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As entrepreneurs, time is our most valuable asset. Every moment spent on a time sink is a distraction from the strides that we could and should be making with our core businesses.

But here’s the thing. Early-stage entrepreneurs are also notoriously cheap. Often revenue-strapped, we’re pumping as much money as we humanly can into the products and services that we’ve committed ourselves to developing.

At any given time, we walk a line between two things: spending money and doing more ourselves. As many of us will tell you, this is not an easy line to walk. I once burned through $20K on a vendor that I shouldn’t have hired. I also spent 15 hours a week on administrative tasks when I should have been working with an administrative assistant.

O...

Welcome to Phase Three of a four-part Splitting Equity Series. If you missed it, start your journey here: Introduction - Early Startup Equity — Getting it Right before continuing on if you haven’t already, and go in order from there.

Phase One - Startup Equity - Avoiding Early Mistakes

Phase Two - How Startup Equity Works

Phase Three - Part 1 - How to Split Equity

• Part 2 - Splitting Equity Today

• Part 3 - Splitting Equity in the Future

• Part 4 - Calculating Startup Equity Splits + FAQ (←YOU ARE HERE 😀)

Phase Four - Equity Management

Let's continue!

At this point, we have all we need to calculate our equity splits. It’s showtime, baby! All of the different agreements we’ve made from this point on are just a formula to calculate an outcome. Ideally...

Being a founder is hard — and we should be grateful for that.

We don’t feel grateful all the time. At least not when we’re lying awake at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat, staring at the ceiling wondering how we have created so much debt in such a short period of time and then looking over at our spouse who is probably pretending to sleep — pondering the same question.

But, I believe it is the sleepless nights, the awkward conversations at family dinners, the long days without measurable progress and the other thousand things that most people wouldn’t tolerate that makes the solutions we build valuable — and the pursuit worthwhile. We relish the challenge as much as the outcome.

As the holidays quickly approach, perhaps you’re like me and find yours...

It’s hard to think of anything more closely associated with the startup experience than pitching to investors.

Think about it: virtually every hackathon ends in a pitch competition. The promise of pitching to real, live investors is the grand prize at incubators everywhere. There are whole television shows devoted to following people as they pitch their company. Podcasts, too.

And no wonder: when you’re pitching to investors, you’re putting your heart on the line, spilling your guts about why you believe down to your bones that this business needs to happen – and you need to be the one to lead it. It’s not hard to see why that makes for compelling viewing/listening.

But there’s another reason the investor pitch is so iconic: because it’s so...

How Hard is it to Get a Business Loan?

Unfortunately, business loans can be difficult for startups to procure.

That’s because while some funding sources in the startup ecosystem — like VCs and angel investors — are looking to take big risks, traditional financial institutions like banks generally aren’t.

You’re going to need to show that you have perfect personal (and probably business) credit and they might even require that you’re profitable or on track to become profitable. Generally, banks prefer businesses that have a proven track record when they’re handing out loans.

But that doesn’t mean business loans are impossible for startup founders! It’s just something to keep in mind when you’re considering a bank loan as a funding source.

As a founder working on his newest project, Andy needed really good leads. But most “email list” companies sell you a load of crappy emails; and only emails.

He wanted key influencers, specifically at tech companies, and he wanted email and phone and social links. So he built BreakoutContacts to do it.

It uses some pretty slick AI (artificial intelligence) to comb through, analyze, and validate hundreds of data points per company and person. Then, and this is the part that too many services skip, good ol’ fashioned human effort kicks in to manually re-verify everything.

The process is slow. Like, never-will-this-ever-scale slow. But, Andy has been able to get a 100% conversion rate on the contacts he’s reached out to. There’s nothing more ...

There's a time to get tough and keep building our startups. And there's a time to be honest about simply folding the tents.

The problem is that our own egos can rarely distinguish between the two.

We hear these (revisionist) stories of great entrepreneurs overcoming insurmountable odds to build the great companies of today, and we assume that in order to earn our own tale, we'll need to bring ourselves to the brink of destruction to do the same.

But the truth is, more often than not, the idea of running ourselves into the ground is just that: we're just killing ourselves with little upside or glory on the other side of the journey. As Founders, we need to have an honest dialog about when it's really time to put a bullet in this thing for th...

We spend countless years getting our startups to an "exit." We all know that once we hit that promised land, everything will finally be OK. We'll satisfy our investors, our employee stockholders, and finally pay back all that debt we created. We'll get a vacation — a real one this time! We'll get back in the gym, we'll pick our hobbies back up, we may even find out what our kid's names are ("Chad, right?".. "No, Dad, I'm Jen.")

All of this will be an atomic mushroom cloud that lands us to what we've always been promised — validation.

We'll validate ourselves from the haters and naysayers. We'll walk into rooms full of important people who will all look at us and say "Can you believe what an amazing thing that woman did?" We'll get instant r...

You never see many “consultant” costumes around Halloween time, but it turns out that hiring one can be the source of numerous company horror stories.

First of all, hiring a seasoned strategic consultant is a difficult area to navigate. For example, you might prepare by reading whitepapers to brush up on some knowledge before the hiring process. Then, if the candidate uses the same terminology that you read in the whitepapers, you might assume you two are a great match. But what if the candidate read the same whitepapers and that is the full extent of his knowledge?

It can be challenging to know whether the person in front of you is the real deal or just wearing a mask.

Expectation and reality

Hiring the right strategic consultant can be di...

I often picture this Marty McFly moment where I'm sitting across from my 18-year-old self, this skinny pimply-faced kid who thought he could start an Internet company, and trying so hard to impart the wisdom that cost me decades to share.

It makes me wonder whether there could have been a directional shift if only someone was helpful enough to provide just the right advice at just the right time. It's what I've dedicated my whole life to in helping my fellow Founders, but still, I wonder if I could have helped myself.

If I only had three things I could tell this young fool — what would I say, and how do I think he would have taken it?

Lesson 1: "You have 50 Years"

I never realized how much time you really have to make an impact. When I was ...