Toward the end of Season 1 of HBO’s incredible Silicon Valley, there’s an amazing scene that this writer has legit watched on YouTube about a hundred times.
The Pied Piper team is at TechCrunch Disrupt, coming off the high of unveiling their compression algorithm to a veritable whos-who of the tech world. Then, disaster strikes. Mega-corporation Hooli is there, and they’re presenting a technology that is identical to the product Pied Piper is building.
Panic inevitably ensues among the Pied Piper ranks. Then, a notably manic Jared, fresh from the traumatic experience of being kidnapped by a self-driving car, has a brainwave.
What Pied Piper needs to do, he thinks, is pivot.
“A lot of successful startups launched with a different business mo...
Jennifer Justice is as much of a bad-ass as her Marvel Superhero name implies. She’s the current President of Corporate Development at Superfly, producers of festivals like Bonnaroo and Outside Lands. Before that, she spent 17 years as the personal entertainment lawyer for Jay Z. She’s also a single mom of twins, who has been outspoken about the power she gained after becoming a mother.
Her journey is all the more impressive when you understood where she came from: The daughter of a single mom who didn’t even finish high school, raised in poverty. Her story of clawing her way into the inner circles of superstardom and how her children made her even more ambitious is one of my favorites.
Sarah Lacy: You’re a lawyer. Now, did you feel like, ...
People often wonder why they haven’t caught their “break” yet. They’re waiting for that moment when they’ll hit it big and everything will be like they dreamed.
I wanted to give a brief look at why it’s not some random occurrence. Breaks don’t just come along and say, “whelp, I guess it’s Tommy’s turn today!”
In this post you’ll see why continually placing bets and investing in yourself is the only way to play the game.
I’ll share some of my successes and failures so you can understand more about how the specific roads I chose led to any breaks that I got. I’ll also talk about the other roads I could have chosen, which would have clearly led to different outcomes.
Let’s look back to high school. When I was in high school I didn’t underst...
For decades, Zig Ziglar has been speaking and writing about personal development and has helped countless people achieve their dreams, both professionally and personally.
In the business world, closed-mindedness and an unbalanced lifestyle can bring down businesspeople that have real potential to succeed. Could that be you?
If so, then keep reading, because Zig Ziglar has a thing or two to teach us all about how to achieve real success in life.
Some people have the tendency to set pretty far-fetched goals without giving any detailed thought to how they’re even going to get there.
According to Ziglar, it’s all about the details.
Set a goal that’s practical and pr...
Every business is different yet what makes a successful wholesale distribution business in 2017 is the same no matter what products you sell. Cash flow planning, sales and inventory management and planning are key areas every B2B wholesale distribution business should be focusing on.
Here are 8 tips for running a successful wholesale distribution business in 2017.
Money in vs money out is a basic concept of cash flow, the tricky part is when cash is tied up in stock in your warehouse. It gets really complicated to forecast what will be sold, what to purchase and making sure monthly overheads are covered. This is a very delicate balancing act that could make or send any successful business int...
Business grants for women is a popular topic — and no wonder. According to research from Kaufman, 40 percent of first time entrepreneurs in the United States are women.
Even more impressive? The number of women-run businesses in the US is growing at twice the rate of man-owned businesses. The rate of women starting businesses and startups throughout the country is at an all-time high.
But women aren’t getting nearly as much money for those businesses as men are. In the startup world, women founders got only 2 percent of VC funding in 2017.
That means women are forced to look to other money sources when they’re looking to launch a startup or small business. VC money is the “free” money of the startup world. (Well, not “free,” exactly. But, u...
When you’re working on an early-stage startup, figuring out what your business goals should be — like what you should be achieving and at what stage — is difficult. It’s not like school, where there are clear steps that lead to the next level. Or even like traditional businesses, which have clear business goal templates. No — early-stage startup founders often struggle with the nebulous nature of their business goals.
Lucky for you, there are experts in this who have great advice about what should be achieved — and when — for early stage startups.
Here are seven business goal posts you should be aiming for as you grow your early-stage startup.
As I’m writing, it’s the day after Apple’s Special Event. The Steve Jobs Theater has a public event under its belt. We’re past figuring out how to pronounce iPhone X, and we’re done caring what happened to iPhone 9. Even the Face ID demo fail is already yesterday’s news.
If you watched the live stream of Apple’s Keynote as a normal part of your job like I did, you need to know that customer centricity is under attack.
I have a few suggestions how to respond:
I have to say I’ve always enjoyed Apple’s Keynote events. I’d bet you agree. There’s a fun element of the big reveal. Were our predictions right? Were the leaks accurate?
And the events suit our sense of humor too. There’s a fine line between the reality of Apple on st...
Everything around us is changing—how we communicate and express ourselves, how we connect with other people, how we order food, how we live our lives.
When it comes to how work is done, everything is changing as well. At Servixio, we decided to make our company a 100 per cent virtual company—from top to bottom.
Why did we do that? We strongly believe that remote work has lots of benefits to our clients and people.
Here are the top 10 benefits of remote work:
Remote workers are lazy and they will just slack around, right? Well, wrong! According to a ConnectSolutions survey, 30 per cent of workers said that they accomplished more in less time when they started working remotely.
Working remotely can avoid...
A sole proprietorship is an unincorporated business owned and run by one individual with no distinction between the business and the owner.
Sole proprietorships are the simplest and most common form of small business ownership, representing 73% of all small businesses in the United States today (a total of 23 million were reported by the IRS in 2010 and again in 2018 by the small business administration (SBA)).
The business owner is entitled to all profits and is personally responsible for all of the business's debts, losses, and liabilities, and pays personal income tax on profits earned from the company. The owner is not required to formally register their business with their state as corporations or LLCs do.
With...