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8 years ago I decided that whatever startup I was going to launch would be the last startup I ever did.

I made this decision after launching 8 startups and realizing that creating a company as a "means to an end" was a shitty way for me to live.

I found myself in this constant cycle of being wildly preoccupied by "the next thing." Raising money for my startup was a means to a quicker exit. Killing myself meant I could finish this chapter faster, more successfully.

I had endless justifications for compromising my life because I could always "make it up later."

But what if there was no "later"?

This time around I decided to change it up.

I asked myself, "What if I picked what I wanted to do for the rest of my life NOW?" So instead of maki...

Tech has a very obvious diversity problem — and it’s coming out in insidious ways. For example, in April, Snapchat released a Bob Marley filter that essentially put users in blackface.

In August, they came out with a yellow face filter, which transformed users’ faces into a stereotypically “Asian” face. These racist releases from a company that boasts 8 billion video views per day had people around the world wondering how, exactly, these filters slipped through the filter.

The answer is simple: They’re not designing for a diverse audience.

It’s one thing to say ‘We’re trying to make tech more inclusive’ but what we’re really trying to do is create places where people feel they belong.

Benjamin Evans is a UX/UI designer who has worked with a...

Paying your dues sucks. When I started my career, I got told by everyone older than me that whenever they handed me shit work I should be thankful because I was “paying my dues”.

I assumed it was some tired colloquialism for getting young people to do work at sub-market rates without questioning their own value.

Have a great startup idea? Great! Now you need someone to build it. If you are not technical and don’t want to learn to code, how do you hire a great developer to build your MVP?

For many people the process of hiring the first tech person to build your early-stage startup can be very intimidating but it doesn’t have to be. During my time coding risk systems on Wall Street, I interviewed hundreds of developers for a spot on our team. Below are five things to look for in a promising candidate.

1. Look For a Person Excited About Solving Big Challenges.

Ask your candidate what was the biggest challenge she faced in her last few projects. If the answer involves anything about finishing the project on time, dealing with difficult clients or havi...

Question: What is one thing to look for when investing in a startup?

The following answers are provided by members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

How Customer Focused They Are

I ask every founder, “How many sales calls did you make in the last week?” If founders spend more time perfecting features than speaking with potential customers, their focus is in the wrong place. They might have a great product. It might look like a business. But without customers, it’s not a business. If the ...

Here’s a basic truth about founding a startup: You don’t know everything you need to know. In fact, you probably only know a fraction of what you need to know to be successful. But don’t worry — you don’t have to go it alone. This is where a startup mentor comes in.

“For a really early stage company, mentors are a great source of industry advice and expertise, particularly if you don’t have direct expertise in that particular area,” Sapna Shah, Principal at Red Giraffe Advisors and startup mentor for XRC Labs, The Monarq Incubator, and TrendSeeder, tells Startups.co. “As well as executive coaching advice — perhaps you’ve never been a CEO before, and you’ve never had to manage people in this way.

Knowledge is one of the greatest things a sta...

Growth expert Steve Patti joined us for a Clarity Live webinar last week to share some of his key lessons for growth. We’re sharing his top tips to keep you on the right track for startup success.

Steve’s three steps for startup growth are outlined below.

Step One: Understand the Approach for Becoming Customer-Centric

Get the Story Right: Be clear about why buyers should care about what you have to sell. Nail your positioning statement and then quantify it in terms of business outcomes that matter to customers.

Apply It: Once the brand positioning is defined and quantified, apply it to your messaging strategy, content production, lead generation tactics, and in your sales process so that you become your positioning.

Keep It Relevant: Audit ...

It turns out middle schoolers may be some of the best Founders I've ever met.

A little backstory. My kids go to a small school in Ohio that only has 208 students in the whole Middle School (grades 5-8). The school is very innovative, but one of the things that they do is allow the teachers to each pick one topic they would love to teach, no matter how weird, and pitch it to the entire Middle School.

I got invited to this pitch, totally unprepared as usual, and watched all of the other teachers pitch their classes. It was everything from "How to be a Pirate" to "How to Create your Dungeons and Dragons character." There were some seriously academic ones in there, but I was "sold" on the D&D course for sure! Where was this stuff when I was a kid...

Google AdWords is a heavyweight when it comes to understanding and monitoring the desires and questions of Google searchers, and ultimately understanding what affects the overall decision making that drives clicks.

By digging through and analyzing data, one can find explanations for budget leakage, and reasoning for campaign renovation. Using AdWords, in combination with multiple tools, users can conduct an accurate analysis of a campaigns current performance, both to discover strengths to continue taking advantage of and areas to improve.

For those of you looking to discover new ways to analyze your campaigns and make large and small scale changes to your account, join us for this ultimate PPC account analysis.

Tools and Resources Used:

I...

Fail fast. Fail forward. Those are just two of the mantras you’ll see hanging in startup offices and incubators across the globe. In the startup world, a failure is considered a learning opportunity, at the least; a feather in the cap of the Founder, at best. We fetishize failure. We normalize it.

But as much as we talk a good game about failure, the reality is that failing sucks. Just as no one goes into their wedding day planning for divorce, no one starts a company thinking, “Yeah, this one will just be my starter. I’ll get it right next time.” No wants to fail, and yet the majority of startups do fail.

According to an examination of startup businesses (by which they mean new companies in general) in the United States conducted by Stati...