Unfortunately, my site (SujanPatel.com) was hacked again, but I’m happy to report that everything is back up and running – no data lost and no personal information compromised.
I wish I could say that this was the first time somebody messed with my site, but what I’ve come to learn is that getting hacked is part of the price of admission for running on WordPress.
Don’t get me wrong – I love WordPress. The fact that it’s open source and widely adopted means tons of great templates, plugins and add-ons, many of which I use to power this blog. But those same pros turn into cons when you take into consideration the fact that hackers have the same amount of access as you do.
Dealing with the potential for WordPress hacks requires two things – be...
It is critically important for the founders of a company to intimately understand the company’s Key Performance Indicators (“KPIs”). Founders cannot hope to grow a company in any meaningful way without an almost obsessive focus on its KPIs. Why? Because KPIs, if constructed correctly, give management and potential investors a cold, analytical snapshot of the state of the company, untainted by emotion or rhetoric. This focus must not be limited to the KPIs themselves, for they are merely measurements of outcomes. We look for founders to have an understanding of what levers can be pulled and what tweaks can be made to improve the business, which will then be reflected in its KPIs. So the focus should not be on the KPIs themselves, but the mea...
In 2014, my friends and I set out to build the best possible web design tools. We built UI kits, Admin Dashboards, Templates, and Plugins. We’ve always tried to create web products that are helpful in the development process, and that we would use ourselves for building websites for clients.
From a revenue’s perspective, if we don’t take into consideration the Black Friday sales (which doubled the amount that we made in November 2016), we are grossing around $22,000 per month. Part of that goes toward paying our affiliates’ commissions, collected VAT, payment vendors’ taxes, and other expenses. We end up netting around $17,000 each month.
In this case study, I’ll share exactly how we built our products and grew our business. You’ll hear all...
Aditi joined Crosslink in 2014, focusing on Mobile, Fintech and Internet Services investments. Prior to joining Crosslink, Aditi was an analyst in the technology, media & telecom investment banking group at Deutsche Bank in San Francisco providing M&A advisory and capital raising services for Internet & digital media and software clients. She has prior experience working at Allen & Overy LLP in Singapore and J.P. Morgan Private Bank in Hong Kong. Aditi holds a BA in Psychology from Stanford University, where she cultivated her interest in the human aspect of technology and the way it impacts lives.
Companies disrupting our current financial services infrastructure: changing the way we thin...
It’s a key buzzword of our time. What worrying over ‘The Age of Distraction’ really reveals is our great anxiety about maintaining focus and meaningful interactions, when we’re saturated with opportunities for immediate and trivial communications.
In 2017, we commonly understand that this ‘saturation anxiety’ is inextricable from our modern relationship to smartphones. One recent study shows that the average 18–33 year old checks their smartphone a shocking 85 times a day, while another reveals that the average attention span has fallen a third since 2000 (or around the time of the mobile revolution.) Clearly, any present-day solution to these problems has to take into account the smartphone question.
But distraction anxieties have been on...
A deep rumble filled the boardroom. Tchotchkes and Star Trek figurines jitter along the desks and fall to the floor. Instinctively the executives climb under the table for shelter. It’s Seattle, 2001, during the Nisqually Earthquake. To everyone’s amazement, Tom Killalea emerged to retrieve his laptop from the top of the desk, and proceeded to check whether Amazon.com was still live.
If Jeff Bezos had a “Mars Group” — Tom Killalea would be in it. But, I’ll get to that, later.
I’m fascinated by Amazon. Its stock price has risen 6,000% since 2001. Amazon has same-day online shopping — even at Christmas, powers a good chunk of the Internet with its web services and in 2016 won 5 Emmys and was nominated for 11 Golden Globes. Jeff Bezos has undo...
When I first left my full time job to try my hand at being an entrepreneur, I thought it would be helpful to join a women’s business networking group. The membership included a subscription to their women’s business magazine which provides exclusive content, advice, and tips for being more business-y.
I won’t name the organization, but I won’t be surprised if anyone recognizes it. I joined just over 6 months ago and every time I have received an issue of this quarterly magazine, I become a little more enraged.
The very first red flag is that inexplicably and despite the fact that the women’s magazine is only available to pre-paying members and can’t be bought in store, it has a price tag on it (but no barcode), presumably to convince the po...
Entry-level workers are no longer U.S. college grads—in fact, some aren't even human anymore.
The world of entry-level talent has completely changed in the past decade, particularly for startups. Not too long ago, startups raided colleges with an implicit understanding that among college grads, you could find someone who was smart (the college part), willing to work hard (lots of free time), and relatively cheap (first job).
I know this well because I was exactly that—young, relatively smart, insanely hungry, and freakishly cheap to hire. Since then, I've been trying to find my 19-year-old clone every single day of my Founder life. What has changed, though, is that the most fertile hunting grounds for those folks are no longer U.S. colleges...
There are a lot of accomplishments in Sheila Marcelo’s official bio, not least of which is founding running the publicly traded Care.com. One thing that isn’t in all those official bios is that Marcelo– a Filipino born girl who was sent to America to get educated and become a lawyer– got pregnant unexpectedly in college. At a women’s college no less.
She wound up marrying her boyfriend of just three months and having the baby, but that wasn’t necessarily a given. “I was worried,” she says. “I wanted to be a banker. I was worried about what I was going to do in my career. Was this going to hold me back? He kind of said all the right things.” He also said the right thing to her parents at the wedding: “We will make sure she gets to law school...
Pitching your product line to a retailer? There are so many areas to cover. Do you know which three facts matter most to the decision-makers?
The greatest challenge product companies face is convincing retail buyers your brand will sell. If you want shelf placement in Target, Walmart, CVS, or ANY retailer for that matter, your retail pitch (or as I call it, the Retail Story) needs to address retailers’ key needs. And their primary need revolves around mitigating their sales risk.
The following are the 3 most effective ways to show retailers how you will mitigate their sales risk as you’re pitching your product to retailers and stores:
The best way of showing how you will mitigate sales risk is by showing the...