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“Stagnancy isn’t good for anything, from standing pools of water to athletic performance to startups serious about growth. Ensure positive outcomes and superior employee performance and avoid team rifts well in advance by staying attuned to changing individual and cultural needs within your workplace.”

–Michael Manning, How to Know When to Shuffle Your Employee Deck

“Every company needs to set its sights on fostering alignment between the best roles for team members as befits the business’s objectives and vision. It all starts with taking some steps toward a more organic way of managing people,” proclaims Michael Manning in her article on why shifting an employee role may allow you to see your team members in a new light.

Easier said than ...

Growing slowly is the fastest way to build a sustainable startup.

From the outset that sounds like a contradiction, right? How could "growing slowly" and scaling possibly be congruent? They are if we take the time to understand that scaling is only possible once we've identified the assumptions in our business that are actually true.

As it happens, most Founders don't realize that "growing slowly" isn't about the long-term growth curve of a startup, it's about the near-term growth curve, the part where we are still trying to figure out exactly how this thing works.

Amplifying Mistakes With Acceleration

The case for acceleration is that we'll get to where we need to be faster. But that rests on one (often) broken assumption — that we're acc...

Show me a startup that was once hot and I'll show you a Founder that got totally distracted by their own bullshit. As Founders, we're in the business of making dreams come true — particularly our own — so when everyone around is telling us how amazing we are, it's really hard to wake ourselves up and realize none of it is real.

Once hot startups all had a moment when everyone was praising what they did. The reason they are "once-hot startups" is that in the very moment they needed to be the most focused, they went off track believing their own press. It's a challenge that as Founders, if we understand, we can put ourselves in a position to avoid altogether.

When We're Up, We're Blind

When things are going well, we assume we've finally "made...

The worst advice Founders get consistently comes from their hometown.

I call these the "local yocals" and every hometown has them. They are well-meaning advisors who try to guide a Founder through the startup stages but instead fill their head with irrelevant, outdated, and in many cases straight-up bad advice.

Every single time I talk to a Founder that's been clearly led astray, I ask where they got that advice. And in almost every case, it's from someone that simply isn't relevant to the startup ecosystem. It's their well-meaning uncle who made a boatload of money in commercial real estate, or a local angel investor who has no idea who YCombinator is, or the "startup guru" who had the one exit in town but has never left the state.

From a ...

We can all agree that bringing qualified customers to a new website is no easy feat. To add to that, most of your customers won’t be willing to pull out their credit card the first time that they reach your site.

Yeah, we know. It sucks to hear, especially since half of the people who stumble upon your site probably won’t come back for a second visit.

So how do you actually sell to these online customers?

Well, you don’t.

You give them insane amounts of value for free and make it easy for them to buy when they’re ready.

That’s right. The days of bombarding your potential customers with sales tactics and TV commercials are coming to a close. The secret to winning customers is to offer them exactly what they’re looking for when they actively ...

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...

Funding a startup isn't easy, and anyone that has launched a startup knows this to be painfully true. You need money (like yesterday) and raising funds is "a process" — to state it simply. There are so many details to know and questions to ask before a round can even begin, and once the startup funding round is ready to rock, there are additional questions every founder needs to know the answer to before they take the plunge.

One of the most common questions asked — and arguably most important details to know is how much equity do you give away in seed round? With the help from members of our community, we are going to get into this question in further detail to demystify the information about raising seed capital and the amount of equity ea...

Getting equity back from an existing stakeholder isn't easy — but it is possible.

It's a situation that very few Founders have ever been through before, so no one really knows how to go about it. Let's talk a bit about how the situation develops and what we can do to get some of that precious equity back into our coffers.

Remember, Equity is a Promise of Payment

More than anything, equity isn't just a stock issuance. It's a promise that at some future point that stock will be worth cash money — maybe.

When we think about pulling the equity back, we have to think in terms of how to redeem that promise of payment in some capacity. It's not just a matter of "taking it away" per se, it's a matter of trading the terms of the initial agreement ...

Out of the hundreds of thousands of people using my company Open Listings to shop for and buy homes, I thought I knew who our worst users were — even by name.

There was Sarah* in San Diego who went on 134 home tours before finally buying one. Then, there’s Dan in San Francisco who’s asked our in-house agent team questions about nearly 1,000 properties but hasn’t submitted an offer on a home yet. And, there was Chris, who tried to negotiate our already low fee down to zero by blackmailing us with negative online reviews.

As CEO, I cared deeply about all users and every shred of feedback. I read every review, internalized problems, and prioritized solutions. I felt confident that we were super customer-centric and solving the most important p...

All startups face the same issue when launched: Each strives to create the best product and achieve market compatibility, but not all startups are created equally. Without a doubt, focusing on product development and market entrance is important, but too much emphasis on these areas tends to eclipse broader foundational issues.

I’ve met hundreds of founding teams over the years. Some were ready for venture capitalist funding while others needed to keep percolating a bit longer. In order for startups to reel in venture capitalist backing, building and scaling a fundable founding team is paramount from the start.

There’s an expression: “Choose the right tool for the team.”

When that idea is flipped, it becomes a more inspired guideline that c...