TechCrunch’s Picks: The 10 Best Startups From Y Combinator’s S12 Demo Day

75 startups pitched their hearts out today at Y Combinator’s 15th Demo Day . We saw surefire small businesses to risky big bets but after collecting opinions from their YCS12 classmates and top VCs, these are TechCrunch’s top 10 picks.

[Chosen and compiled in random order by TechCrunch writers Josh Constine, Anthony Ha, Colleen Taylor, and Kim-Mai Cutler. There were many other great presentations, so choose your own favorites from our full coverage of all 64 startups that pitched on the record: Batch 1 , Batch 2 , Batch 3 , Batch 4 ]

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Source: TechCrunch

Be a Better Boss: 12 Tips to Help You Encourage Innovation

Many entrepreneurs dream of starting their own company so they can be their own boss, call the shots, get the corner office nicest table in the co-working space. Turns out, being in charge is a lot harder than just ordering people around and having someone fetch your lattes. To make a startup successful, you have to encourage an atmosphere of constant innovation.

We asked these upcoming entrepreneurs for their best tips on how to be a boss boss.

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Source: venturebeat.com

Everyone in your startup is a Marketer

In the early days at Buffer, we would have very clear roles as a team. Joel would code, build new features and improve the product. I would write, get press and do guest blogging to drive signups.

For a start, this worked very well. As we moved on, it felt as something was missing. The clear split between what each person was working on meant one thing. Only one brain contributed to the product and only one brain contributed to the marketing. But that’s not how startups work, there are no departments. To speak in Steve Blank’s words:

A Startup is not a smaller version of a large company

As we changed this, what we soon discovered was this. Joel’s ideas on guest blogging or pitching for press were very successful and did far better than some of mine. So we switched to brainstorming ideas for marketing as a team and leaving only the execution to myself.

Today, we have internalized this even further with each press push or marketing effort. And what’s most important, nearly everyone on the team also puts stuff out there that directly brands and markets us, oftentimes completely unknowingly:

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Source: leostartsup.com

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