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If you really want to impress a startup founder as a potential employee, or you want to be a smart investor, you need to know the right questions to ask. These are the questions that get past the hype of a founder “vision to change the world,” and into the realm of real business strengths, weaknesses, and current health Read More

When I heard a friend make this statement the other day, I realized that every entrepreneur should adopt it as their mantra. I certainly have. If we all do it, we can drastically improve the statistic that over half of new startups fail within five years. Nothing is more discouraging to future entrepreneurs than a failed startup Read More

What positives does Gen-Y (Millennials) bring to your startup, and what management strategies will work most effectively and productively with them? Everyone is quick to point out their shortcomings and idiosyncrasies, but I see some attractive attributes from a business perspective, including the following Read More

Once you have succeeded in developing a solution and obtained initial funding, the next challenge is to penetrate the relevant domestic and international markets. For that, you need to implement a winning distribution channel strategy. Common channel strategies include direct to customer, distributor, and joint venture arrangements Read More

What happened to Generation X? They are generally defined as anyone born between 1965 and 1980, sandwiched between 80 million Baby Boomers and 78 million Millennials (Gen-Y). Gen-X has just 46 million members, making it the lost child demographic Read More

Don’t charge the hill until you are “ready.” This probably seems obvious to military types, but I see entrepreneurs violating this rule all the time. They approach key potential investors way too early, trying to talk their way up the hill, with no supporting business plan, and before they have a support team around them. Needless to say, they get shot down, and get no second chance Read More

Like it or not, email is still a major business and personal communication vehicle, just like telephone calls. Your business and your integrity are being judged every day by your responsiveness to emails, and no one likes to do business with a dead-letter box. Unresponsive people and businesses lose friends and customers quickly Read More

Every time I hear about a new startup that is in stealth mode, I wonder what problem they are hiding from whom. Of course they pretend that they are trying to avoid alerting competitors prior to launch, but too often it becomes an excuse to move slowly in a world that’s all about getting to market fast Read More

Every entrepreneur should spend plenty of time thinking about competitors, and how they relate to your business, but you need to be very careful what you say out loud about them to your team, your investors, and your customers. What you say speaks volumes about how you think about your startup, how smart you are, and your personal integrit Read More

Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the best entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. On the average, the entrepreneurs I know are broke. But one thing they all seem to have in common is a love for learning and change. They rush in with a passion to better the world, and money is just an indication of their progress Read More