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Getting taken seriously as a Founder is real work.

It's not some entitlement that's handed to us when we've achieved some career milestone. No matter who we are, we all have to fight for our ability to get taken seriously.

Why do I need to work so hard, shouldn't people reserve judgment?

That would be fantastic, but the world just doesn't work that way. Especially among Founders whose credibility is tested on so many fronts — from acquiring customers, to pitching investors to hiring staff.

Our ability to establish our credibility early and often is critical to our success from the moment we found the company.

How can I change the way I present myself in a room?

Believe it or not, body language sends huge signals.

A well-presented Founder ...

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 ...

The past few years have seen an explosion of podcasts — it seems like everyone wants to get in on the audio. And startup founders (many of whom have probably been listening to podcasts since they started in the early aughts) are no exception! But how do you know what to listen to in this vast sea of startup podcasts?

Don’t worry — we have you covered. Here are the top 20 best startup podcasts as we head into 2020. Grab your noise cancelling earphones — and get listening.

1. Startup Therapy

Hosted by Startups.com founders and serial entrepreneurs Wil Schroter and Ryan Rutan, Startup Therapy is an inside perspective on issues startup founders really care about. From what to expect in your first year after launching to how to deal with the e...

Cameron Herold is an accomplished entrepreneur and growth guru, having built 4 companies to over $100 million in revenue. He is also the author of Double Double, a guide to doubling revenue and profit in 3 years. Cameron sat down with us to share three of his best growth strategies for building a successful company. Read more below or watch the full video here.

Create a Vivid Vision

This “vivid vision” is a 3-4 page written description of exactly what you want your company to be three years from now. More specific than a mission statement, this paints a picture of your ideal company and makes it easy for employees to work towards that vision. Once you have the final plan, it is easy to reverse engineer and create manageable steps to get to...

Why are Founders often so lonely? It's a combination of things.

First, unlike most other jobs, Founders often don't have a lot of relatable peers in their close-knit group. Most people can sit at lunch and complain about their jobs and get a bunch of nods.

Us Founders often explain what we're going through and get the "thousand-yard stare" from someone wondering how to get out of the conversation.

What do Founders do in this case?

The first thing they do is to find other Founders to meet up with.

The one amazing thing about Founders, by the way, is that they immediately tend to connect with and appreciate other Founders.

It's amazing.

Every Founder understands what it means to be staring into the abyss daily, and how those feelings are...

One of the sayings I hear from talented managers in product development is, “good enough never is.” It’s inspirational, always calling the team to try harder and do better. It works to undermine excuses for poor or shoddy work. And, most importantly, it helps team members develop the courage to stand up for these values in stressful situations. Especially in teams that are managing by objectives (or OKRs), the pressure to deliver is intense. Under such pressure, the temptation to cut corners, to quit prematurely, or to hand off shoddy work to another department is overwhelming. It requires courage to stand up and say: “this work is simply not good enough. Sure, we could get away with it, but that’s not how we work.” Good managers work hard ...

Every year, we’ll hear people declare that SEO is dead. Well known entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk has declared that its been dying for quite some time. It might be changing, but it’s not dying. Not even close.

Wouldn’t we all love to go back to the late 1990s and early 2000s – a time when simply stuffing keywords into a website’s meta tags, footers and CSS files was enough to guarantee high rankings in the search engines? Not to mention getting paid big money for these simple hacks.

As search engine algorithms have become more sophisticated, most of these tricks have died out. You’ve probably already heard the tagline “SEO is dead”, but for some reason the mindset still persists that figuring out the latest on-page tweaks is the key to natura...

At one time, only the corporate elite could afford to collect and crunch millions of data points to optimize their businesses. But with the advent of big data as a service, companies of all sizes now have the chance to take part in the big data revolution.

Although the need for data isn’t new, the amount of information and the type of intelligence it can provide looks starkly different than it did even a few years ago. In fact, the same amount of data influx that was achieved over the past 50 years is now achieved every two days.

If you’re serious about data, you need a way to store, manage, and analyze millions of numbers that will point your business in the right direction. As your company expands, your data stockpile will also grow expon...

Last week I got a call from Patrick an ex-student I hadn’t heard from for 8 years. He was now the CEO of a company and wanted to talk about what he admitted was a “first world” problem. Over breakfast he got me up to date on his life since school (two non-CEO roles in startups), but he wanted to talk about his third startup – the one he and two co-founders had started.

“We’re at 70 people, and we’ll do $40 million in revenue this year and should get to cash flow breakeven this quarter.” It sounded like he was living the dream. I was trying to figure out why we were meeting. But then he told me all about the tough decisions, pivots and firing his best friend he had to do to get to where he was. He had been through heck and back.

“I made it t...

1. You will never take a “real” vacation again.

I am 7 years in and I have come to accept that it is not possible for me to take a “movie vacation” — ya know on a beachfront bungalow with no internet connection, remote from the working world…. And let’s be real — to an entrepreneur that simply doesn’t actually sound fun or relaxing at all. My ideal lifestyle is to be semi-connected on vacation. I’m a phone call/text message away and I will choose when to respond to emails. That may be the extent of my ability to fully “vacation”…and I’m honestly ok with that. Just as I sleep better when my kids are under my roof, I also sleep better when I’m accessible to my business.

2. You will decrease your friendship pool.

Where do most people find the...