Forums Search

CHAPTER THREE: Start with the Outcome

In This Chapter:

-How to set goals to accomplish before scheduling a meeting
-How to communicate clearly when calendaring

How often do you start a meeting with a clear indication from everyone in the room with what you’re supposed to achieve after you leave? If you’re like most, not often.

Most calendar appointments look like this:

Awesome. You’ve let everyone know that 1. You are going to meet and 2. That there is an open ended discussion happening about the cataclysmic destruction of the planet.

However on the brink of Armageddon it’d be nice to know that the folks responsible for this discussion focused more on the ou...

Every founder knows that company culture is crucial to a startup’s success — as Fred Wilson says, “If you want to be in business forever, you need to build a culture that sustains the business” — but there are seven common mistakes that startups make when creating their culture:

1. You think culture just “happens.”

Running a startup means your burn rate is always in the forefront of your mind, and as a result, everything takes a backseat to getting to MVP. Culture can be fixed later, right? The truth is that “culture” is just another way of saying “how we work here,” and by the time you get to your MVP, it will be deeply entrenched.

FiveStars’s founder Victor Ho never took the time to officially define the culture— he felt it was too “chee...

Friends — today I’m excited to share two very big announcements and to give you a peek at what’s in store for 2015.

We’ve Acquired Clarity.fm

Yep, the family just keeps growing.

Clarity was founded by well-known serial entrepreneur Dan Martell to help Founders get personal advice from startup experts in every field, from marketing to fundraising to product development.

Over 4,000 experts have joined Clarity, and last year alone they spent more than 181,026 minutes on the phone helping entrepreneurs. To put that in perspective, that means that 1 out of every 3 minutes of the day (or night) someone on Clarity is on the phone helping a Founder. It’s awesome.

They’ve also created a fantastic Q&A product where Founders can ask hard questions abo...

Let’s talk top startups of 2018. But first of all, did you know that entrepreneurs create more than six million new businesses in the United States every year? Sifting through those multitudes is impossible, even for startup junkies. And when you consider the high number of startup failures, the shifting sands of the startup landscape become even harder to track.

So how can you possibly know what’s good? How can you separate the wheat from the chaff? How can you ever know what the top startups are?

Well, one way is by relying on experts who interact with new companies every day. And it doesn’t get more expert than the team at Fundable, the largest business crowdfunding platform that’s exclusively about helping startups raise money. Fundabl...

We all love celebrating the big wins with big announcements.

✓ We celebrate our big product launches.
✓ We celebrate key partnerships.
✓ We celebrate when we raise a big funding round.**

All of those sound amazing — and sometimes they are. But, what gets lost are the victories that actually matter: the small victories.

Small victories are what lead to the big announcements. But, they often get overlooked for one reason or another. Things like:

★ The first paying customer you signed.
★ The first month you broke even.
★ The first customer acquisition campaign that actually yiel...

What happens when the people who helped start a company are no longer qualified to work there?

▸ What about Kimberly who became CFO because she was the only person at the time who had taken an accounting course?

▸ How do you find a home for Willis who was the jack-of-all-trades …but now is the master of none?

▸ Should Arnold still be leading the engineering team even though he has less experience than the entire team now?

As our startups mature, we are quickly faced with the harsh reality that the folks that were critical at one stage of our growth are woefully under-qualified for our current state of operations. Things get weird. We can feel the tension mounting as we try to wrestle with our own evolution and how it impacts each team membe...

Seneca once said that “Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.” I truly believe that we can help luck along by being prepared for opportunity when it knocks.

And one of the must-have tools in our storytelling arsenal is the infamous Elevator Pitch – or the “Quickpitch” as I often dub it. And you never know where the opportunity might knock – at a networking event, in an Uber Pool, or even in line for coffee at Starbucks.

If you find yourself conversing with someone who could be a potential investor/user/partner/connector – are you ready to pitch them in a fast, powerful way?

I heard the amazing Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube speak this year, and she said that it usually takes people about 15 minutes to explain to her what they do and w...

Don’t miss out! Check out the previous chapters here:
–Chapter One
–Chapter Two
–Chapter Three
–Chapter Four
–Chapter Five

CHAPTER SIX (Bonus): Leverage Your Email Footer

In This Chapter:

• Leverage every inch of the emails you send
• Use your footer as a way to share important details

Before we bid adieu—We would love to share something that could really help you and it takes literally 15 minutes to implement, and will save you countless hours of time in the future.

Email footers are generally one of the most poorly utilized pieces of daily communication. Think about it for a second. How many emails have you sent and received? Of the received emails, how many footers have you paid attention to?

None, right?

That’s because most people eith...

What are Microloans?

Microloans are small loans that businesses that can't access traditional loans or other finance options. It could be because they don't have any — or great — credit. It could be because their businesses aren't very established yet or they're locked out of the traditional financing options for a variety of reasons. They're usually short-term loans, with low-interest rates.

Microloans started in Bangladesh with economist Muhammad Yunus in the early 1980s. It was primarily to help people in developing countries who didn't have access to traditional small business loans. Access to a microloan program gave them funding to start businesses and raise themselves out of poverty. There are now a huge range of microlending options w...

CHAPTER FIVE: Prep Beautifully

In This Chapter:

-How and why you should auto-confirm every meeting
-Adding smart metadata to each calendar invite
-Our example of a contact dossier

There are only two things cooler than walking into a meeting being perfectly prepared.

1. Moonwalking into a meeting to the song Billie Jean—perfectly prepared
2. The first edition of “Godzilla – King of Monsters”, in mint condition

Short of those two things—seriously—nothing is cooler.

So now that you’re ready to be cool, let’s show you how to prep beautifully for meetings.

Auto Confirm Every Meeting

They say the worst meeting is the one where you’re the only attendee. We’ve all had this happen, it’s not just you. The first step of prepping for meetings is to make s...