992 Posts Found

In my experience, the more true we are to our own creative gifts the less there is an outer reassurance or help at the beginning. The more we are on the path, the deeper the silence in the first stages of the process. Following our path is in effect a kind of going off the path, through open country, there is a certain early stage … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: David Whyte | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Personal Development

An inventor is simply a person who doesn’t take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates from college, he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he’s out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails, maybe a thousand times. If he succeeds once, he’s … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Charles Kettering | Subjects: Education, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Success / Failure

A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.

Content: Quotation | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

The success of ‘stretch goals’ to power performance in existing businesses can blind managers to the reality that similar techniques cannot be used to drive the creation of new businesses. Stretch goals work in existing businesses because managers get stuck in ruts and the stretch can unlock their thinking. In the search for new businesses managers have no ruts to unlock. Stretch just distracts them … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Andrew Campbell | Source: European Business Forum (EBF) | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management

Daily Muse co-founder and startup advisor Kathryn Minshew has started several startups and has the battle scars to prove it. In this 99U talk, Minshew shares common mistakes made by startup founders, and reveals the remedies to each. Chief among them? The “Gollum Syndrome” where founders treat their companies as “their precious.” Just launch and iterate, says Minshew, because “an ugly baby is better than … [ Read more ]

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Kathryn Minshew | Source: 99U | Subject: Entrepreneurship

To founders, the behavior of investors is often opaque—partly because their motivations are obscure, but partly because they deliberately mislead you. And the misleading ways of investors combine horribly with the wishful thinking of inexperienced founders.

Content: Quotation | Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

The most important thing to understand about valuation is that it’s not that important.

Founders who raise money at high valuations tend to be unduly proud of it. Founders are often competitive people, and since valuation is usually the only visible number attached to a startup, they end up competing to raise money at the highest valuation. This is stupid, because fundraising is not the test … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

Be nice when investors reject you. The best investors are not wedded to their initial opinion of you. If they reject you in phase 2 and you end up doing well, they’ll often invest in phase 3. In fact investors who reject you are some of your warmest leads for future fundraising. Any investor who spent significant time deciding probably came close to saying yes. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

Avoid investors till you decide to raise money, and then when you do, talk to them all in parallel, prioritized by expected value, and accept offers greedily. That’s fundraising in one sentence. Don’t introduce complicated optimizations, and don’t let investors introduce complications either.

Content: Quotation | Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

Most startups that raise money do it more than once. A typical trajectory might be (1) to get started with a few tens of thousands from something like Y Combinator or individual angels, then (2) raise a few hundred thousand to a few million to build the company, and then (3) once the company is clearly succeeding, raise one or more later rounds to accelerate … [ Read more ]

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

There have been fantastic essays written about the fundraising process. This is not a guide to fundraising, but rather a look behind the curtain from experience as a venture investor at most of the quantitative metrics that are analyzed when judging an early-stage startup. These metrics fall into five groups: financial, user, acquisition, sales, and marketing. While the statistics are important, the relevant weight any … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Danny Crichton | Source: TechCrunch | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Although many startups hope to become venture capital-backed companies, few understand how the venture capital industry works. In this Crash Course, Jason Mendelson and Brad Bernthal will attempt to illuminate what many consider the venture capital black box. They will explain how venture capitalists think, how they raise their funds, and how they decide to invest their money. If you are a startup looking to … [ Read more ]

Content: Multimedia Content | Authors: Brad Bernthal, Jason Mendelson | Subject: Entrepreneurship

The author of The Lean Startup is thinking big about the challenges facing companies in an economy driven by innovation.

Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Eric Ries, Paul Michelman | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management

There is a wonderful psychologist at the University of Toronto called Jordan Peterson… He says that if you look at the big five personality traits, entrepreneurs are characterized by openness — which is obvious — creativity; conscientiousness – again, obvious — diligence [and being] disagreeable. That is to say, they are not people who require the social approval of their peers.

Content: Quotation | Author: Malcolm Gladwell | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Learning is the unit of progress in entrepreneurship. It’s more important than making money, getting customers, building features, or engineering technical quality. Of course, those things are important, but only insofar as they contribute to learning what creates value and what creates waste.

Content: Quotation | Author: Eric Ries | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Entrepreneurship

The problem is that in finance, equities never become bonds. They’re separate assets. But successful entrepreneurial products grow up to become established products. Under the old system, the people who launch a product tend to migrate with it. That causes a lot of problems because the skills and at-titudes that make for effective entrepreneurs don’t necessarily make for effective managers of status quo operations.

Content: Quotation | Author: Eric Ries | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

Entrepreneurs often talk about the importance of identifying a mission that is likely to stay consistent even while the scope changes as the venture grows, as customers engage with it, and as it is influenced by the ecosystem. Developing a mission and guiding vision that is malleable enough to accommodate and even anticipate inevitable pivots is critical for success. All ideas change, and entrepreneurs need … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Heidi Neck | Source: Babson Insight | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Mission

Entrepreneurial leaders need to learn to be cognitively ambidextrous, engaging both prediction logic and creation logic, in their decision-making approach. When an organization’s future goals and environment reflect the past, entrepreneurial leaders can engage traditional analytic models to predict and manage the situation. However, when the future is unknowable and bears little resemblance to the past, entrepreneurial leaders must learn how to create the future … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Babson Insight | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Leadership

Venture capital is in the midst of a structural sea change, evolving from a secretive old boys club into a much more accessible and transparent… well, new boys club. One thing that has generally remained guarded, however, is investment strategy. Not the broad strokes of sector and stage focus, but the nitty-gritty about how a firm makes its decisions on who to fund and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Dan Primack | Source: FORTUNE | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital | Company: Bloomberg Beta

Paul Graham, essayist, programmer, investor, and co-founder of YCombinator, the Silicon Valley tech accelerator program, describes a contrast between “maker schedules” versus “manager schedules.” Manager schedules break the day into hourlong chunks conducive for meetings and communication, but not for work that requires deep thinking, creative problem-solving, writing, or making. The work of [entrepreneurship] necessitates uninterrupted blocks of time.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Heidi Neck, Paul Graham | Source: Babson Insight | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Time Management