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A deep rumble filled the boardroom. Tchotchkes and Star Trek figurines jitter along the desks and fall to the floor. Instinctively the executives climb under the table for shelter. It’s Seattle, 2001, during the Nisqually Earthquake. To everyone’s amazement, Tom Killalea emerged to retrieve his laptop from the top of the desk, and proceeded to check whether Amazon.com was still live.

If Jeff Bezos had a “Mars Group” — Tom Killalea would be in it. But, I’ll get to that, later.

I’m fascinated by Amazon. Its stock price has risen 6,000% since 2001. Amazon has same-day online shopping — even at Christmas, powers a good chunk of the Internet with its web services and in 2016 won 5 Emmys and was nominated for 11 Golden Globes. Jeff Bezos has undo...

Like millions of other women around the world, I have followed Oprah Winfrey as my guide for inspiration and motivation to pursue and live my best life. In my 20-year entrepreneurial journey, I have held up Oprah as an example of how to achieve my highest objectives regardless of the challenges along the way. She has also served as a role model for how to give back and contribute my time and talents to improve my community.

Like most of her admirers, over the years I gleaned this inspiration mostly from watching her TV shows and video interviews, and reading her magazine. Recently, however, I had the fortune of getting an up-close-and- personal introduction to Ms. Winfrey while attending an exclusive inspirational talk she gave to our priva...

Neil Patel is renowned as a marketer and entrepreneur. As co-founder of KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg and Hello Bar, he has found enormous success: he was even named a Top Online Influencer by the Wall Street Journal, and a Top 10 Online Marketer by Forbes.

If you have a few minutes, watch the video below to hear Neil ruminate on how to drive traffic to your site through creativity. We’ve also outlined the major points below for your easy perusal.

Tap Into Your Creativity

Believe it or not, Neil Patel’s first entrepreneurial effort was a failure. He was self-admittedly young and naive, assuming that the adage “If you build it, they will come” applied to Internet marketing. He soon learned this was untrue, and then went broke paying a professiona...

Any entrepreneur trying to fund their startup is well aware of the benefits of raising capital. Large cash infusions enable you to reach the market quicker, add more resources, and launch with a burst of speed.

But are there any benefits to not raising capital? What happens when you avoid taking on capital and take your time to build a company?

There are lots of hidden benefits to building slowly, although that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best way to grow. More important is how you consider the benefits of avoiding capital and use them to your advantage.

Avoiding Dilution

If you refrain from taking on investors, you keep more equity. It’s an obvious truth that can be difficult to reconcile with the aforementioned benefits of taki...

Not so long ago, my post-work routine looked like this:

After a particularly grueling day, I’d sit on the couch and veg for hours, doing my version of “Netflix and chill,” which meant keeping company with a cold pint of ice cream. I knew the ice cream, and the sitting, were probably a bad idea, but I told myself this was my well-deserved “reward” for working so hard.

Psychological researchers have a name for this phenomenon: It’s called “ego depletion.”

The theory is that willpower is connected to a limited reserve of mental energy, and once you run out of that energy, you’re more likely to lose self-control. This theory would seem to perfectly explain my after-work indulgences.

But new studies suggest that we’ve been thinking about willpow...

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...

I going to share the story of the creepiest, least appropriate guerrilla marketing tactic I’ve ever come across. I’m not going to name the startup founder who did it, nor am I going to tell you identifying details about his company. I just want to make sure that no founder trying to get ahead hears a story like this and thinks, “Oh, that’s a great idea!”

No. It is not a great idea. It’s terrible.

Let’s rewind. The other day I came home to a package on my couch. Now, this isn’t a rare occurrence — I order off of Amazon as much as the next Millennial American — but I didn’t recognize the return address. “Weird,” I thought. “What’s this?”

My boyfriend poured me a glass of wine and I absentmindedly ripped the package open while telling him abou...

Remember Pokémon GO? Of course you do because it was all you heard about for a few quick months in the summer of 2016. With millions of people downloading and playing the game, retailers and restaurants leapt at the opportunity to sponsor in-game experiences. Players flocked from location to location to virtually battle one another or to catch new Pokémon, and numerous companies were able to cash in on quick marketing wins.

There’s a lesson here, though. It’s most likely been a while since Pokémon GO was part of a recent conversation. Chances are that businesses are also no longer investing a significant portion of their marketing budget into the app’s in-game advertising opportunities. Short-term wins absolutely exist, but instead of spend...

We're so damn distracted by "growth" that we rarely ask ourselves what it is about growth that even matters.

You know who cares about growth? Our investors. The media. Our sewing circles of other Founders.

You know who cares about quality? Our team. Our customers. Our partners. You know, the people that we should be solely focused on.

There's a time and a place to focus on growth, but all too often our focus on growth comes directly at the expense of our focus on quality. And that's a dangerous place to be.

We need to have a discussion around making our startups better, not just bigger.

Size Doesn't Equal Quality

A couple of years ago, Basecamp Founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson said something that always stuck with me when ...

Paying people with equity is synonymous with startups.

Founders love being able to buy things with Monopoly money and newly granted shareholders dream of a huge windfall someday. And that sounds awesome.

But the problem is that equity isn't like cash — it's far more valuable, yet we tend to spend it like it's free. We later come to learn that equity is not only expensive now, it's way more expensive later as the company grows, and we now hold less of it.

What's so bad about paying with equity?

It's not a bad idea if we value it properly. But that's the problem. Equity, especially in the early days, is often spent with little consideration for it's long term value.

"I'll design your mobile app for 10% of the company" might sound like a dea...