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“Startups are really hard, but you have a duty to yourself, your team, [and] your investors to take care of yourself and to not neglect your health [and] wellbeing.” –Sam Altman, President, YCombinator

Rene Descartes has single handedly doomed thousands of startups to failure.

Not in person, obviously—he’s been dead for 350 years. But his ideas have lived on, convincing otherwise smart founders that the mind is the thing only thing that matters in intellectual pursuits, and that our bodies are just meaty life-support systems carrying around those minds and getting in the way.

Not only is this way of thinking dangerous to the health of these founders, it’s dangerous to the health of their companies. Building a company is hard enough as it i...

What is a Limited Partnership?

A limited partnership (LP) is a type of business partnership that has two types of partners — general and limited — and there are different liabilities for the two.

In order to qualify as an LP, a business has to have at least one general partner and one limited partner.

General partners in an LP are personally liable for the business. Because the general partner of a business can be a person or entity, many people choose to set up an LLC to act as the general partner, thereby avoiding personal liability. General partners are also involved the actual running of the business.

Limited partners, on the other hand, aren’t personally liable. Limited partners can’t contribute to the day-to-day operation of the busi...

It’s time we admit the obvious: The classic business differentiators have become obsolete. Customers expect the best quality, the lowest possible price, instant delivery, and an experience that wows them every time.

Despite this change, most companies are terrified to implement the “novel” technique of being honest with customers.

Modern buyers focus intensely on customer experience and touchpoint impressions, not on which products perform well. Why? Blame the Japanese Kaizen movement of the 1970’s and 1980’s if you’d like.

Not only did Kaizen spark the total quality management movement, but it also brought defects down to negligible amounts. Customers got high-quality products, and companies suddenly found themselves competing mainly on p...

At Startups.com we talk to thousands of founders, many of whom are weighing the benefits of convertible debt versus equity. If you’re not sure what convertible debt is, check out these posts:

• Convertible Debt Simplified

• Convertible Debt Basics

Since equity and convertible debt are the most common methods for raising early stage startup funding, it makes sense to examine them side by side so that you can understand the differences. Hopefully this will make your decision easier, so you can move on to the real fun of actually raising the money.

In order to get a handle on the decision we’re going to do three things:

1. Compare convertible debt and equity
2. Discuss how investors think about convertible debt
3. Evaluate the pitfalls of using conv...

This interview, conducted by Emily Pope, was originally published on the General Assembly blog.

Raffi Khatchadourian is a Mathematical Economics major and incoming junior at Colgate University. A self-starter and talented entrepreneur, Raffi has established himself as the COO of indify, an emerging music startup, before many of his peers have even declared their major. Back in January, Raffi attended GA’s week-long Business Accelerator program in partnership with Colgate University. Since then, he and his co-founders have gone on to win $10,000 in funding from Colgate University’s Entrepreneur Weekend Shark Tank and $15,000 from Colgate University’s Entrepreneurs Fund. Read on to learn how this young entrepreneur transformed his passion fo...

After closing a new Series C round of $50MM, CEO Eoghan McCabe has released the Intercom pitch deck from 2011, the slides they used to raise their initial $600K convertible note.

I often call Intercom one of the startup tools that have been key to our success and it’s not an overstatement. We’ve leveraged their platform to create an engaging, personalized and human experience of support and customer success, that our customers truly appreciate. It’s this personal experience that has kept us on an exponential growth path for over 12 months now.

Intercom released their first pitch deck on their blog this week, you can find the original slides here. Still, we took the liberty of redesigning the presentation on Slidebean to make it shine. Here’...

During last week’s Startups Live, we talked about developing your pricing strategy, and how asking customers for money is an important step in building an actual grown-up company.

If only it were as simple as flipping a switch on a revenue stream and then watching the sales pour in. That would be a beautiful world to live in. But we don’t live in that world, we live in this world – and in this world, if you want customers, you have to go out and earn them.

We tend to think of lead generation strategies as this very rote, transactional thing: you herd as many people as you can into your funnel, and then you shake the funnel and hope that enough people fall through to paying customer.

“Driving traffic is different than turning someone into a...

It’s one of the oldest truths in marketing: in order to get customers’ attention, you have to live where your customers live. And today more than ever before, where customers live is on social media.

According to a study by marketing firm MediaKix, the average person spends 2 hours per day on social platforms. As the post helpfully points out, that amounts to 5 years and 4 months over a lifetime – enough time to fly to the moon and back 32 times or run 10,000 marathons.

With numbers like that, it’s no wonder that paid social media advertising has supplanted radio and possibly even television as the new darling of the advertising world. Mediakix predicts that social media advertising spend will hit close to $36 billion globally in 2017, and ...

The graveyard might be the last place on Earth you’d care to visit, but, if you don’t want your company to go under, it’s a good idea to pay attention to what killed other similar companies.

Grab your flashlight, Founders, and head to the Startup Graveyard. “This site is a resource for entrepreneurs to avoid making the same mistakes as failed startups. We hope that this project can help de-stigmatize failure, increase transparency, create a community and improve the information on the site.”

Of course projects have unhappy endings. Call them failures if you will. But if you believe in process, take the long view of life, and have the courage to look at startup corpses – then the stories of failures become instructional lessons more so than...

Some entrepreneurs sail blissfully into the sunset after their first big payday. Others — like us — can’t imagine anything more boring. Instead, we thrive on constantly risking it all to build something out of nothing. This condition of serial entrepreneurship is what I call “one-and-not-done” syndrome. We know it will be hard, if not seemingly impossible, and there will be times when we will be overwhelmed with frustration. In spite of that, we know the journey is worth it.

If you’re this special breed of entrepreneur, I feel both sorry and happy for you. More than anything, I welcome you to the club.

There is a magic to what we do as entrepreneurs. We can create a thriving business almost out of nothing. Is there anything more magical tha...