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Entrepreneurs who experience success with their first startup are often amazed to realize that the risks and fears of doing it right the second time go up, rather than down. Encores are tough, especially in the high-risk world of startups, yet every entrepreneur I know can’t wait to start over and Read More

Entrepreneurs have always believed that their product or service must show real value to customers, but today the smart ones are even able to make their marketing valuable. The days are gone when marketing was all “pushing product.” Now customers seek out people who are willing and able to add valu Read More

As a mentor to aspiring entrepreneurs, I often feel the frustration of someone trying to build a startup in the wrong place and time, and wrongly attributing their struggle to personal limitations. It may not seem fair, but passion and commitment alone are not enough to make your startup successful Read More

Strategic decisions set the overall direction for your business, whereas operational decisions set day-to-day operations. Unfortunately, most of the entrepreneurs who contact me for guidance only seem to work on strategic issues when they are in a crisis, such as losing a major distributor or being Read More

Cash flow is a basic survival metric for every startup. Investors check your burn rate to assess your efficiency, and project your remaining runway before you run out of money and into a brick wall. Don’t wait until you are almost out of cash before managing every dollar spent, or looking for the n Read More

When the business is struggling, most business owners I know feel like anything but a leader. They start second-guessing their own vision, and are prone to making snap decisions suggested by someone else, in lieu of their carefully crafted processes and metrics. Entrepreneurs who can keep their coo Read More

In my experience, consummate entrepreneurs tend come up with more startup ideas than they can ever implement, and some of the ideas may not even make business sense. But how does any entrepreneur know which ideas to implement, and which ones are best left behind? Read More

As an angel investor and a mentor to aspiring entrepreneurs, I’m always disappointed to see founders who seem stressed out most of the time, and more annoyed than energized by the abundance of challenges they see in building their startup. The entrepreneurial lifestyle is a tough one under the best Read More

Many entrepreneurs are so enamored with their product vision that they believe their own hype, and are convinced that the market for their solution is so huge that no one will ask them for independent market research data. They don’t realize that business projections with no third-party validation Read More

While spending years in a big company as an employee and an executive, I heard many people talking about jumping the corporate ship, dreaming of being an entrepreneur, and totally in charge of their own destiny. Fortunately for many of them it was all talk and no action, saving them from a world of Read More