In today’s startup marketplace, we tend to overvalue founding teams with experience building technology products and undervalue teams with domain expertise in the particular market being addressed. Let’s consider two fictional founders, Bill & Ted, creating two different startups to attack the same market: Bill is a great engineer. He worked at Google for 5 […]

“Enterprise technology” and “beautiful design” aren’t typically used in the same sentence. But just because the application is made for IT-users, doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful or easy to use. Believe me, I know – I relied on that kind of software earlier in my career as a data analyst. What exactly does enterprise […]

As companies grow, the agile culture of “think fast, act fast’ must eventually play nicely with the anchor of sustainability. This transition can be a bit of a mind-bend and even feel like operating in two worlds, especially in the beginning. The question becomes: “is it possible to integrate consistent systems and processes and still […]

All business verticals have their own mechanics, some of which aren’t as obvious from the outside looking in. I’ve spent the last 8 years in the wonderful world of ratings, where the acronym PEARL is an easy way to remember an important mechanic. The great thing about PEARL is that it applies to any situation […]

Our friends at the Young Entrepreneurship Council asked eight entrepreneurs to share their top tips for pitching investors, based on their own success and failures. Here’s what they found: Share your vision, not a product tour It’s a rookie error for an entrepreneur to pitch an investor with the equivalent of a product tour. Investors are usually more […]

It stinks when clients leave you. All that effort to win them over, and then, unexpectedly, they give their next project to someone else. We’ve all experienced that. It’s normal to lose some clients, but some hard lessons over the years as well as a recent conversation with Rajat Paharia, author of the bestseller Loyalty […]

When you’re swamped with work and every helping hand is tied up elsewhere, you’ll need to decide between hiring a full-time employee or a freelancer. Wrong decisions can play mightily on your cash flow and productivity (two pretty important factors for startups), so here are some thoughts to keep in mind. 1. Look in the […]