some niche to exploit, like becoming the Airbnb for pets, they were experts — and they were passionate about education. Weinman herself had been working in web design and film special effects, along with teaching, for years — and had published several books.

The co-founders attribute the success to becoming industry insiders before becoming entrepreneurs, and on focusing on the product before profit, allowing customers to keep you honest, and listening to their feedback to help push your business forward. Early on, everything they had and made was poured into Lynda.com. As Heavin said, it took years of “walking through the desert,” before they were able to see any real profit, but being passionate about finding better ways to educate people using online tools, and taking into account the modalities of learning — being intimately familiar with their user or target customer — can lead to a positive result.

As to what’s next, Lynda.com just added a course queue so that users can keep track of and save subjects or chapters they’re interested in watching later, and continuing to ramp up its educational content for developers. And, since 20 percent of its users are international and its content is presently English-only, the company hopes to begin translating its videos into other languages. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

For more on Lynda.com, check them out at home here.

via TechCrunch

“Your life is an amazing story that a lot of people would be interested in if you told it,” said Chris Cox, vice president of product at Facebook in the video. “The social graph is something that has always existed as long as there were two people on earth.”

Awww. Where do we sign up?

The retail roadshow video goes on for 30 minutes and features chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, along with chief financial officer David Ebersman, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, and Cox. In it, the Facebook crew discusses the company’s mission, products, advertising, finance, and the future of Facebook.

Putting these videos out has become common practice, with lots of tech companies, including Groupon, partaking in the new tradition during the days leading up to their IPOs. Zuckerberg and Facebook, however, have executed the video a little differently, tying in a strong dose of nostalgia and Coldplay-esque music. They talk about the beginnings of Facebook, way back in 2005, when the only photo you could upload was a profile picture. The video then details the company’s expansion to photo albums, while displaying pictures of mothers and babies, people in funky sunglasses, and other obvious representatives of Everyman. The company then goes on to talk about Timeline, the platform, advertising, it even includes a cameo of Ben & Jerry’s executives talking about Facebook’s reach.

What’s more heart-warming than ice cream?

The company also includes bits of actual information, such as the fact that Facebook’s members leave comments on the site one billion times a day, and that Facebook has 488 million mobile users. These stats you can also find in Facebook’s prospectus, which was updated today to include Facebook’s “initial public offering range” of $28 to $35 per share, although to get information out of a prospectus you have to be able to read. With a video, by contrast, you could be convinced to buy stock even if you’re illiterate.

Facebook will be selling a total of 337,415,352 shares, which could bring in $9.4 billion to $11.8 billion, depending on the offering price.

Facebook is expected to IPO as soon as May 18.

We can’t embed the roadshow video, but if you don’t want to watch all 30 minutes of it, we’ve included some highlights below.

via VentureBeat