992 Posts Found

VC funding. Our perspectives on the topic wax and wane with market cycles. We love capital efficiency until we love land grabs until we abhor “over funding” until we get huge distribution & ring the bell for more funding until we attract every non-VC on the planet to invest in startups until it crashes and we start the cycle all over again none the wiser. … [ Read more ]

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

No matter the stage of the business, startups need to manage the size of their Employee Stock Option Pool or ESOP. The ESOP contains the shares set aside by the company for hiring and retaining employees. Like a financial budget, ESOP budgets help a startup plan how to finance its growth.

Content: Article | Author: Tomasz Tunguz | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Finance

Here are some sobering statistics for entrepreneurs. In 2011, more than 400,000 new business entities were launched in the United States, but 34% of those companies are now out of business. Two years from now, less than half will still be around. By 2018 only 30% will have survived.

What’s behind these failure rates? In many cases it’s a lack of salesmanship, says Waverly Deutsch, clinical … [ Read more ]

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

Entrepreneurship can be personally rewarding and good for the economy, if we wipe the stardust from our eyes.

Content: Article | Authors: George Foster, Lee Simmons | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Economics, Entrepreneurship

Equity is one of the most important aspects of working for a startup, but it’s often confusing. Here’s what you need to know about equity before joining a startup.

Content: Article | Author: Conner Forrest | Source: TechRepublic | Subjects: Career, Entrepreneurship

Paul Graham is a renowned programmer and wildly successful venture capitalist. He also happens to be a talented writer. You should ideally just go read his actual essays, but if you’re short on time, Stelios Constantinides has cropped the most important pieces from his favorite essays.

Content: Article | Author: Paul Graham | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Whether you’re a first time founder or a serial entrepreneur, there’s always room to learn and grow. Here are 10 blogs that every founder should be reading.

Content: Article | Author: Conner Forrest | Source: TechRepublic | Subject: Entrepreneurship

“Startup communities” are popping up everywhere, from cities like Boulder to Boston and even in countries such as Iceland. These types of entrepreneurial ecosystems are driving innovation and small business energy. Startup Communities documents the buzz, strategy, long-term perspective, and dynamics of building communities of entrepreneurs who can feed off of each other’s talent, creativity, and support.

Based on more than twenty years of Boulder-based entrepreneur … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Brad Feld | Subject: Entrepreneurship

DocSend, a startup that provides people with a secure and private way of sharing files like offer letters or legal agreements, studied more than 200 pitchdecks to figure out the right way to graduate from bootstrapped to seed-funded, or from angels to a Series A.

They partnered with Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann to look at companies that had raised $360 million in total.

What did … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Kim-Mai Cutler | Source: TechCrunch | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

A Silicon Valley VC shares his thoughts on persistence, the importance of believing, and when to ignore the spreadsheet.

Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Bill Snyder, Vinod Khosla | Source: Stanford University | Subject: Entrepreneurship

One of the biggest things that can work against a startup being good is growth. A lot of what makes a company good is common knowledge. If everybody 
in a company knows everything, then generally it is going to be a pretty good place to work. Communication is super high fidelity. Everybody is on the same page, and 99 percent of the work people do … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ben Horowitz | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Still in his early thirties, Chris is on the verge of completing a tour of every country on earth – he’s already visited more than 175 nations – and yet he’s never held a “real job” or earned a regular paycheck. Rather, he has a special genius for turning ideas into income, and he uses what he earns both to support his life of … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Chris Guillebeau | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Guy Kawasaki evangelizes the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a pitch should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.This rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc. This infographic will help you fine tune what to put on your ten slides. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Guy Kawasaki | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Productivity / Work Tips

That first mile—where an innovation moves from an idea on paper to the market—is often plagued by failure. In fact, less than one percent of ideas launched by big companies end up having real impact. The ideas aren’t the problem. It’s the process.

The First Mile focuses on the critical moment when an innovator moves from planning to reality. It is a perilous place where hidden … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Scott D. Anthony | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Management

There are few factors that can make a company more successful, fun, and epic than an awesome co-founder. There are few factors that can make a company more unsuccessful, aggravating, and pathetic than an incompetent, lazy, or dishonest co-founder. This article explains the art of the picking a co-founder.

Content: Article | Author: Guy Kawasaki | Subject: Entrepreneurship

If you’ve been acting more like a worker and less like a leader, these 5 activities can put you firmly back in the driver’s seat of your small business.

Content: Article | Author: Anita Campbell | Source: OPEN Forum (American Express) | Subjects: Career, Management, Small Business

Interest in developing entrepreneurial skills is exploding, and thus new approaches are emerging to keep up with demand—and also keep up with the changing nature of entrepreneurship education. Where are these new approaches coming from? And, how precisely are the new ways of conceiving entrepreneurship education different than traditional approaches? With these two practical questions in mind, below we discuss some key developments in the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Candida G. Brush, Heidi Neck, Patricia G. Greene | Source: Babson Insight | Subject: Entrepreneurship

The founder of Garage Technology Ventures says grabbing the attention of investors requires crafting a succinct and compelling story.

Content: Article | Author: Deborah Petersen | Source: Stanford University | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Working with startups showed Ernesto Sirolli how anyone can have more impact: Shut up and listen.

Content: Article | Author: Sally Helgesen | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Entrepreneurship

In most cases it takes good people to grow a business, and for an entrepreneur, this means delegating and trusting others to deliver the results that will grow the firm. Hiring the right people, engaging them in the pursuit of their dreams and giving meaning to the employees who are building the business requires different skills than those needed to launch a business. Readers will … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Edward Hess | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Entrepreneurship