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Exactly one month ago, I landed a job at Roam Co-Living as their Channel Management Consultant. Roam is an international network of co-living and co-working spaces, designed for global travelers and digital nomads who want to see the world without sacrificing convenience, community, and comfort.

Working at a small, rapidly-growing organization like Roam has been an incredible experience, and I would recommend it to anyone. But, I didn’t get this opportunity through a job search, career fair, or recruiter.

It took hustle, plain and simple.

This journey started in November, shortly after I buried the VR startup I had been working on at the time. After a very brief mourning period, I decided to check out an organization called Venture for Ame...

James Wolf was late for our interview — two and a half hours late, to be exact. I’d speed walked the fifteen minutes from my apartment to his shop in Ho Chi Minh City’s expat hub, Thao Dien, at 8:30 in the morning, only to be met with a shuttered door and no signs of life inside. Sweating in the shade as loitering taxi drivers threw me curious looks, I called him up.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, picking up after a couple of rings. “I didn’t expect to have to go to the factory this morning but something came up and I’m just arriving, on my bike. Can I call you in a couple of hours when I’m headed back to Thao Dien?”

“Oh no problem!” I said. “It’s my bad! I should have sent a follow-up email.”

Now, anyone who knows me knows that that’s not my us...

One of the most common questions we get asked is, "Should I raise capital for my business?" _What they’re really asking is, “Can you tell me how to raise money and where to find it?”_

And our stock answer is simply "No".

That tends to mess with people — because they typically aren’t expecting pushback. But the reality is that there are actually very few reasons that a startup absolutely has to raise capital. Every startup could use it. But does every startup absolutely have to raise?

Nope.

Having answered this question about a billion times, it seemed like the right time to list what the decision tree for startup Founders should be when determining they must raise capital so we can distinguish the difference between "I need it" and "I have...

Clicking the “Publish” button is one of the highlights of my day.

Working hard on a post and then putting it out there to help others is extremely rewarding. It’s one of the main reasons why I continue to write so much.

But it’s not the only reason….

Content marketing remains one of the most effective strategies to grow a blog – any blog.

Eighty-six percent of marketers in North America use content marketing, and 71% of marketers (overall) are planning to increase spending on content marketing.

Creating great content is an extremely important part of any successful content marketing strategy. But it’s just one part.

If all you do is hit “Publish” and then move on to the next article, your blog won’t grow as quickly as it should.

And if you...

Pre–seed. Seed. Series A. Series B. Growth capital. Term sheets. Valuations. Cap Tables. Convertible notes. Market opportunity. Venture Capital. Angel investment. Equity Crowdfunding. Family offices.

While the learning curve is steep, getting funding is about more than just an understanding of terms, it’s about the art of relationships. For female founders, the funding landscape has been less than friendly. According to Crunchbase, the number of female-founded, venture backed companies has plateaued at 17% since 2012. Is venture the only way to go? Certainly not. There are a diversity of funding sources founders can tap into. Crowdfunding, for example, is the only type of funding where women outperform men.The SheWorx100 Summit NYC brough...

This is a stupid idea. Why did I quit my job? Why did my friends say they liked this idea? I bet they were just humoring me. What if nobody likes it? I have no clue what I am doing. I should ask for my old job back.

If you are even a month into starting your own business I am going to hazard a guess that at least one of these thoughts has popped into your mind. You’re not alone. Self-doubt is natural even for the most confident of people, your business is essentially a highly visible, physical manifestation of your beliefs and thoughts. So yes, it is scary exposing yourself in that way, the same way it would be scary if you were to share your love letters (Snapchats nowadays) with the world.

But this is not a good reason to stop or slow do...

Like any relationship, sometimes the spark gets lost and we want to move onto something else. The problem is, we're often incredibly tethered to what we've built.

What do we do about it?

Should I feel guilty about this?

Nope.

There's nothing that says just because we invented a job that it has to be our favorite job of all time. We love pizza, but that doesn't mean it should be the only food we eat for the rest of our lives.

Our interests absolutely change over time, and there's no reason our interest in our startups shouldn't change too.

What are my options if I want to bow out?

It depends on the quality of our team (if we have one).

The strongest move would be for us to level up all of the people around us so that they can have more ...

Startup failure is knowing our friends aren't asking about our startup because they already know we've failed.

It's knowing we're the punchline of community gossip, sometimes from fellow Founders who might have a right to joke, but mostly from those who don't.

It's about trading that exciting victory we dreamed about for the nightmare that kept us from sleeping at all.

Anxiety can be a Powerful Ally

Anxiety, however, can be a powerful motivator.

It's often a terrible, awful kind of energy that rots us to the core while accomplishing nothing useful. That's unless we judo-move that energy into something that powers us toward something positive.

We can stay up all night with our anxiety or we can stay up all night working on our next great ...

Nancy Duarte is a pro when it comes to presentations. Not just giving presentations, but starting them, finishing them, and every step in between. Author and co-founder of Duarte Designs, Nancy Duarte is a seasoned veteran when it comes to incorporating storytelling into speaking and creating connections with an audience.

The below video is the fifth part in a series of 10 in which Nancy shares the key components to making a successful pitch using creativity and critical thinking. Find out what she has to say:

Getting creative (and comfortable) with startup presentations

Back when startup presentations were nearly all slide-based, Nancy used to have a general rule-of-thumb: one slide would equal about two minutes of talking. This was a tim...

In my last blog post, I spoke about siloed content caused by silos within an enterprise. Moreover, about the guy who is on the hook to drive the business, generate leads and protect the brand. In most organizations they call him the Chief Marketing Officer or CMO. He is focused on the connected, consistent customer journey.

Yeah, this feels like herding cats — an attempt to control or organize a class of entities which are uncontrollable or chaotic.

Because in a larger organizations, everyone creates content. Sometimes people do not even know that this content ends up being customer facing. Some folks in Support writing some messages in support systems — but is it necessarily on brand and on target?

Let’s break down the customer journey — ...