Founders don't get the luxury of sharing openly — at least not without consequences.
Unfortunately, we learn this lesson the hard way, from acting and sharing like we used to do as an employee, only to find out that Founders don't get the same "safe space" we once enjoyed as employees.
Our startups are now a complex web of relationships, responsibilities and again, consequences that we need to understand and respect every time we're about to open our mouths about, well, anything.
When we were in our last job as an employee, we didn't really understand consequences the way we do now. If we got really pissed about something a co-worker did, we could hop on a Slack chat or if we were really clueless about this stuff,...
There is absolutely a point where the cost of building our startup is simply too high.
The problem is all of our startup lore tells us otherwise. When I talk about building my new startup I talk about not taking a vacation for 7 years, not seeing my family for 3 years, and eating nothing but Ramen Noodles for a decade.
OK, the last part isn't true, it was Chocolate Pop-Tarts dipped in Nestle Quick (I was living big all along!)
We've built a culture around respecting the sacrifice, which is only somewhat helpful. What's dangerous is when we wind up taking it too far. How far is too far? That's the $0 question.
One of the most difficult things about being a startup Founder is that you have to be willing to sac...
A great startup idea is nothing without a great co-founder. Finding the right partner is instrumental to your success: “teams with more than one founder outperformed solo founders by a whopping 163%” says the First Round Capital Ten Year Project report.
However, you can’t just take the first person who likes your idea and call her your partner. Being co-founders is like being married.
My co-founder Diana and I realized we’d make perfect co-founders after going on an adventure of a lifetime in South East Asia. A few years ago I became obsessed with doing the Pinnacles hike on Borneo, Malaysia. Diana, who at the time was my climbing buddy, agreed to come.
It took three planes, a bus, a kayak and a three-hour ...
In the moment when our startup ship is sinking to the bottom of the ocean, everyone has jumped on the life rafts, and we're wondering what the world will think of us, what goes through our minds?
Whether we fail or not, we've all run through the same scenarios. The only difference is when we fail for real, we get to see what actually happens. We get to see what kind of support we really have and what people will really think about us.
But what's both sad and comforting is how few people will care at all.
In our minds, we're sitting around thinking that everyone is against us. Every investor, employee, partner, customer, even random people we don't know are sitting around taking turns bashing us. In every one of our soc...
Let’s get one thing out of the way quickly, the following tactic is not how to raise capital from Angels.
Selected this example because the sender clearly has ‘1 mutual connection’ and yet it wasn’t worth their time to use that connection to get a warm intro.
Cold introductions are infertile ground.
This is true not only of capital but most other lead types also.
With that out of the way, one way to approach the question of Seed capital for your startup is to understand what it isn’t.
Money to help raise a toddler.
Allow...
Welcome to Phase Four of a four-part Splitting Equity Series. If you missed it, start your journey here: Introduction - Early Startup Equity — Getting it Right before continuing on if you haven’t already, and go in order from there.
Phase One - Startup Equity - Avoiding Early Mistakes
Phase Two - How Startup Equity Works
Phase Three - How to Split Equity
Phase Four - Part 1 - Equity Management ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)
Part 2 - Recovering Startup Equity
Let's continue!
Splitting startup equity is only half the challenge for early-stage startups — managing startup equity is a whole different issue! How much equity we split and the founders' ownership percentage is generally determined by what we expect each founder to contribute.
But the problem is once ...
The mobile internet has been both a blessing and a curse for startups and small businesses looking to build their brands from the ground up.
Never before in history has achieving awareness and influence been so democratized. Truly any brand can have their 15 seconds of fame – or more. However, that’s also the curse. There is more noise than ever before to stand out from and drive awareness.
Therefore it’s not a surprise that when we recently asked over 500 startup & small business owners what their primary digital marketing objective was — their number one priority was to increase company and product awareness. It even beat out driving inbound leads and customers — go figure.
In order to achieve brand awareness in this new mobile-driven, ...
We’ve spent the last couple of sessions at Startups Live talking about idea validation: how do you know if an idea you have is an actual viable business in the first place? How do you go about learning about your idea from the people whose opinions matter most – customers?
For this session, we’re staying on the idea validation theme, but we’re taking it a bit more tactical, focusing on actual, concrete methods you can use to validate your ideas. Joining us for this conversation is Stuart Brent, founder of userinput.io, a service that provides on-demand feedback for websites and business ideas. Stuart has shared his favorite startup idea validation techniques with us in the past, and he added his insights to this conversation as well.
Why the hell would anyone quit a stable, successful, six-figure job at a global company? A job where you work with fun, intelligent colleagues, get heated covered parking (crucial in Chicago), and can travel the world almost any day you choose. A career that helps support a family, pays the mortgage, and still leaves a few bucks left over for all the protein bars you can eat. You’d have to be an idiot, right?!
My sources of motivation: family, friends, sports, and a startup. (Dennis Timpanaro)
Truth is, some days I do feel like a real dumb dumb for starting my own business. Those days I tend to focus on my shortcomings and failures. I vividly relive getting cut at the Olympic Trials, being ...
There is a ton of hidden treasure in failed startups — you just have to know how to look for it, and ultimately, how to capture it.
After my first (not last) venture-funded startup tanked, everyone pretty much ran for the hills. Investors bailed, the team got other jobs, and customers found better solutions. But I kept thinking "We just spent a ton of money to build all of this, can't I capture this value back?"
Then it occurred to me — the same thing is happening for countless other failed startups. All of the assets that they spent millions to build just get buried. Everyone tries to make a last-ditch effort to sell them off, but in most cases, it never works and they just evaporate.
But what if we were the ones looking to dig up that bur...