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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...

In late 2006, the much younger and more naïve 21-year-old version of me graduated from the University of Melbourne. I was full of optimism, elated by hope that the career I was about to embark upon would bring me a deep personal satisfaction in life. Between 24 and 29 years of age, I took home on average about $250,000 per year. In 2016, at 31, I took home exactly zero dollars.

For a lot of people, seeing an annual payment summary like this with their own name on it would probably trigger a rush of adrenaline equivalent to skydiving from ten thousand feet. They’d probably be thinking: “Hey, I’ve done well for myself!”

I remember seeing this and feeling nothing. Not because I thought it wasn’t enough, or because I felt like I didn’t deserve...

Like doing any deal, getting good angel investment deal structures is all about creating a win-win situation. Once you get an angel investor interested in your deal and agree on basic terms, you will need to discuss the best way to structure the investment.

This is a critical juncture in every startup’s evolution, as the provisions you agree on here will be carried with you for the life of the angel investment deal.

How to get angel investor Agreements with win-win deal structures

1. Be Cautiously Optimistic

At this stage, many entrepreneurs get so excited that they forget to dot the i’s and cross the t’s on their deal.

Make sure you thoroughly review any term sheet with a lawyer to make sure you completely understand the deal structure an...

To grow or to profit, that is the question!

There we are, with a fistful of profit in our hands (finally!) and an endless list of places to spend it! Do we hire another engineer to get our product shipped faster? How about increasing our marketing budget to scale customer acquisition? Or, and let's just get crazy, do we finally pay ourselves?

Profit First, then Grow

I'm going to go out on a limb and spat in the face of startup lore, which suggests that the only way to succeed is to bet the farm and grow. Think of me as the owner of a casino (in this case, that casino is Startups.com) who gets to not only witness a handful of people bet it all and get rich, but 100x more bet it all and fail.

What we miss in our passion for greatness is that...

Breaking up with investors at the end of a failed startup journey is basically every Founder's worst nightmare. It's that awful conversation we did everything in our power to avoid. We rehearsed it over and over while starting at the ceiling at 3 AM. And yet, here we are.

How we break up with investors is as important as how we built the relationship to begin with. That's because in the startup world, building long standing relationships among key players, including investors, is all about treating those folks with respect at every step of the journey — even the shitty ending part.

We need to own the outcome

This is no time to point fingers. It was our job to create a successful startup; it didn't work out — we have to own that. This is th...

1984. A novel that probably most folks were forced to read begrudgingly at some point or another while attending english class (also begrudgingly). As a millennial, I can see among my peers that there’s an undercurrent attitude of irreverence towards the old ways of doing things. It’s like we have some weird anti-establishment angst that we just never grew out of and carry with us wherever we go.

A lot of it is just mob mentality — out with the old, in with the new! Down with bureaucracy! Big brother is evil! Overthrow the tyrannical parents!

Attitudes like that, coupled with the enormous success of the irreverent celebrities of our time (think Zuckerberg with his refusal to wear suits) makes us want to do things differently, even if diffe...

Why are we still paying people in units of time?

It's been about 100 years since the Industrial Revolution and yet nearly everyone on the planet still gets paid like a dock worker, where units of time equal measurable production.

That made sense when nearly everyone had an output that could be tracked by time, but in our current economy, why do we still think every job should be performed for exactly 40 hours within a 9 to 5 schedule?

We're at a point where we can no longer justify a one size fits all type of output metric. It's time we burn down the old institution of work hours and build a new mechanism that actually applies to what employers are paying for, and what employees actually do.

Let's Pay for Outcomes

As Founders what we care...

We created Toggl Button 3 years ago to make Toggl more accessible and better integrated with other tools. We started small — advertising only to our own users and integrating with a few major project management tools. Up until recently, only one developer ever worked full time on Toggl Button.

Yes, you read that well. Out of the 135,000 total users, about 85,000 have found us in the last two years, while I was leading the efforts on growing Toggl Button — the ultimate time tracking add-on for all your favorite web tools.

As usual, I can’t promise you’ll get rich quick or succeed over nigh...

About once a decade, the U.S. Financial Markets implode. It happened during the "Dot Com Bust" of 2001, again in the financial meltdown of 2007, and is now upon us in a Post-COVID recovery.

For Founders, while we understand the broader implications of "this is bad" we may not be aware of how it affects us personally now that we're running a startup in this environment. Fortunately, we have plenty of history to fall back.

What Just Happened?

In short, many of the tech IPOs that are the holy grail of startup investments have failed in an epic proportion. The reason that matters is that for startups, all of our fundraising is tied to the idea that someday there will be a massive pot of gold at the end of this journey.

Well, that pot of gold tu...

What if our current startup success can't be repeated?

As Founders, we're ridiculous optimists, and for all of our "vision" we're pretty damned short-sighted. In our minds, if things are going this good now, it stands to reason that they will go even better in the future. It has to, right? We'll be better connected, more experienced, and way more prepared than we were for our current startups!

But that's not how startups work. The startup game isn't chess, where the conditions are similar and we're just more experienced. It's more like blackjack, where we know a little bit more, but the variability changes on every hand.

Don't Know What You Got, Til It's Gone

(If you sang this last headline in a Cinderella power-ballad, you are my people). ...