Forums Search

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: a Founder and a VC walk into an elevator…

In all seriousness, if you’ve spent any time swimming in the startup waters, you’re probably familiar with the idea of the elevator pitch. But in case you missed that day in Founder School, the scenario is this:

Say you got in an elevator, and standing in that elevator was the one person that could make or break your business. You have the length of that elevator ride to convince this person to get on board. And no, the electricity can’t suddenly cut out and leave you with a couple of hours to fill instead of a handful of seconds.

Well — What the @#*! do you say?

There’s a reason the elevator pitch has become such an icon of entrepreneurship. And it’s not be...

You never see many “consultant” costumes around Halloween time, but it turns out that hiring one can be the source of numerous company horror stories.

First of all, hiring a seasoned strategic consultant is a difficult area to navigate. For example, you might prepare by reading whitepapers to brush up on some knowledge before the hiring process. Then, if the candidate uses the same terminology that you read in the whitepapers, you might assume you two are a great match. But what if the candidate read the same whitepapers and that is the full extent of his knowledge?

It can be challenging to know whether the person in front of you is the real deal or just wearing a mask.

Expectation and reality

Hiring the right strategic consultant can be di...

Imagine stumbling across a Glassdoor review of your company filled with damaging declarations and seemingly unfounded statements. You’d be shocked, right? I know I was.

Our former employee’s description seemed so foreign, I didn’t recognize the company being described. According to the review, we were growing too fast, too furiously; we were operating in a knee-jerk manner.

It was clear the past employee wasn’t aware that we look to hyper-vet everything we do. Decisions are hardly made on whims; they’re quite nuanced. Of course, none of that matters to employees if they’re not hearing the truth.

What had happened? To make a long story short, complete miscommunication on our part.

We’re not the only business that’s dealt with miscommunicati...

At what point do we find out if all of our startup sacrifice was worth it?

The prevailing theory is that as Founders, we can justify our sacrifices of time, money, and emotional energy for the bounty of riches we'll enjoy on the other side. It's almost hard-coded into all of us the moment we take the plunge to start something.

But what happens when we're on the other side and we're forced to come to terms with whether or not those sacrifices were justified? Can we truly replace what was lost in getting here with what was gained through our efforts? What if we straight up made a bad bet?

Let me tell you a personal story about my journey as a Founder over 30 (very long) years of building startups and my assessment of a mountain of sacrifice o...

Are you in the startup or growth and establishment phase of your business? Odds are you’re already thinking about the importance of location.

Where you’re located might not be a huge concern when you’re the sole member of your “team”. However, once you grow the business past a critical point, you’ll need to attract additional talent and investment.

The temptation to set up shop in an inexpensive city is entirely understandable. On the face of it, it seems the most cost-effective option. After all, startup hubs such as New York, San Francisco, London, and Singapore regularly rank in the top 10 most expensive cities in the world, both for cost of living and cost of doing business. So why not go somewhere cheaper? Or even further afield: to a ...

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...

“The problem here: a) making a business that didn’t give us money early on, and b) not giving up; we kept putting money into the business without knowing we were already dead.”

The special guest of this Startups Live session, Caya, has some great stories to tell. “Started my first business in 2011 (I was 22) and it failed terribly. I ended up with $15K in credit card debt that I just finished paying up last year. The problem here: a) making a business that didn’t give us money early on, and b) not giving up; we kept putting money into the business without knowing we were already dead.”

Well, this may not sound ‘great’, but even this painful experience, which Caya freely shares, comes with silver linings. You might say that he has a knack fo...

We wanted to find out, were these people telling us they liked the product just to be nice? Or was there something else that was going on?

Jeff Stefanis and his co-Founder Amber Wason were pedal to the metal on development of their electric bike startup Riide in early 2015. They had perfected their design, they had partnered with a top manufacturing company to build the bikes, and they were offering test rides around Washington, DC as a way to introduce DC commuters to the idea and turn testers into buyers.

There was just one problem: nobody was buying.

“Our conversion rate from test rides to buying was about 3%,” Jeff remembers. “Which is not great.”

The low conversion rate confused Jeff and Amber at first, because it seemed to directly co...

“The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.”
~Bill Copeland

It’s not exactly a groundbreaking claim to say that setting business goals is crucial to the success of any company. But sometimes, as Founders, we get so focused on the big-picture goals we have for our company, we forget about another set of goals we should be setting: goals for our team.

Trying to run a company without setting team goals is kind of like a football coach sending their team onto the field without a game plan. You may score a touchdown, sure – but the more likely outcome is chaos, confusion, and a whole lot of hurt.

The big-picture goals you set for your company may be the roadmap that shows yo...

In programming, there’s a concept called “technical debt.” It’s the idea that you can build something well or you can build it quickly — but not both. A site or an app that’s built super fast is going to be buggy; that’s just the reality of the limitations of human creation. But sometimes — especially in the fast-paced world of startups — it’s worth it to release something quickly, bugs and all, with the knowledge that you’ll fix it (i.e. pay off your technical debt) in the near future.

Didier Elzinga, CEO of Culture Amp, borrowed the concept of technical debt and created the idea of “diversity debt.” It applies to hiring practices in any company, where every time you make a new hire, you’re either incurring more diversity debt or paying it...