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With the current strong economy, as an active startup mentor, I’m seeing a new surge of entrepreneurs and startups, with the commensurate scramble for funding. There just aren’t enough angel investors and VCs to go around. Thus I’m getting more questions on new mechanisms, like crowd funding, or go Read More

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. I often get asked about the real alternatives to bridge this Read More

Every entrepreneur I know is short on resources, including time, money, and skills. The last thing they can afford is to waste any of these, but in my mentoring and coaching activities, I see it happening all too often. Waste in a startup is any activity that spends resources, but creates no value Read More

Millennials have come a long way in business since I started writing about them almost ten years ago. They started out as that spoiled generation of kids, born between about 1982 and 2004, who had everything, and could care less about business. Today they are in every business, and will likely comp Read More

In my experience with technical entrepreneurs, they work hard on creating an innovative and elegant solution, and assume that customers will flock to them (“if we build it, they will come”). The reality is that successful businesses these days require an equally elegant business model, with the rig Read More

As an advisor to entrepreneurs, I often have to deal with people who are convinced that they must get me to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) before they begin talks about their new venture. They seem shocked to learn that most professional investors and advisors, myself included, routinely dec Read More

Every culture and community puts pressure on its members to follow the norms. Even young people who start out wanting to be different are called “freaks,” and most are slowly bent back into the norm by the time they “grow up.” Maybe that’s why so many entrepreneurs struggle with building a disrupti Read More

Most entrepreneurs believe they are “different,” but they can’t quite understand how. They usually explain it by insisting that they are driven to follow their passion, need to be their own boss, want to get rich quick, or want to change the world. I now believe that the roots of the difference may Read More

I started out in business as a techy geek, so I understand why technologists starting a new venture spend so much effort getting the product just right. Yet I’ve learned over time that building the business is all about having the right team members. Thus I’m frustrated when I see founders pushing Read More

As a mentor to aspiring entrepreneurs, the most common question I get is, “I want to be an entrepreneur -- how do I start?” The obvious answer is that you need an idea first, but I’ve come to realize that the process is really much more complex than that. Many people with great ideas never make it Read More