Monday, July 15, 2019
By
Ted Roduner
Microsoft Inspire
Microsoft Inspire kicks off today in Las Vegas today. Hailing from over 130 countries, thousands of our leading partners will meet to connect, collaborate and celebrate as one community. This year,…
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Wednesday, July 10, 2019
By
Jeana Jorgensen
Jeana Jorgensen
Ecosystem Update
Startup Stories
June has wrapped which means summer is in full swing. The team has pulled together highlights of some of the top news, startup stories and events they have encountered over the past month. From diagnosing the state-of-affairs for female founders to exploring the merits of the startup ecosystem in Beijing, this month’s edition covers a range of topics. Let’s dig in.
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Wednesday, June 19, 2019
By
Microsoft for Startups
Female Founders
Startups
Female Founders Alliance
We recently had the opportunity to speak to Female Founders Alliance CEO and Founder, Leslie Feinzaig, about her path to founding the organization as well as the unique opportunities and challenges facing women entrepreneurs.
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Wednesday, June 5, 2019
By
Raz Bachar
ScaleUp
Tel Aviv
It only happens a few times over the course of a career, that you shift from a company you’ve been with over seven years to start a new adventure. That was the journey Raz Bachar recently undertook when he transitioned from AWS, his professional home for much of the past decade, to join Microsoft for Startups as Managing Director in Tel Aviv.
What motivated this new journey? Or, more directly, why startups, why Israel, why Microsoft? Read on to find out.
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Thursday, May 30, 2019
By
Jeana Jorgensen
Ecosystem Update
Microsoft Build
Collision Conference
Webit
CTO
Events
Spring has arrived and that means our conference season is in full swing. We started off May with Build 2019, Microsoft’s premier developer event in Seattle followed by dozens of startup events from Vivatech in Paris, Collision in Toronto and Webit in Bulgaria. In the past month, we’ve had the chance to meet thousands of incredible startups and their incredible founders.
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Wednesday, May 29, 2019
By
Emily Rich
Startups
Hear from Phil Thomson, co-founder of Auror — a retail crime intelligence platform that helps retailers stop crime in their stores.
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Updated: Thursday, May 30, 2019
Thursday, May 23, 2019
By
James Turnbull
Early Stage Startup
Investor Pitch
Advice
Pitching
You have a fantastic idea. You've taken the core concepts of that idea and turned them into a prototype, a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The prototype is the first pass of your solution. It's not pretty, nor complete, and often not tested. Frank Robinson said when he coined the MVP term:
"... think big for the long term but small for the short term. Think big enough that the first product is a sound launching pad for it and its next generation and the road map that follows, but not so small that you leave room for a competitor to get the jump on you."
Once you have your prototype though, the question becomes how you get that "sound launching pad" in front of potential investors and customers and enable you to grow it into a fully-fledged product.
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Monday, May 20, 2019
By
Iskender Dirik
Sales
startups
When people ask me about my role at Microsoft for Startups, they are often trying to understand the nature of our business and what exactly we do for startups. It’s easy to summarize with our slogan “You’re here to do great things. We’re here to help.” ... We aim to provide a host of resources, from technology to marketing support, and everything in between. At its core, Microsoft for Startups exists to alleviate the specific challenges and pain points that startups face.
One of those critical pain points, especially for B2B startups, is building a sales team and strategy. We heard again and again from founders that “sales” is at the top of their list of things they need help with. So, I set out to build an in-depth strategy guide that can help founders build a team, create a sales strategy, and implement that strategy in short order. That’s how we created The Sales Operations Playbook, a 90 plus page primer that can help startups, or any professional, learn how to build and operate a sales organization.
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Thursday, May 16, 2019
By
Ruth Yakubu
Cloud
Early Stage Startup
Planning
Budget
When choosing their first Cloud platform, most startups think of their current state instead of their future state, and fail to consider what happens when they start gaining traction and scaling. Unfortunately, if they don't choose a platform wisely, there may an ugly task down the road called Cloud migration: the need to lift-and-shift your solution to another Cloud platform. This results in cost and time you can't afford, when you should be focusing on building and growing your product. In some cases, your solution may be so tightly coupled with the old Cloud platform that you need to rewrite some of your code to integrate with services in the new platform.
As a startup, you cannot afford the cost and potential downtime involved in choosing the wrong Cloud platform. Knowing the right questions to ask and your business requirements and goals provide you with the ability to assess and choose the right platform for you.
Here are the top 5 key questions that startups need to consider before they choose a Cloud platform.
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