By Amy Kwan

StartupMonthly had a great Demo Day on Thursday, June 21! Teams presented their pitches and received feedback from 12 mentors and investors.  When you only have 5 minutes to capture your audience’s attention, to make an impression, and communicate your business plan - you need to make sure your pitch is spot on.  There are plenty of tips out there on how to give a great pitch…here are some of our favorites:

1) Be Concise and Clear
No one wants to hear you ramble on forever about how you tested your code.  You should be able to tell your story in less than 1 minute.  

By Valerie Muravitsky

Lately Lean and Agile terms started appearing interchangeably, as in "lean agile methodology". Although these methodologies are merging and many organizations employ a hybrid of Lean and Agile development methods, they started as separate practices. The two do go together and there are elements of Lean that we utilize more and more in Agile, but it is important to understand the distinction and avoid confusion.  

By Sarah Khogyani 

As the sagely advice goes, there is no better way to set yourself up for failure than by having grandiose expectations. The U.S. military took expectations for the perfect software-defined radio technology to a $6 billion level, only to have failed monumentally. We should not catalog this as a mistake to be forgotten, but rather, as a blueprint on how to avoid such time-consuming and finance-depleting blunders.

The Joint-Tactical-Radio-System (JTRS) Ground-Mobile-Radio (GMR) agenda launched in 1997 with goals of delivering 32 different waveforms all at once, or as Bauman describes, “a recipe for disaster.” The problem with this en masse approach was that hardware designs were changing incrementally.

By Amy Kwan

Startup Monthly is debuting a brand new workshop called SmartUP.  The main goal is to help you form effective teams through play modules and integrate unique agile practices.  Participants will spend the day implementing techniques on how to be lean, how to self-organize, and how to build strong and effective teams.  You may be wondering how SmartUP differs from Startup Monthly’s Icebreaker workshops.  Well, the  benefit of SmartUP is that in addition to icebreaker-type activities, you’ll learn lean method concepts from an Agile expert.

by Vadim Slavin (StartupMonthly co-founder, COO)

StartupMonthly started as a grass roots movement in Silicon Valley but as many already know is quickly spreading to other parts of the worlds. Here is why. Firstly, it offers the entrepreneurship school which teaches (through hands-on workshops)

• how to articulate an idea
• how to perform effective Customer Development
• how to recruit the right co-founding team of capable people who will work well together
• how to convert an idea into a business model
• how to validate the business model and adapt it to the market needs