It’s easy to get lost in the Silicon Valley sauce. I know because I’ve been there. Startups are sexy and we’re surrounded by news of big rounds of funding, the newest cohorts accepted in to prestigious accelerators (like Y Combinator) and essays from legendary investment firms such as a16z.
The examples are endless.
They’ve all earned their names for a reason and produced excellent learning resources for aspiring founders.
But, there’s one caveat, often overlooked by new founders:
They create fantastic resources, tailored toward founders headed down the venture capital (VC) route.
This might seem like small fries— But, not being aware of this caveat can fundamentally (and subconsciously) shift an entrepreneurs evaluation of wh...
Boris Wertz is the founder of VersionOne Ventures, an early-stage fund that has made over 35 investments in consumer Internet, SaaS, and mobile companies across North America. Clarity sat down with Boris to discuss how to find funding sources, how (and how much) to ask, and crafting the perfect pitch.
In order to raise money, most startups go through the same process: create a pitch deck, and then pitch it to investors.There are many types of investors, such as institutional investors who invest other people’s money, angel investors who invest their own money, and venture capitalists who privately or publicly provide total capital for a new venture.
Where can you find funding?
First, you should think about what the right funding is. Everyon...
After graduating college I was working as a social worker running a foster care program for children with developmental disabilities when I found an ad online for someone selling a business — Amigos Spanish Program. It was a business that contracted with daycare centers to provide Spanish language classes to young children. I contacted them, reviewed a few spreadsheets and bought the business for $8k. I put it all on credit cards and started my quest towards millions… It was going to be great! I was going to own the biggest Spanish Language Class Business in the World…..or so I hoped.
I lost 20k over the year I owned it before I shut it down and closed the company operations for good. I was 22 years old with 22k in credit card debt with not...
Marc Andreessen isn’t just an industry legend, because he helped the modern Web browser. He’s not just an industry legend because he’s one the only folks who’ve co-founded two companies that exited for north of $1 billion each. Nor is he renowned simply for throwing a grenade into the cozy way venture capital had worked for decades, when he co-founded Andreessen Horowitz in 2009.
You get where I’m going with this… Andreessen might be “famous” for you for different reasons, depending on how old you are or when you first started paying attention to startups.
Plenty of conferences and magazines feature interviews with Andreessen where he talks about the future. What’s difficult is getting a man so excited about the future to talk about the pas...
A recent study done by for Fusion called the Massive Millennial Poll — which included 1,000 people between the ages of 18-34 — found that a firm 50 percent of millennials don’t think that there are only two genders.
Instead, people are viewing as gender and sex as two related but different things: Sex being a person’s biology (including genitals, chromosomes, and hormones) and gender being someone’s identity (including how they present themselves to the world and which pronouns they choose to use). While most people fall within the binary of “male” or “female,” there’s a growing portion of people who simply don’t.
And another cultural shift — online dating — is happening concurrently with this change in how we view gender. While online dati...
People say that the co-Founder relationship is like a marriage — but what about when it actually is a marriage?
That’s the case for Michael and Angela Smith. They founded YipYap and created the first Bluetooth-enabled smart phone for kids, Pipsqueak, after realizing that handing over their very expensive phones every time their four kids wanted to talk to Grandma just wasn’t going to work.
“I love — and I’ve told her this — I love doing business with her,” Michael told me over the phone from the house in Texas that he shares with Angela and their kids.
But juggling a successful startup, homeschooling their kids, and still finding time for each other isn’t easy. Things can hectic and it’s a constant balancing act for these life and business ...
What if I told you the perfect idea is a myth? We all know what the myth looks like – it’s this moment of inspiration where it’s so obvious that the world will love your idea for the Double Decker Couch. You rush downstairs in your PJs and begin a montage scene going from blueprint to big sale to furniture tycoon by the time the theme song is over.
Perfect ideas don’t exist because—until you put them into the real world—they’re just concepts. In the real world your idea will get beat up a thousand times until it barely resembles whatever is in your head right now.
We get caught up in the notion that if the idea in our head doesn’t check all the right boxes, then there must be a good reason to hold back...
For a very long time, I felt like my startup was a direct reflection of my worth as a person.
When my startup was doing well, I felt on top of the world (this was rare). But when my startup was struggling, which was 99% of the time, I felt it was a direct reflection of my own incompetence as a human, and I felt like hell. And so by way of that, I usually felt shitty.
It wasn't until I started exiting startups (good and bad exits) that my startups were just a moment in time. While they were a reflection of my output, they weren't a reflection of me. It took a few decades to figure that out, so let's see if I can help you do it in the next few paragraphs instead.
I'm a Dad, a carpenter, a crea...
Jim Hendrickson has successfully started 4 companies and he has bought and sold 7 more, consistently building them to the double digits in sales and returns. He sat down with us last week during a Clarity Live session and gave us his best advice on why it is important to build an exit strategy. Below are some of his tips on the art of successful exits:
Exit strategies improve the odds of success for a business. Whether it be liquidation, selling the business, an acquisition, or an IPO, it is important to think about your exit ahead of time, and doing so will lead to improvements in many other areas of your company.
Management
Exit strategies can help conquer and shine a light on bad management situations. Understanding how you want to exit ...
To grow or to profit, that is the question!
There we are, with a fistful of profit in our hands (finally!) and an endless list of places to spend it! Do we hire another engineer to get our product shipped faster? How about increasing our marketing budget to scale customer acquisition? Or, and let's just get crazy, do we finally pay ourselves?
I'm going to go out on a limb and spat in the face of startup lore, which suggests that the only way to succeed is to bet the farm and grow. Think of me as the owner of a casino (in this case, that casino is Startups.com) who gets to not only witness a handful of people bet it all and get rich, but 100x more bet it all and fail.
What we miss in our passion for greatness is that...