CU New Venture Challenge » video

Silicon Flatirons 10th Anniversary Video

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:30:41 +0000

At the banquet this past Sunday in connection with the Silicon Flatirons Digital Broadband Migration Conference, a video commemorating the past ten years was unveiled. Here it is for your viewing pleasure!

Silicon Flatirons 10th Anniversary from Kendall Media Group on Vimeo.

If you’re looking for more information about the annual conference, check out some of the footage NextGenWeb captured this year. The first panel of the conference, moderated by Phil Weiser, included some snappy comments from local legend Brad Feld:

CUNVC Workshop with Tom Keller – Connecting with Your Customers

admin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:29:52 +0000

The CU New Venture Challenge held its second workshop on Wednesday evening with Tom Keller presenting an introduction to getting to know your customers.

Connecting With Your Customer by Tom Keller 2010 01 27

View more presentations from University of Colorado.

Tom outlined that there are 4 ingredients that make money fly to you.

Flying Money Ingredient 1: Know what pain your customers are experiencing, and ensure you can provide a solution that is better than the one the customer could come up with themselves, and better than your competitors. Be the best. This could be the cheapest, fastest, highest quality, most convenient, most fun, most admirable values – whatever sets you apart.

Flying Money Ingredient 2. Be the best solution for the pain, don’t under-price it – position yourself appropriately. Talk about your solution in the terms of your customer pain. All sales are emotional. Make sure your customer understands why you fix their pain as they know it.

Flying Money Ingredient 3. You have to have the best brand (not just the best features). This means people believe you have the best stuff (even if you don’t). Perception is reality. Make sure that your potential customers understand that you are the best.

Tom also told everyone a real truth – Kevin Costner in the Field of Dreams was wrong. “If you build it, they will come” isn’t true. You need to get customers aware of your product when they are feeling the pain. Advertise! Word of Mouth is through social networks becoming far more powerful. It’s timely, it’s strong. It uses someone’s existing relationships to help sell your product. And they do it because they love your product. You can’t buy their love. Be proactive and ask any customer who’s had a good experience to tweet, blog or Facebook about it.

Flying Money Ingredient 4. You don’t need a big ad budget, you need vocal, raving fans. The fans who will tell other people about their love for you and your brand. You build them not by pontificating but by conversing with them. You don’t get to tell them to love you, instead you need to give them a reason to love you.

Tom then described how these four ingredients form a circle. When you have a group of Raving Fans, they then lead back to finding more customers in pain (step one), helping you drive the business.

For anyone who missed the workshop, some video clips are below and you can also find the entire audio file here. Thanks to Joanne White for guest blogging.

Jason Mendelson’s CUNVC Crash Course Video – How to Build a Company

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:28:34 +0000

Slides and write-up to follow, but here is the video for anyone who missed it. Thanks to Colorado Tech TV for the awesome video and the speedy upload! (Note: be patient, it may take a minute to load all six parts.)

Video of Paul Berberian’s Talk on How to Pick a Business

admin — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:13:20 +0000

For anyone who missed the first CU New Venture Challenge event, you’re in luck! Below is video from the Kickoff hosted by Paul Berberian. See our write-up of the event here. Enjoy!

How to Pick a Business from Paul Berberian on Vimeo.

A Quick Video Tour of How to Use Google Analytics

admin — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:34:06 +0000

This short video from Google explains how to set goals in Google Analytics to track how well your online efforts are paying off. Great tool for any business with a web presence.

Josh Klein Gives a Personal Account of Innovation

admin — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 22:58:28 +0000

This video from the 4th Business Innovation Factory Summit is Josh’s story about how he was innovative about his creative work. His account shows the power of collaboration is in the people. It’s also nice to be first to a new platform!

Lessons From Incubator 2.0 from Dave McClure

admin — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 22:35:52 +0000

Dave McClure shared this presentation with some lessons about start-ups incubators. The presentation is slides only, but worth a look. Some good information about the development cycle and the metrics that are important to young companies (keep clicking past the intro slides). The contextual blog post can be found here.

Incubator 2.0: A Silicon Valley Success Story

Mint.com’s CEO Aaron Patzer’s Presentation on Startups

admin — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:02:33 +0000

I jacked this content straight from a Tech Crunch article. In a nutshell, “If you are an aspiring startup entrepreneur, you’ll want to watch that more than a few times. The candid disclosures and advice he gives is rarely seen in Silicon Valley.” Now that Mint has been acquired by Intuit for a tidy sum, you know the CEO, Aaron Patzer, probably knows what he’s talking about.

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on Startups from Techcrunch on Vimeo.

Top 10 Must Haves for Start-Ups

admin — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:22:48 +0000

This is a great video presentation (a little dated, 2001) by Frank Levinson of Finisar that has some great advice for start-ups. In particular, get customers; then listen to them. There is other good advice too, like; Get a couch, you’ll be sleeping on it from time to time. Seriously though, storytelling from entrepreneurs is a great way to learn from people who have been there and made mistakes. If you like this kind of format, definitely check out the Entrepreneurs Unplugged series at CU-Boulder.

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki and Alltop for this find.