Founder Insights

In the world of startups, success stories often steal the spotlight. Yet, failure is a far more common companion on the entrepreneurial journey.

Investors and advisors may have told you your solution needs to be ten times better, faster, or cheaper than the competition. But why is that?

Creating and growing a company can be an incredible experience, but you will have days that seriously suck. Because I frequently talk about how challenging launching a startup can be, I want to share my worst day as a founder.

Founder stock vesting can be a touchy subject. If an investor asks you to vest your shares, you might worry that you will lose control or that they will take your ownership and kick you out.

Many new founders are confused about how cap tables, stock, and dilution work. Learn what you need to know to talk intelligently to your attorneys, investors, co-founders, and employees.

Why do you want to be an entrepreneur? It's an insane job with super high risk and crazy hours and totally unknown outcome at the end of the day.

Founders and CEOs can often get into the trap of working on mundane tasks while failing to take time to do the critical strategic thinking that will make the company soar. I share two frameworks that helped me in my startup.

This is the best of the best of my learnings from 25 years as a founder, angel, and advisor. Don’t miss this one.

Patent Attorney Adam Philipp explains what you need to know about patents and intellectual property as a startup founder.

Startup advice, in the form of a recipe or template for success, can cause more harm than good. Learn what to look out for.

I want to talk about a different way of thinking about your competitive environment. Your competition isn't just the other companies in your space.

Intelligence, skill, and hard work are necessary for your startup to succeed, but they are often not enough. In my experience, you need to be lucky too.

The busyness trap is when you get caught in a pattern of doing a lot but accomplishing little. I share some approaches to escaping from that trap.

What’s the difference between an intentional pivot and just having no clear direction? Learn to achieve focus with flexibility.

Founders often feel like frauds. Learn the nearly universal reality of impostor syndrome.

Passion provides a gigantic competitive advantage. Learn how to connect your business to your passion.

One of the most frightening moments as an entrepreneur is when you finally quit your day job. You can risk reduce that transition and improve your chances for angel funding at the same time.

As a human, you don’t scale well. That means delegating, which can be painful but is the only path to growth.

Making a video while evacuated from a massive wildfire helped me think about my priorities and when to push through difficulties.

Virality is the holy grail of business models. Learn the three different kinds of virality which you can use in your startup.

You want to keep control of your startup, but that does not mean you need to keep 51% ownership. Learn what really matters here.

Why do investors want to hear about your ability to execute more than your idea?