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The conventional wisdom in the startup community these days is that to create a successful startup, you need to move at breakneck speed in everything you do.

And, to facilitate this, you should consume as much money as you can get your hands on along the way to make sure you’re removing all obstacles from getting to market. The perception is that if you move too slowly at the beginning, you’ll miss the market and, even worse, you won’t get funding.

But, is this correct?

While we completely support the idea that getting a great product to market as quickly as possible is a cornerstone of startup success, we just don’t buy that frenetic speed is the best way to do it. It’s not what has worked for us, nor for any of the successful startups we’...

You'll hear the terms “founder” and “co-founder or cofounder” thrown around a lot in Startup Land. But what, exactly, do they mean? What's the difference between the two? And how do you find a good one? It's not very easy to find cofounders that properly fill the business needs and help in the early stages of a startup. So, where do founders even start?

We'll answer the above questions and six more in this breakdown of everything you need to know about founders and co-founders in order to ensure your company's success.

1. What is a founder?

A founder is a person who comes up with an idea (hopefully a profitable idea) and then transforms it into a new business or startup. Founders can set up a business on their own, or they can do it with other...

Congrats on being an entrepreneur! The good news is – you are your own boss and you set your own hours. The bad news is – you are your own boss and you set your own hours!

One of the reasons you wanted to be an entrepreneur was the pursuit of freedom, but as you probably quickly learned, freedom doesn’t necessarily equate to free time.

Your days are filled with trying to get everything done — from creating proposals, putting the finishing touches on your pitch deck,, keeping all your documents organized and your team on the same page — all while wrestling with all the things that want to steal your attention away. As a founder, you know firsthand the struggle of managing time effectively and trying to be productive.

Having a solid product...

Like any “get‘er done” entrepreneur, I was once a pro at going solo. Whatever needed to be done I did it, and then I did everything else, too. Need a great idea? Just give me one minute. Need a genius marketing plan? No problem, I’m on it. Need someone to execute the plan flawlessly? Consider it done.

It’s the nature of the beast, really. Most first-time entrepreneurs have the monumental task of pulling off major miracles from scratch with little or no help. We get used to seeing our own name next to every task on the “volunteer sign-up sheet” that is our massive to-do list.

Even when I hired assistants to help me with this or that, I still felt like the captain, first mate, and the crew of my own ship.

Drifting

And while this approach cert...

If there is one quintessential task a startup CEO needs to be in charge of is not letting the company running out of money. Being on top of your Financial Model and business budget can make a difference and can enable managers and founders to make game-changing decisions. To give you an example, about nine months ago a quick prediction in our financial model enabled us to make our company profitable while duplicating our marketing budget.

The spreadsheet we use is an evolution of a template created by our investors at Carao Ventures. Over the years, I’ve simplified it to remove unnecessary modules and adapted it to serve the purposes of our SaaS business model. I’ll elaborate on the main features we used to make the model work in our favor-...

What is an LLP?

A limited liability partnership (LLP) is type of business structure in which all partners have limited liability for the business. That’s means they can’t be held personally liable if the company — or one of their partners — is sued.

In an LLP, all partners are allowed to participate in running the business. A company has to have at least two partners to become an LLP.

When it comes to taxes, LLPs avoid the double taxation that some types of corporations are subject to. In a partnership, the profits are taxed solely on the partners’ personal tax returns. In some other types of business formations, the profits are taxed first as corporate income tax and then the shareholders’ dividends are taxed on their personal tax returns...

I recently had coffee with a startup founder (let’s call him Ben) that has been working at his startup for the past year or so. His vision for his product and company had developed quite nicely since we first met, when his concept wasn’t much more than some rough sketches and guesses at what it could become. In the past year, Ben and his partner had bootstrapped their way to launching an MVP and signing up some initial Beta customers. He’s now at the point where he’s fine tuning his product to understand if it’s really serving his customers right. While the venture has been self-funded to this point, Ben plans on soon talking to investors in anticipation of later raising seed capital.

There’s just one problem: Ben has no idea how to value h...

It was the glitch heard ‘round the skies. Just this past summer, a brief computer outage grounded thousands of Delta Airlines flights. The carrier lost $100 million in revenue, and the entire airline industry saw a spike in consumer complaints over the ensuing months.

This was merely the culmination of America’s rocky relationship with commercial air travel, as airlines are consistently near the top of the Better Business Bureau’s list of most complained-about industries.

As an entrepreneur, does the above anecdote leave you feeling eager to launch a business in the airline industry — or does it make you want to run away from it as fast as you can?

If you’re leaning toward the “run away” option, have you forgotten about a company called Sou...

In the startup community it can sometimes seem that buzzwords come from out of nowhere. Not the case with “pivot”: Steve divulges that this is actually a term coined by his “best student ever” Eric Ries, when he noticed the cyclical nature of customer validation and customer discovery – stemming from his work developing lean startup methodology.

So what is a pivot, exactly?

A pivot is the action you take when you discover that your hypotheses don’t meet reality. It used to be that if a business wasn’t succeeding, executives would get fired. What we’ve come to realize in recent years is that if your business model doesn’t match what’s going on in the real world, it’s time to fire the model. That’s why it’s so crucial when first starting up ...

When we talk about building startups, we talk about lots of costs: Staffing costs, the cost of capital, cost per acquisition, and opportunity cost.

But we never talk about the biggest cost – the emotional cost.

Imagine if we could put a numeric value on how much “emotional capital” we have in the bank. The amount of stamina, the amount of positivity, the amount of physical wellness we have left. Startup Founders don’t just run out of financial capital – we run out of emotional capital.

Running out of emotional capital isn’t something we talk about, and that’s a problem. That’s because the cost of capital in this case is our well-being, our relationships, and ultimately the startups we sacrificed it all to build.

This needs to be a more...