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In 2008, the world got a new music streaming service named Spotify. It was developed in Stockholm, Sweden, and provided digital rights management-protected content from record labels and media companies. It may have started out as a local thing, but the freemium service quickly expanded. Today, Spotify has more than 140 million monthly active users and over 50 million paying subscribers.

I had the pleasure of meeting up with Andreas Ehn, who was Spotify’s first employee and CTO. Andreas was responsible for the product and platform architecture as well as hiring a world-class engineering team, of which many have gone on to become successful entrepreneurs on their own.

After Spotify, Andreas founded Wrapp — a mobile online-to-offline customer...

Our Founder careers aren't defined by the size of our positive outcomes, they are defined by whether we've had one at all.

Therefore, if our outcomes are so important to us, shouldn't we first start with optimizing for the most likely outcome that will be meaningful to us? Is our idea more likely to become a $3 million business earning $1 million in profit or a $100 million business that could go IPO?

We need to start our journey, which implies an insane amount of tough decisions, aligning our path with outcomes that will not only be meaningful but those that we have the highest probability to achieve.

Optimizing for a Billion Dollars is Silly

To be fair, the "It has to be a billion dollars" is a mantra directly driven from the VC community...

It's really hard to convince people that money isn't the most important metric of a startup's success. Especially if those people happen to be investors, in which case, it actually is the most important metric.

But what we're talking about, as always, is what's important to Founders, and by extension to the people that work within that startup.

The broken part of the startup narrative has become this — "If it's growing fast and making money, it's successful, no matter what other costs are incurred."

I'd like to just go crazy for a moment and offer a new narrative — "If it's making everyone's lives geometrically better, then it's successful, and hopefully that means it's making money."

Focus on Making Lives Better? What?!

I know, I know. W...

When I’m listening to Naveen Jain describing his plan to create big business on the moon, it’s hard for me to grasp that he was once a poor child in India.

Today, Naveen is a billionaire and a very successful entrepreneur. His own recipe for success is, among other things, not knowing much and not being very good at anything. To me, that sounds like the opposite of what business life normally requires, yet Naveen isn’t joking, and his track record proves that he is not wrong either. After all, the young boy that grew up in poverty in India is today changing the world as we know it and has Sir Richard Branson and Google founder Larry Page as two of his good personal friends.

Jonathan: Naveen, I find it so inspiring that you have used entrepr...

I had the pleasure of talking to Blake about his ideas and experiences as a social entrepreneur. I started by asking him about how TOMS started.

Blake: I started TOMS after a trip I took to Argentina in 2006. I noticed that many of the locals wore shoes that I learned were alpargata. I also noticed that in rural villages there were many children who were without shoes and how that was affecting their daily lives. I had to come up with a way to help and knew that relying on donations alone was not a sustainable solution, so I used my knowledge of business to come up with an idea. The result was a for-profit business model that empowers customers to help children through their purchases. For every pair of shoes purchased, a new pair is given ...

Capital raising isn't about pitching investors, it's about getting in front of them to begin with. But how do we get introductions from investors if we don't know any?

We start with forming an Advisory Board.

The suggestion here isn't to form an Advisory Board specifically for raising capital — since there are a ton of benefits to having an Advisory Board. However, as a first step toward raising capital, it makes a ton of sense to surround ourselves with smart, well-connected people who believe in our product but also have been through the very gauntlet we're entering into. In the same way we'd hire a dev team to build an app, why wouldn't we round up a team of smart, well-connected Advisors to build our capital raise?

We don't need to be s...

Founders are really bad at asking for introductions.

On a daily basis I get a request that looks something like this: "Hey Wil, I see that you know (some investor), would you mind introducing me to them? I just had this idea 9 seconds ago and I'd love to see if they'd invest in me!"

Now, mind you, I make a living by helping Founders (my dream job) so making introductions is a huge part of my job. The problem isn't my willingness to make them, it's the inexperience of Founders in how to ask for an introduction.

As Founders, our ability to get introductions is the lifeblood of our growth. Here's how to do it incredibly well — and what to avoid like the plague.

Understand what Social Capital is

Every time I make an introduction to someone, I'm...

Decoupling startup stress from our "regular life" is one of the biggest challenges we deal with as Founders. Running a startup isn't like working at a job. The startup is a part of who we are, so our stress feels like it's imprinted into our very DNA.

Yet, at the same time, if we can't decouple our startup stress and our home lives, we risk destroying both. What we need is an actual strategy for freeing up our minds so that we can actually enjoy both sides of our lives.

Isolate and Attack the Problem

As Founders, we are awesome at attacking problems all day long at our startups. So why is it that we never isolate the problem of our "take-home stress" and attack it with the same intensity?

The first step is to isolate the problem as an actua...

A Founder that doesn't understand startup finance is a liability to the company.

The very survival of a startup comes down to whether we have enough cash to survive. If the Founder can't answer that question, it'd be like hopping on a jet with a pilot that doesn't understand how to read the altimeter, compass, or fuel gauge. They might be a great pilot, but without knowing the fundamentals, that trip is going to end poorly.

Fortunately, Founders don't need an MBA in finance to be competent, we just need to understand a few basic principles very well. While I'm the Founder + CEO of Startups.com, I'm also our CFO. That's because I learned long ago that with a solid understanding of just a few key principles, we can make (and avoid!) really cr...

You don’t have to have an original idea for a startup. Original ideas are difficult. And unproven. What if you find a business model that you like, and improve upon it?

I’ve heard it a couple times since, but once I was listening to some podcast and someone said to do “R&D… rip off and duplicate.” Oh the hilarity, right? Usually R&D means research and development, but instead, this guy was talking about copying someone else’s work.

It’s fine to do that. And it happens all the time.

Don’t let the business model already existing out there stop you from creating a similar business of your own.

If the business model already exists:

1. There’s probably a market for it
2. People probably buy the service
3. You can probably improve upon it

I say “probab...