992 Posts Found

In my work as an angel investor and advisor, I often find myself dishing out the same advice: Do the work to make sure you are building a product that people will actually find valuable. That requires an incredibly deep understanding of the user, their hopes, and their motivations, instead of taking the easier path of operating off of untested assumptions.

Many entrepreneurs may do this … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Sunita Mohanty | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Market Research, Marketing / Sales, Project Management

Start-ups often take a while to get their execution right, primarily because of founder overoptimism. On the one hand, optimism is necessary to create a company. But on the other hand, that same optimism gets them into trouble by getting in the way of good judgment. Achieving the proper balance between optimism and execution takes one to two business-building cycles. You also need to balance … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Vivek Mehra | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Resilient founders don’t ask “Which competitor are we scared of?” Instead, it’s “What fully-formed company would be an existential threat to us, whether it exists or not? And if it doesn’t exist, why aren’t we building it?”

Content: Quotation | Author: Bob Moore | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Strategy

I don’t worry about competition, I worry about my own vision being wrong, which creates an opportunity for competition to succeed. If anything, I think we spent too much energy thinking about the noise everyone else was making and not enough thinking about our own place in the real market.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bob Moore | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Competitive Intelligence, Entrepreneurship, Management, Strategy

Can an algorithm outperform the average angel investor? And if it can, does that also mean it will make less biased investments? Researchers put these questions to the test: They built an investing algorithm and put it head to head with 255 angel investors in a simulation, asking it to select the most promising investment opportunities among 623 deals from one of the largest European … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Charlotta Siren, Dietmar Grichnik, Ivo Blohm, Joakim Wincent, Malin Malmstrom, Torben Antretter | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Finance, Venture Capital

One of the most common startup failure modes is investing in too many channels at once, and as a result not investing in any one channel enough. As an example, betting big on both SEO and virality feels like a really good idea (“We’ll grow twice as fast!”), but in practice it rarely works. And it’s often not clear that either of these routes are … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Dan Hockenmaier, Lenny Rachitsky | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Marketing / Sales

Founders shouldn’t feel that they have to go it alone. An abundance of support and high-quality advice can make all the difference in times like these, which means getting the most out of your existing network of advisors and investors has never been more important.

Advice is by no means a silver bullet. And as we’ve previously noted, we’re steadfast believers that the best advice often … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Two years ago, our team at First Round, led by Partner Bill Trenchard and VP Platform Brett Berson, began to quietly build out a program to help our founders navigate the choppy waters of follow-on fundraising. Long had we observed founders caught off guard by what was needed to raise their Series A after having a relatively easy time at the seed stage.

Realizing how … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Bill Trenchard, Brett Berson | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

When a founder says in a plainspoken manner, “When we close, we’re going to be…” you know that they already see the money in the bank. There’s no extra emphasis as they make the statement, but it’s clear it’s not in question. When talking about the future of your company orient around “when” and not “if.”

Content: Quotation | Author: Brett Berson | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

Consider comedians. Comedians don’t live in a different world [than] everyone else; they just see the humor in it. Likewise, entrepreneurs see opportunity where the majority sees mature, intractable markets. Entrepreneurial epiphanies come from a beginners mind, not a jaded one.

Content: Quotation | Author: Anne Dwane | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation

From lack of product-market fit to disharmony on the team, we break down the top 20 reasons for startup failure by analyzing 101 startup failure post-mortems.

Content: Article | Source: CB Insights | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Startups that grow into transformative companies do two things: (1) they nail the basics and (2) they cultivate the right habits (core operating principles).

The first is mandatory. If you don’t get the basics right, in all probability your company won’t succeed. A list of things we consider basics:

• Fundraising (don’t run out of capital)
• Ship (don’t just talk about it, ship it)
• Customer focus (live

… [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: James Currier | Source: NFX | Subjects: Best Practices, Entrepreneurship, Management

How the right mix of experience and innovation generates a great start-up top management team.

Content: Article | Author: Nathan Furr | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Nikhyl Singhal advises folks at every end of the startup spectrum, from scrappy early-stage founders to heads of product at some of the biggest unicorns. Founders and product leaders at companies big and small bring him their toughest questions: When should founders hand over the product controls? What should you look for in a PM? How do you structure the team? How do you balance … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Nikhyl Singhal | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management

Gloria Lin has gone on a lot of dates in the past year. No, not that kind. We’re talking about co-founder dating. As the next generation of company builders takes shape and new founder mafias spin out of places like Stripe, it stands to reason that more co-founder stories won’t fit the traditional mold, and will instead look a lot more like Lin’s.

Lin’s process is … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Gloria Lin | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often, innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why.

Editor’s Note: for more on this theme, read “Visionary, Salesman and Pragmatist Model of Business Succes.”

Content: Article | Author: Steve Blank | Source: VentureBeat | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

Having the best product won’t help your start-up without a focus on segmentation, targeting and positioning.

Content: Article | Author: Patrick ‘Mad’ Mork | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Entrepreneurship

When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they’re making — not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. Usually this initial group of users is small, for the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed and that could be built with … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation

There are strong arguments that diversity promotes effectiveness. But I think that has implications that people haven’t really thought through. What about situations where some people believe diversity produces ineffectiveness? That’s not a hypothetical — this has long been the argument against diversity in the military. But there’s a counter-argument rooted in social justice. Do I want to live in a world where people’s outcomes … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ken Shotts | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

As Vinod Khosla has observed, your market entry strategy is often different from your market disruption strategy. And too many people focus on how small the market entry side is, but the entry point almost definitionally has to be small, because you have to find a space that isn’t covered or saturated by incumbents. If you find a gap and push your way through, often … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Elad Gil, Vinod Khosla | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Strategy