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Founder: The person who started the company. It is someone who has an idea and creates a business around that idea. They are the “Founding Father” or "Founding Mother" of the company, as the company would have never existed without them creating it. They are often focused on vision and big picture of the start up. They are generally the business owner, or at least one of them.

CEO: The head of the company, responsible for overseeing all aspects of it and making sure everything runs smoothly. The Chief Executive Officer runs it as a business, sets the long term plans and drives towards success. They also communicate directly to the board of directors. A Professional CEO will have the distinction of having risen through the ranks, and brings ...

A lot of entrepreneurs start companies based on their own needs: Travis Kalanick couldn’t get cab — Uber was born. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were having trouble making rent, so they rented out their apartment — and we ultimately got AirBnB. It’s a common narrative but, sometimes, entrepreneurs start companies that have nothing to do with their own needs and have everything to do with the gaps they see in the market.

I like creating things that have a positive impact on the world.

That’s the case for Chris Gatbonton, the founder of Creation Crate. Chris is one of those guys who’s been running businesses as long as he can remember. In college he creating a beverage that was deemed “the greatest chaser to alcohol,” which was an aloe vera dri...

Part of planning for your startup’s success is finding the right working space for your team and your clients. Property’s expensive, and leases are binding; when you’re in a rapid-growth phase, how can you predict your office needs a year or two from now?

Maybe you’ll add two new team members — will they need offices? If you plan to add a new department in the next 18 months, will you need larger meeting rooms? If you want to attract top talent, will your office environment appeal to them?

Business owners and founders of growing companies face a practical dilemma when it comes to office space. There is no such thing as a perfect lease for a company that is growing fast. Getting the space right is vital to the health and development of your ...

It's really hard to convince people that money isn't the most important metric of a startup's success. Especially if those people happen to be investors, in which case, it actually is the most important metric.

But what we're talking about, as always, is what's important to Founders, and by extension to the people that work within that startup.

The broken part of the startup narrative has become this — "If it's growing fast and making money, it's successful, no matter what other costs are incurred."

I'd like to just go crazy for a moment and offer a new narrative — "If it's making everyone's lives geometrically better, then it's successful, and hopefully that means it's making money."

Focus on Making Lives Better? What?!

I know, I know. W...

Marketing and business models might not be the same as they were decades ago. But one thing hasn’t changed: Customers are still any business’s greatest asset. That seems obvious, right?

It should be, but brands can forget that fact all too easily. In the race for the newest shiny things and the largest caches of data, it’s not hard for marketing teams to forget to tailor campaigns toward what customers actually want.

Chatbots are a great example. As sales associates, they can make shopping much more convenient. But as customer service reps, they kind of suck. In fact, when nearly a third of U.S. brands began shifting to automated customer service, the American Customer Satisfaction Index took the steepest dive since the 1990s.

Convenience i...

No one cares what we have — they care that they don't have it.

That's a huge problem for Founders because we often have very asymmetrical compensation compared to the rest of our staff. We have more equity, we have a higher salary. We're on an investor retreat to some insanely cool resort while they are freezing their asses off in our cramped office. We're driving the new Benz while they're sharing a Kia with their roommate.

No matter what the delta is, what we have and what everyone else does not will always be a problem. As the organization grows, and the delta between our lifestyle and that of our staff increases, this situation only gets exponentially worse.

What we need to do is first understand why it's happening and then be mindful ...

Capital raising isn't about pitching investors, it's about getting in front of them to begin with. But how do we get introductions from investors if we don't know any?

We start with forming an Advisory Board.

The suggestion here isn't to form an Advisory Board specifically for raising capital — since there are a ton of benefits to having an Advisory Board. However, as a first step toward raising capital, it makes a ton of sense to surround ourselves with smart, well-connected people who believe in our product but also have been through the very gauntlet we're entering into. In the same way we'd hire a dev team to build an app, why wouldn't we round up a team of smart, well-connected Advisors to build our capital raise?

We don't need to be s...

Ten years ago, Andy Dunn was at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. He was torn between taking a high paying job and following the lead of Brian Spaly– a classmate who was selling better-fitting pants out of the back of his car.

That company would become Bonobos, a promising survivor in an otherwise graveyard of so-called “ecommerce 2.0” upstarts.

Spaly and Dunn had a contentious falling out; with Dunn keeping Bonobos and Spaly going on to build (and sell) TrunkClub. Dunn is still plugging away with Bonobos, hoping to reinvent the way brands are built in an online world.

He says he’s now confident that Bonobos will survive. But continuing to build it into a stand-alone ecommerce company is another matter. An even bigger challenge: Maki...

The Funding Slide in our investor pitch deck summarizes our investment opportunity, including our use of funds, investment amount, and what we want to accomplish in our next stage. Potential investors, from angel investors, to venture capitalists, will zero in on this part of the slide deck to determine their initial investment.

Typically this is the final slide of an investor pitch deck, where we transition from pitching investors to making the big ask.

What do Potential Investors want to know?

Our investor deck should cover three critical factors when we get our "ask slide":

"How much capital? What Round of capital?"

Many investors, from venture capitalists to angel investors, align their investments based on the amount of capital a startup co...

As Founders, so many of us have joined this marathon because we believed there was our own version of "happiness" on the other side of it. The problem for many Founders, once they've "made it" is that they don't realize that money was never going to buy more happiness. In fact, it wasn't the problem they were solving for, to begin with.

Think of it like getting a big, honking bruise. In this case, that bruise is a metaphor for debt. When you have a bruise, you're constantly worried about it — it's super painful. So we think about how great it will be when it goes away. And eventually, it heals (we have some money). But all we did was get rid of the pain, we don't actually become "more healthy" than we were before.

The same goes for debt. Wh...