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Once you have your fundraising plan and your pitch list together, it’s time to make sure you have all of your key pitch assets in order. Most of these assets are built from the same basic content and are simply reworked to fit different needs and requests.

Once you have the basics down, it’s pretty easy to prepare all of these documents as needed. Here’s a comprehensive list of what you’ll need to prepare when you’re ready to launch your fundraise.

Elevator Pitch

Your elevator pitch is a short, consistent synopsis of your business, usually in just a few sentences. Surprisingly, getting your pitch to be short and consistent is kind of hard to do.

Although the amount of content you need to create is tiny—just a few sentences—the amount of tho...

According to figures reported in the GEM Global Report, 100 million new businesses are launched annually.

Thats nearly 11,000 startups per hour.

So, how do you beat this competition? By raising more funds? By marketing more aggressively? Maybe. But, I believe that increasing the brand value of your startup can help it not only survive the competition but thrive.

When it comes to marketing your business, branding is an old concept. Unfortunately, it’s one that few startups utilize properly. Review these 7 tips to improve (or build!) your startup’s branding:

Tip #1 — No persistence, no brand

For example, what are the labels you would associate with the Nike brand?

You’re probably thinking somewhere along the lines of sports, Michael Jordan,...

Today we’re exploring how cognitive bias affects venture capitalism. The topic is worth our time because investing is just as much art as it is science.

A venture firm works from a thesis, but a thesis is just a set of proposed understandings. Beneath the graphs and pie charts, the empirical anchors, lie fuzzier things like intuition, hope, and bias.

Let’s understand that bias to better understand why money gets allocated the way it does.

Brains Full of Bias

The human mind is prone to quirks of thought that distort reality. A fun example is the IKEA effect: the tendency to over-value items that you assembled yourself. The planning fallacy is another cognitive bias, one that software developers are familiar with, at least in practice — peop...

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...

Ben is currently VP Product at GoInstant, a venture-backed startup focused on changing how we share and experience the web with co-browsing technology. GoInstant was recently acquired by Salesforce.com. He is also a Founding Partner at Year One Labs, which is an early stage accelerator in Montreal. They’ve invested in five startups: Localmind, Massive Damage, HighScore House, qidiq and Happy Stuff. Three of those companies have gone on to raise follow on capital.

Prior to that Ben was the CEO and co-founder of Standout Jobs, which sold in 2010. He’s been an entrepreneur in the web space for 15+ years. Ben is also involved in a number of different projects as an advisor, consultant and mentor. His main interests include: Web/mobile startups...

A fair warning about pitching venture capital firms: no amount of preparation will guarantee that you will raise venture capital. But being unprepared is the fastest way to fail. You really only get one shot making the right impression with each venture capital firm and the last thing you want is to blow your chances because you didn’t spend the time to know your business inside and out.

Contrary to what you may think, venture capital firms don’t actually read business plans, but they are sure glad you have one.

In the previous section we explained how to find venture capital firms to send your elevator pitch to. Now we’ll explain what you’ll need when they ask you to present.

Executive Summary

Over the years the reliance on venture capital...

What is a business loan?

A business loan is an amount of money a business borrows from a financial institution, with set requirements for the amount of time it will take to pay back, as well as interest rates.

Businesses get loans in order to help them start or to fund expansion. They’re one of a range of funding options for startups.

Types of business loans for startups

There are five main types of business loans that are relevant for startups:

1. SBA small business loans
2. Business credit lines
3. Short term loans
4. Invoice financing
5. Merchant cash advances

Let’s take a closer look at each one.

SBA Small Business Loans

A SBA small business loan is a loan that is backed by the Small Business Administration (SBA).

Founded in 1953, the SBA is a fe...

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Ninety to ninety-five percent of startups fail within the first five years. A large majority fail within the first 12 to 18 months. The failure of a startup shouldn’t be a big deal. In fact, finding the hard edges is what startups are all about.

Ideas should be pressure tested to find the ones that don’t survive, the ones that do, and most importantly the ones that could scale.

The problems begin when we conflate startup failure with “this is really bad”.

It’s only bad if the founder and team are over-extended, underwater, out of runway, or whatever analogous phrasing you choose. When all of the resources are marshaled in the wrong direction. When nobody stopped to do the critical work over the urgent. When the founders believed the same s...

In the early years of your startup, you may feel like a one-person show. You have infinite faith in your product or service, but how do you translate that commitment to investors and stakeholders? How can you raise brand awareness before you have the funding necessary for marketing and PR?

Despite these obstacles, you must find a way to gain traction in building a community or generating sales. Otherwise, you risk stalling or, worse, folding. Fortunately, this is where “strength in numbers” comes into play. Find out how you can get your show on the road with a strategic startup partnership.

Getting ahead with a strategic startup partnership

1. Instant Street Cred

Validation by large enterprises generates the credibility and exposure you ne...