Oftentimes, a magician uses “smoke and mirrors” to make something disappear, right before your eyes. With early-stage entrepreneurs, “smoke and mirrors” often means making it appear that a product or startup success exists, before it actually does, in an effort to close a client sale or get a cash deposit with which to fund your […]
Startup Weekend
8 Deadly Wastes that Every Entrepreneur Must Avoid
Every entrepreneur I know is short on resources, including time, money, and skills. The last thing they can afford is to waste any of these, but in my mentoring and coaching activities, I see it happening all too often. Waste in a startup is any activity that absorbs resources, but creates no value or competitive […]
The Importance of Social Media for Enterprise Tech Startups
Enterprise tech startups generally don’t elicit a wellspring of fervent fandom. On the spectrum of technology awareness, let’s just say that folks are not lining up overnight in front of Oracle stores to eagerly buy the latest database release. On that front, don’t expect to see EMC open any holiday pop-up stores, Infor to do […]
IP Primer for Startups
Let me guess: You have an idea for a startup. It’s an awesome plan for a lightweight, agile SaaS killer app that could scale to 1 million users in 6 months. Or maybe it’s some fancy new spring-loaded, arduino-infused wearable that’ll be more ubiquitous than the iPhone. Either way let me also hazard a guess that […]
10 Top Relationship Strategies for Startup Leaders
Just because you are an entrepreneur, or work in a startup, you can’t ignore the rules of building and maintaining relationships. Many despise these experiences in corporate environments, and leave for a startup, only to find that they have to be able to navigate a similar minefield there of workplace and business relationships to be […]
What I Have Learned Building My Startup
The journey to building a startup seems daunting and unachievable to many. For me, it was very much the opposite. Over the past few months, since creating the first prototype and concept to the actual public release of our beta app, it’s been quite a journey, to say the least. Pitching to over 100 people […]
Startup Founders Need to Manage Their Optimism
I’m sure we have all seen entrepreneurs with high levels of passion and confidence touting an idea that makes very little sense to us. Of course, we never see ourselves in this mode, yet we need to recognize that all humans see reality differently through a built-in set of “cognitive biases,” based on their own […]
5 Days to Decide Whether You’re Ready to Found
A step by step process to evaluate your idea and, more importantly, whether you really want to be an entrepreneur. You have an idea that could grow into a world-changing, money-belching company. So you’re thinking of founding your first startup. The trouble is that there’s no obvious path to becoming an entrepreneur. In the […]
Try to Kill Your Startup Before You Start
Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of sitting on an investor panel with Joe Dwyer, a partner at OCA Ventures, a good colleague of mine. I thought he made a very interesting comment, that I told him I was going to steal (with his permission). He was counseling the startups in the room to “try to kill […]
Flex Your Intellect @NYCSW: 5 Things Agencies Can Learn From Hackathons
Last weekend I attended Startup Weekend NYC—a 2 ½ day hackathon—an open call for entrepreneurs, designers, developers, creative strategists and the biz dev obsessed. Startup Weekend is headquartered in Seattle has been around for 4+ years and is found in over 200 cities around the world. From Mongolia to South Africa to London to Brazil, […]
New York City’s Curated Startup Events – AlleyWatch Event Guide: June 23rd – June 29th
Each week we bring you a handy guide to just a few of the events we think should not be missed. On any given night, there are too many events. You can’t attend all of them and neither should you, unless you’re a career socialite. The week of June 23rd – June 29th seems to […]