A few months after struggling to raise a new fund in 2005, Accel Partners bet $12.2 million on a website run by a college dropout. Seven years later, that wager is poised to be the most profitable ever for a venture firm.

Accel, whose partners include Jim Breyer and Kevin Efrusy, is the top outside investor in Facebook Inc., owning about 10 percent. Assuming Facebook is valued at $100 billion, Accel’s stake on paper is worth about $10 billion.

When Accel made its Facebook investment, the site had just 2.8 million users — all on college campuses — and was run by a 21-year-old Mark Zuckerberg. Now it has 800 million members worldwide and an estimated $4.27 billion in 2011 sales, according to EMarketer Inc. That explosive growth is poised to deliver an 800-fold return on Accel’s money, catapulting the firm to the forefront of the venture industry.

via Accel’s Facebook Bet Poised to Become Biggest-Ever Venture Profit: Tech – Bloomberg.

Being able to make a solid pitch to investors about your business is a *must have* skill. Here’s a good take on what to say, how to say it and how to structure it.

View Slide Show: Silicon Moon: How to Create an Early Stage Pitch Deck.

Anyone who has started a business has his or her own rules and guidelines, so I thought I would add to the memo with my own. My “rules” below aren’t just for those founding the companies, but for those who are considering going to work for them, as well.

1. Don’t start a company unless it’s an obsession and something you love.

2. If you have an exit strategy, it’s not an obsession.

3. Hire people who you think will love working there.

via Mark Cuban’s 12 Rules for Startups | Entrepreneur.com.

It’s been nearly seven years since I posted Top 10 Business Plan Mistakes on this site. Looking back and reading the post again today, I think the list holds up very well. Still, I can’t resist making a few changes. So here is my revised version for 2012, incorporating what I wrote back then that still holds true.

1. Misunderstanding the purpose: It’s the planning that matters, not just the document. You engage in planning your business because planning becomes management. Planning is a process of setting goals and establishing specific measures of progress, then tracking your progress and following up with course corrections. The plan itself is just the first step; it is reviewed and revised often. Don’t even print it unless you absolutely have to. Leave it on a digital network instead.

via The Top 10 Business Plan Mistakes | Entrepreneur.com.

The Pulling Power of Brand Rituals

To be successful, all brands must develop a culture that builds-upon their differentiated proposition with all they do each and every day. Brands able to create unique and engaging ‘rituals’ performed by their people create an indisputable brand property to leverage in the battle to win customers and their loyalty.

As Icelandic premier league football team Stjarnan have proved, a unique and surprising ritual is often the difference between fame and obscurity. As far as football teams go on the world stage, Stjarnan are far from a household name – yet they’ve successfully built a brand and major international awareness as a result of their uniquely creative and entertaining goal scoring rituals.

Via: The Pulling Power of Brand Rituals

Branding a place or a region is no different to product or service branding – you have to own something that is distinctive and compelling to your target market. However, when it comes to regional branding there is an added complication. You have to balance the competing needs of a diverse set of stakeholders because the people and businesses that make up the region simply do not always see the world through the same lens. Different mental models, different types and sizes of businesses, different levels of self interest and all that before one even layers in the different egos at play.  A lot of stakeholders and lot of emotion makes for interesting branding.

Via - Truly Deeply/Madly.

My last post described how Innosight follows a three-stage process to evaluate investment proposals from outside entrepreneurs. But deciding how to invest in ideas at a corporation is a different beast. In The Innovator’s Guide to Growth we suggested that companies should create one-page “Idea Resumes” that capture the essence of an idea on a single PowerPoint slide.

After this starting point, however, our VC process holds pretty well. The first decision is whether to explore an idea more deeply. Consider some combination of the following criteria:

1. Does what we hope to do fit our strategy? (If you don’t have an innovation strategy, go and create one.

via -

http://blogs.hbr.org/anthony/2012/01/my_last_post_described_how.html.

A few years ago, I put together a list of social media marketing examples. The list contains 324 examples of brands putting social media to use and at that point in the social media industry’s evolution, it was the best of what was around (and still might be).

Now that initiatives have been in market, any reasonable business manager would expect to see program results. However, quantified results in social business and brands willing to stand behind them are difficult to find. But the truth is out there…

…and here are 101 examples of social business return on investment, roughly 60% revenue generation and 40% cost reduction. Each example lists brand, activity, and source + year.

via 101 Examples of Social Business ROI.

WILLIAM BURRIS invested about $100,000 in 2009 to purchase three of the first Rent Your Boxes franchises in the United States. The parent company had been founded in 1998 by an Australian entrepreneur to help people rent boxes when moving.

THE CHALLENGE Just five months after opening his three locations in the District of Columbia, Mr. Burris — a former director of advertising and media sales at the International Franchise Association — learned that his franchiser had declared bankruptcy in Australia. Without the parent company to support its franchisees with marketing and supply contacts, Mr. Burris and the other nine franchisees based in the United States struggled with what to do next.

via After the Parent Fails, a Franchisee Ponders His Next Steps – NYTimes.com.

For any entrepreneur, the challenge of taking an idea to launch can be a daunting and expensive journey. Fortunately, Adeo Ressi, founder of TheFunded and startup accelerator, Founder Institute, has a ten step plan.While there is no foolproof recipe for every launch, Ressi says his template will help any tech entrepreneur get a business off the ground for less than $2,000. The program, which Ressi recently presented at the Founder Institute’s Boston location, is a bare bones guide to securing your startup’s online identity, enhancing your appearance of legitimacy through low-cost but well designed logos and marketing materials, understanding your startup’s priorities and target consumer, and finally, getting it to the point of a rough web launch.Given that the presentation occasionally offers very specific advice for example, step 3 centers on the use of 99designs for your logo, the ten step plan will hardly work for everyone. However, I imagine many young entrepreneurs can mine this tip sheet for some valuable advice on how to save a few extra pennies here and there on the road to launch — pennies that can later mean the difference between success and failure.Below is a bullet point summary of Ressi’s ten steps to launch. The video above significantly elaborates on these points.

via Founder Institute: How To Launch In 10 Steps With Less Than $2,000 | TechCrunch.