Entrepreneurship & Entrepreneurs

With the an estimated 150,000 new websites and 7.3 million new pages added to the Internet every day, the biggest challenge for every entrepreneur is to get found, and get some credibility for a new startup. I can attest from experience that publishing a regular blog to properly showcase your offering, even before you have it, is a most cost effective approach in time and money.

When a startup takes off, industry watchers note the company’s core offering, and many attribute its success solely to the founder(s) having a great idea. Investors rarely see it that way. For venture capitalists and angel financiers, a smart investment starts not only with a stellar concept but a smart, entrepreneurial team as well.

Here’s how discerning VCs recognize promising founders:

If some ideas are nice, and some ideas are horrible, how could you possibly know which one you’ve given birth to? Here are five questions to ask yourself...

Based on thousands of diagnostics, we're starting to know what really works.

I’ve launched half a dozen or so startup products in my career and in the process I’ve picked up my list of favorite tools to make each step easier, faster, and cheaper.  Below are the sites and services I’ve had success with while launching startups.  Depending on your skills and experience, you won’t need them all, but I hope some of these tools can help expedite your path to success.

Startup DNA: the formula behind successful startups in Silicon Valley. These are my personal observations on a few traits that make startups successful. 

New funding models are about to revolutionize the social sector.

In today's entrepreneurial climate, ideas are nothing without traction. And traction doesn't come by accident. Traction is the sweated-over result of a well-honed pitch, a bootstrapped minimum viable product and often a proven product-market fit as well.

Here’s a social situation almost everyone in the startup community will recognize: You're at a party, or a conference, or a networking event, and some young founder sidles up to you to chat about his big project. He says his idea is going to disrupt everything about everything. He tells you about how it's sure to scale massively the minute he deploys. He tells you about the flood of investment dollars that will surely be unleashed the moment his brilliant idea sees the light of day. But he refuses to tell you his idea, at least until you sign a non-disclosure agreement, which he conveniently has in his pocket.

The tech industry has a certain narrative on how startups are created. Given the immense wealth generated in a short period of time, entrepreneurial lessons are often lost in the measure of dollars and growth.

I’ll admit it, the title of this article is downright curmudgeonly. But between visioning sessions, collaborative software development and Linus’ Law of bug detection — we’ve been taught to accept the wisdom of crowds as necessary to most startup decision-making. In our world, consensus is treated as a type of quality control and our success as leaders depends on a culture of listening and openness.  To an extent, all of this is true. But what happens when a constructive conversation becomes a futile one?

When you’re first getting your start-up off the ground, finding and reeling in awesome team members can be one of your biggest challenges.

In my experience, there are a few key factors that matter most to early stage start-up employees, and these are often the reasons that employees join start-ups in the first place. So, if you can show your top candidates how you can offer them those things, you’ll have a much better chance of people coming on board.

Choosing your technology stack is one of many decisions you’ll have to make when creating a company from scratch. Along with this, you’ll need to figure out who you should found a company with, who you should take money from, what the company culture should be, management processes, and who to hire when. Joe will be covering basic technology stack choices (cloud v. hosted, frameworks, etc.) as well as other critical decisions one faces when starting a startup.