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We can quantifiably say that Elon Musk has been the best tech entrepreneur of the modern era. Only one other one — Jim Clark– has built three companies that exited for north of $1 billion, and he needed the dot com bubble to do it. Musk has done it four times, if you count SolarCity, across different industries and in difficult financial times.

And yet, even Musk is still scrapping and fighting for investors’ respect. Witness the current flap about his plan to merge SolarCity with Tesla, which some investors criticize as a scheme for him to bail himself out.

That isn’t how Musk sees it. But he’s used to seeing the world a different way.

Back in 2012, I did an in depth on-stage interview with Musk about the earliest days of his companies, h...

Having spent the last 25 years in startups and high growth companies, I have had to build sales teams from the ground up several times. While many people would prefer to avoid the heavy lifting required to build a sales team from scratch, starting with a clean slate offers a great opportunity to establish the conditions for success right from the start. That said, there are also several unique challenges that must be tackled in order to be successful.

READINESS

One of the first challenges is getting the timing right.

As a recruiter specializing in finding top performing sales people, we receive many inquiries from companies eager to hire their first sales people. While it sounds counter-intuitive for us to talk prospects out of buying our ...

One of the hardest things about being a startup founder is that you’re expected to be an expert in everything. Bootstrapping founders quickly learn that they’re supposed to not only be the CEO but also the bookkeeper, HR department, janitor, tech support, customer service — everything. And while sometimes it’s a good idea to play all of those roles yourself (Some of you seriously are Renaissance humans. Looking at you, James Wolf.), other times it’s important to recognize where your limitations are and pay an expert to do it for you.

One such expert is Jessica Mah. Or, more specifically, Jessica Mah and her team of more than 200 employees at the entrepreneur-focused accounting firm inDinero.

Your Back Office

According to inDinero, a compan...

We do something in our planning at Startups.com that is relatively unheard of in the startup business: We optimize for happiness.

Now, before you think I’m going to start on some bullshit rant about how profits don’t matter and work/life balance is all that’s important — forget about that.

Profits matter, and work/life balance is as real as Santa Claus.

This isn’t about foosball tables and company outings — at all.

It’s about how incredibly hard you have to work to make personal happiness the one immutable goal of your startup.

We put an insane amount of work into optimizing for happiness, and we do it because we value our personal happiness above all else.

So, you could say that we take happiness very seriously. Well, here’s how we do it:

Mark Robinson and Sam Lee, the founders of Class.Travel, sat down with us to discuss how to launch and create apps that users love. The two met over tacos and Mexican beer, and stumbled upon the idea to create Class.Travel, a platform allowing you to easily book hotels.

Both have a background in computer science and have always wanted to start their own companies. Below they share their top ten tips on creating a user-friendly mobile app.

1. Foster a pool of qualified users
   Find people who are interested in your product or service and really lean on them. Let them offer feedback, involve them in decisions, and keep them posted on news and updates. These people will be your first customers and potential investors down the line.
2. Get advice from...

When Uber first entered the saturated world of on-demand food delivery, it wasn’t easy. Especially considering how crowded the space already is (consider Seamless, Postmates, Grubhub, and now Amazon). Still, UberEats took off, offering its menus in 120 markets around the world in just three years; it even earned more than Uber’s original ride-sharing platform.

Uber makes it look easy, right? But starting a business or transitioning into an already packed industry can be difficult, regardless of whether the company is a well-known conglomerate or a brand-new startup. To begin, business leaders should learn who their customers are — even before marketing. You’ll never attract an audience if you don’t know who your target is (or what their nee...

Building a weekend side project or an MVP to validate your startup is not as hard as you think. Whether you’ve never written a line of code in your life or your GitHub profile link is in your Twitter bio, there are existing tools that you can use to build your initial product in a day and sometimes even a few hours! I’ll share some of these with you that make up my MVP toolkit.

First, let’s focus on what I think is one of the most important considerations and that is validation. Your whole goal when building an MVP is to either validate so you can continue down the path you are assuming is correct (with added conviction), make changes with new learnings (pivot idea, product, and or approach), or realize that what you assumed is not worth y...

There’s something weird going on at Conversio. The team is spread out, not just across cities, but across continents. They get together as a team about once every six months. And they just might have one of the strongest company cultures out there.

Their secret: the entire Conversio team is intensely, radically, maybe even fanatically committed to their company culture.

Not that that’s a bad thing. Quite the opposite. If startup culture comes down to what’s in the water at the company water cooler, we could all stand to take a sip of what the Conversio team is drinking.

And that formula has its roots with the company’s Founder, Adii Pienaar.

Startup culture is something of a passion of Adii’s. When he first started Conversio, he began deve...

If you’re expecting to get the funding you need to take your startup to the next level, you need to get serious about your business pitch. Without the right amount of preparation, people are not likely to throw money at your “amazing” business idea.

Here are some business pitch tips based on my experience as a CEO and entrepreneur. They will help you impress potential investors and find the right fit for your business.

Getting Ready

Benjamin Franklin was right. “By failing to prepare we prepare to fail.”

Leave your startup business pitch preparation to the last minute and a “thanks but no thanks” is all but a fait accompli. If you think natural charm and some ‘ad-libbing’ will get you through, please think again.

Research your audience

Onc...

One of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs, I believe, is that we’re all trying to grow our businesses in an age of significant distraction. You carry mobile devices that have you tethered to a network millions of people deep, you’re juggling multiple applications at all hours, and pushing the limits of how many things you can track on a regular basis.

At some point, something has to give – and when it does, your productivity and work/life balance takes a hit.

We all struggle with this problem to some degree, and it can be helpful to know how others manage to grow and thrive despite constant distractions and unending task lists.

I recently sat down with content marketing influencer and social media strategist Jeff Bullas to find out h...