Posts Tagged Startups
Wacky Buttons | Easy, Affordable, Quick Button Site for Conferences
Posted by Dan Hall in Startups, Things you should know on January 11, 2012
I’m headed to a large trade show next week in Vegas and I realized I needed something to identify bloggers in our network. Thinking buttons might be a good idea, I did a little bit of searching and after evaluating about half a dozen sites I chose to use Wacky Buttons: Make Buttons Online | Design Buttons Online | Make Custom Buttons.
A clean(er) website, with easy navigation, and a handy design tool to create your own design. 100 buttons were $40 bucks and they can get them ready to go in less than 48 hours with overnight shipping.
Bookmark this site, you never know when you might need buttons – fast!
Fueling Growth: Elance To Give $1 Million To Startup America Partnership
I wholeheartedly applaud Elance for doing this:
“Online job marketplace Elance has just announced it will give $1 million to The Startup America Partnership, the national campaign that aims to accelerate entrepreneurship, which is chaired by Steve Case, co-founder of AOL disclosure: TechCrunch parent and Chairman of the Case Foundation.”
via Elance To Give $1 Million To Startup America Partnership | TechCrunch.
I will need to evaluate The Startup America Partnership but as I’ve stated before, I firmly believe technology and small businesses especially startups are one of the few bright stops in America with the ability to spur innovation, create jobs, and keep us great.
Getting Vets Jobs | Learning To Code | Codecademy
Posted by Dan Hall in Adding Value, Startups, coding on January 2, 2012
One of the long term projects that I am working on is helping military Vets find jobs. The jobless rate for Vets is about twice as high as the national average.I am a combat vet myself and am still in the National Guard so I see the impact of this on a regular basis. I also was fortunate enough to have had a startup founder take a chance on me, giving me an opportunity to run Human Resources and Recruiting at Visible Technologies, a social media analytics company. This ultimately led to the founding of my own company which in term produced more jobs (and all my employees are vets).
The first iteration of this project will launch in the next couple of weeks. I’ve put together a great support network of experienced startup execs and founders for veterans to get advice and introductions (after being vetted, of course).
Long term, I would like to develop a curriculum for Vets to learn how to code that would combine on-the-job training with leading technologist, online learning such as Codecademy, and traditional course work at a local college or university. Software engineering and tech companies are some of the few silver linings in the economy. I truly believe entrepreneurs and small business owners are the answer to long term economic growth. Taking demographics who are otherwise limited in career path and providing training, education, advice, and resources is a win-win.
This looks like a cool idea, which I am going to try out for myself:
Still Looking For A New Year’s Resolution? How About Learning To Code … | TechCrunch.
Quick Reviews: BunchBall and BigDoor, social gamification service providers
I had the opportunity to evaluate BunchBall and BigDoor, two of the leading social gaming service providers, aka gamification. Here’s a quick low down:
BunchBall – Great demo by Kevin Spier, Director of Sales. Bunchball has a mature tool set and has been around since 2005. They have many well known clients such as Comcast, Victoria’s Secret, and NBC. I was quite impressed by their capabilities and analytics. It’s rare that service providers surpass my expectations but BunchBall did. BunchBall is backed by Granite Ventures and Adobe Systems Incorporated. The downside is that their current pricing model reflects their targeted clientele. Bunchball has a set pricing model in the mid 4 figures per month for up to 1MM unique visitors. All in all, a great value for established customers who have the budget to drive traffic to their site in a meaningful way – because let’s face it, gamification works if properly implemented. Kevin was quite helpful and introduced me to several of his connections who are interested in the space of my new venture.
BigDoor – Good demo by Keith Smith, CEO of BigDoor. BigDoor recently scored a $5MM venture round led by the Foundry Group, so they are playing catch up in some ways to the more established BunchBall. They have a toolset that will be able to get me the gamification features I desire, albeit with more massaging from my own development team than BunchBall. One plus about this is that BigDoor provides their technology more like an open source library so I can customize the features to fit my needs. Keith also has been quite helpful and BigDoor has a huge advantage for two reasons: First, I, too, am a Seattle based startup CEO, so I am biased towards supporting local businesses and startups and Second, their pricing model, while based on API calls, scales with my business. This is an almost unarguable advantage for a cash-strapped startup and ultimately led towards our choice to go with BigDoor.
Do yourself a favor if you need to drive traffic and participation to your site and check out these two Companies, both offer superior value-added services.
Re: When recruiters tell you the opposite of what you are looking for
Posted by Dan Hall in Startups, recruiting, social media on July 5, 2008
A friend of mine who is connected within the Seattle Startup community, sent me this post by Marcelo Calbucci on the Seattle 2.0 blog discussing the frustrations and shortcomings that Startup Managers have of recruiting agencies in general.
I felt compelled to respond, having gone through a similar process, while recruiting for my Company as an internal Seattle HR Manager.
My response is below:
I am the Recruiting and HR Manager for a Social Media startup in Seattle. In the past six months I have personally recruited dozens of employees.
Being in-house, I have a distinct advantage because:
1. I passionately care about the future and well-being of my Company.
2. I recognize that I am the first person a potential candidate hears outlining my Company and our products. I take that responsibility very seriously. If I am not passionate to be here why would a candidate? People want to work at a Company people are passionate about; this gives me a huge advantage over some of those Companies you listed in your post.
3. A lot of candidates don’t use recruiters, nor care to. I work with contingent recruiters and recruiting agencies at times. There are some good recruiting agencies out there but most only try to fill the req and don’t have a large stake in the fit.
4. Recruiting agencies rarely (and I mean rarely) go below 20% placement fee structures. Their candidates better be 20% better than anyone I can source (which is not a normal occurrence – again I know the culture and fit of my Company and evangelize it passionately).
If you plan on hiring more than 5 or 6 employees in a year, do yourself a favor and hire a good fulltime HR and
Recruiting Manager, not only you will get better candidates, but you will also reduce liability (which there is, and don’t kid yourself, a lot from a HR standpoint), and save money.
Plus every candidate who doesn’t get a job, now knows our Company from someone who loves it and they have a positive lasting, impression, which has cascading effects in the long term.
Dan Hall
Seattle Human Resources Manager
