992 Posts Found

In my experience, it will generally take three to four rounds of equity capital to finance the business and 20-25% of the company to recruit and retain a management team. That will typically leave the founder/founder team with 10-20% of the business when it’s all said and done.

Content: Article | Author: Fred Wilson | Source: A VC | Subject: Entrepreneurship

There’s a joke about startups. “For every 10 startups you see in the market, 11 of them will fail.” I didn’t want to think that my startup would be the one to fail, and no entrepreneur does. I thought I knew it all…or at least would learn it all during the process of launching my startup. After my own failure, I became obsessed with understanding … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Anastasia Mudrova | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Startups go through a series of steps before they become a large company.

Content: Article | Author: Steve Blank | Source: ThinkGrowth.org | Subject: Entrepreneurship

The dynamics of companies change fundamentally when they exceed roughly 150 people, in ways that startup founders can struggle to address.

Content: Article | Author: Kevin J. Delaney | Source: Quartz | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

Khalid Halim notices patterns in startups that how companies scale and break matches military groupings. In this exclusive interview, he pulls at the strings of this scaling-and-breaking phenomenon to articulate what he calls the law of startup physics. He explains how companies and people grow at different rates — and what this tension means for how both will break while scaling. Halim shares how he’s … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Khalid Halim | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Cognitive behavior theory says automatic thoughts color and distort our observations, our judgments, and our actions. These automatic thoughts come to mind without even trying. They reflect deep beliefs about self, past experiences, and expectations for the future, and they have a profound impact on judgment and behavior. I’ve met thousands of founders over the last decade or so and I think many of them … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael Dearing | Source: Medium | Subject: Entrepreneurship

In my short career as a VC, I’ve reviewed thousands of pitch decks and helped hundreds of founders refine their pitches. Additionally, I’m often approached by founder friends to provide feedback on their slides before they go to market. Given pitch decks are frequently discussed and they’re essential in the fundraising process, I thought it would be useful to create a simple guide to building … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Steve Schlafman | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

For the first-time and early-stage founder out there, it can be daunting to recruit and hire executives — especially when you don’t have enough knowledge to test them for skill in their area of expertise. In this exclusive interview, Marco Zappacosta shares his four-step process for identifying and vetting his leadership team. From job descriptions to interview questions to references, Zappacosta shares his approach to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Marco Zappacosta | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Human Resources

A common question entrepreneurs have is how much equity you should grant when you make a hire. Fred Wilson addresses that question in this post.

Content: Article | Author: Fred Wilson | Source: A VC | Subject: Entrepreneurship

VCs turn down 99% of the companies they’re introduced to. Most of those don’t make it to a face to face meeting. If you’ve made it to an in-person meeting, here are the numbers you need to know to get a VC excited.

Content: Article | Author: Ash Rust | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

Founders at companies like Tesla, Paypal, and Airbnb all have traits in common. Learn what six skills they share.

Content: Multimedia Content | Authors: Amy Wilkinson, Sukhjit Ghag | Source: Stanford University | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Advice from Kellogg faculty experts on starting and running your own business.

Content: Article | Source: Kellogg Insight | Subject: Entrepreneurship

In the early days of building a company, it’s hard to step back and think about the bigger picture when there are always so many fires to fight or opportunities to chase down. That’s a shame, because looking at your business from a 50,000-foot view often reveals areas of misplaced focus or resource misallocation.
 
One technique that can break through the bubble of always being in … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Leo Polovets | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Risk Management

Avoid people whose skills complement yours. Consider the “cell division” approach instead.

Content: Article | Author: Roy Bahat | Subject: Entrepreneurship

As a founder, learning how to launch your startup is incredibly important. But as your project grows, you will have more and more people following your lead. Many founders are inexperienced at the art of leadership and lack the management principles necessary to build an enduring company. History ー even the history of Silicon Valley ー furnishes many illustrations of skillful leadership and of principles … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Aneesh Pappu, Josh Singer | Source: Medium | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Leadership

After watching other founders – including myself – flail about, pivoting their way through the darkness, I’ve become obsessed with being more systematic and disciplined about entrepreneurship. So I decided to take Leo Polovets’ lead and standardize risk management into a single spreadsheet, which you can copy, download, or remix.

Content: Article | Author: Josh Smith | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Risk Management

When Leslie Ziegler joined the founding team of Rock Health in 2010, she had an enormous task ahead of her: make the intimidating world of institutional health care approachable for startup founders. No matter what the firm did next, its brand was going to have to do this heavy lifting, and as a veteran art director with the likes of McCann Erickson and DDB, this … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Leslie Ziegler | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Brand, Entrepreneurship, Marketing / Sales

The clearest indicator of the values driving a company — your own or one you’re considering joining — is already in motion from the start, in one of the last places you’re probably looking: compensation.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bethanye McKinney Blount | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Culture, Entrepreneurship, Human Resources

If you’re a B2B startup founder, having warm relationships with a crowd of prospective customers is an ideal. But it can also be a reality. In this exclusive interview, Peter Kazanjy shares the steps any startup — no matter how small — can use to build its own, robust Customer Advisory Board. He covers how to recruit members, gather high-quality feedback, keep relationships strong, and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Pete Kazanjy | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

As a professor teaching strategy, most recently at Harvard Business School and Northeastern University, I have tried to offer the minimum essential explanation of an integrated view of strategy, to combine the best of the many frameworks that exist, show how they relate to one another, and distill the field to the essentials that entrepreneurs need to know to get started.

I’ve published my notes … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Kevin J. Boudreau | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Strategy