992 Posts Found

We spend a lot of time advising startups. Though one-on-one advice will always be crucial, we thought it might help us scale Y Combinator if we could distill the most generalizable parts of this advice into a sort of playbook we could give YC and YC Fellowship companies.

Then we thought we should just give it to everyone.

This is meant for people new to the world … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Sam Altman | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Founders face a wide range of decisions when building their startups: market decisions, product decisions, financing decisions, and many more. The temptation is to prioritize these choices over decisions about how to structure their own founding teams. That’s understandable, but perilous. Our research, forthcoming in Management Science, identifies one of those important pitfalls: founder equity splits, i.e., the way founders allocate the ownership amongst themselves … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Noam Wasserman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

As Daniel Kahneman showed in Thinking Fast and Slow, humans think in normal distributions. Most people will near the mean and a few outliers exist at the best and worst end of the spectrum. But, that’s not the case at work.

Content: Article | Author: Tomasz Tunguz | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Human Resources

The conventional wisdom today is “let’s make it easier to start a business.” But what makes Silicon Valley great is not that it’s easy to start a business. It’s that it’s possible to start another one after you fail. That’s why the ones which succeed are so good.”

Content: Quotation | Author: William Barnett | Source: Stanford University | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Mark Roberge, the Chief Revenue Officer at Hubspot, has spent 20 years in startups. As he told me a few days ago, he has observed the lack of sales management and sales execution skills as one of the most consistent deficiencies limiting the potential of early stage SaaS companies. Frequently, the first sales leadership hire is the hardest, because it’s difficult to ascertain the right … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Tomasz Tunguz | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Human Resources, Marketing / Sales

As investors, we’re considering the total addressable market for a given product or service immediately upon hearing a vision for it: How many users and/or customers are there for this?

Slapping billions or tens of billions of dollars with a title and maybe an asterisk-attributed source on a slide will either be glossed over or, in some cases, actually be detrimental. Every VC has seen … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Tim Devane | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

Two scholars measure the economic impact of VC-funded companies.

Content: Article | Authors: Ilya A. Strebulaev, Will Gornall | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Economics, Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

The initial capital raised by a company is typically called “seed” capital. This brief guide is a summary of what startup founders need to know about raising the seed funds critical to getting their company off the ground.

Content: Article | Author: Geoff Ralston | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

At the founding of a startup, the structure of the company is flat. Everyone is effectively a peer. At about 8 people, a leader must emerge to shepherd the growing team, and so the first management layer is created. Then again, somewhere around 60 employees, the company must add another management layer, and then again when the company reaches a few hundred employees.

This pattern … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Tomasz Tunguz | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Organizational Behavior

“Growing the team” is almost always one of the ways entrepreneurs utilize new investment dollars. Whether it’s adding capacity to an existing function or bringing new talents onboard, glossing over these bullet points towards the back of the pitch deck would be a mistake. I’m interested in not just what these people will be doing but how and when they’ll be hired. So when I … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Hunter Walk | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Human Resources

Entrepreneurs often believe their new product or service is so exceptional that their customers will seek them out to acquire it. And like most people, entrepreneurs are uncomfortable with ambiguity, and selling involves a lot of it.

Instead of selling, entrepreneurs turn their energies to every other aspect of running their new companies. They conduct surveys, design prototypes, and tinker with their products until they … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Robin Mordfin | Source: Capital Ideas | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Marketing / Sales

The experience of … entrepreneurs reflects an unfortunate reality: companies are set up to perform. They are not set up to produce. If they were more capable at producing, they would not have to worry about combating disruption from outside. They would already be skilled at redesigning, disrupting, and innovating from within.

Content: Quotation | Authors: John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Organizational Behavior

Valuing any company can be difficult because it requires a degree of forecasting future growth & competition and ultimately the profits of the organization.

Editor’s Note: in a way this is a topical article centered on the dropping valuations of startup companies in early 2016, but much of the discussion is of long-term relevance for anyone interested in entrepreneurship and venture capital.

Content: Article | Author: Mark Suster | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

effectual entrepreneurs see the world as open to a host of possibilities, fabricate as well as recognize new opportunities, make rather than find markets, accept and leverage failure, and interact with a variety of stakeholders—all for the purposes of creating the future rather than trying to predict the future.

Content: Quotation | Author: Saras Sarasvathy | Source: Babson Insight | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

Content: Quotation | Author: Eric Ries | Source: OPEN Forum (American Express) | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Too many people think only of their own profit. But business opportunity seldom knocks on the door of self-centered people. No customer ever goes to a store merely to please the storekeeper.

Content: Quotation | Source: OPEN Forum (American Express) | Subjects: Customer Related, Entrepreneurship, Management

Entrepreneurial genius—individual or collective—is a constant, torturous struggle between “being your best” and winning. Greatness without triumph isn’t truly great, but winning without being the best you can be is also a failure on some level.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael Schrage | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Achievement, Entrepreneurship, Success / Failure

While big company CEOs are usually groomed for the job for years, startup CEOs aren’t—and they’re often young and relatively inexperienced in business in general. Author Matt Blumberg, a technology and marketing entrepreneur, knows this all too well.

As the fifth book in the StartUp Revolution series, this reliable resource is based on Blumberg’s experience as a startup CEO and covers a number of issues he’s … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Matt Blumberg | Subject: Entrepreneurship

The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they’re something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing.

Content: Quotation | Author: Paul Graham | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subject: Entrepreneurship

If you are self-aware, you know yourself and have a good sense of how others see and react to you. This is the emotional intelligence that Daniel Goleman has written about. You never stop being you, but you have to know how to be the version of you that is right for the business and the people in it. I think parenting is a good … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Derek Lidow | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Management