A founder I was meeting for the first time was telling me about her startup. She spent the first 15-ish minutes of our meeting describing her project. Then, once she’d told me everything she wanted to explain, she asked a question that, to her, seemed simple. She asked: “Why is nobody buying my product?”
It wasn’t the first time I’d been asked that same question by a founder. In fact, I get asked that question almost weekly. But something was particularly jarring about the way this founder asked. She did it in the same way she might ask me to name my favorite color. …
I’ll never forget the first time a reporter contacted me asking for an interview. She wasn’t from the New York Times or anything like that. Just a local reporter writing about the region’s increase in successful venture-backed tech startups. Still, it felt like my company had finally “made it.” We were gaining enough traction to be considered part of the region’s “successful startups,” and that seemed like an important milestone.
I met the reporter for coffee, we chatted for the better part of an hour, and we had what felt like a great conversation about the company and its growth. …
The holidays are a notoriously terrible time for entrepreneurs trying to raise venture capital
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I was meeting with an entrepreneur who wanted to practice his fundraising pitch. His first comment when we started our meeting was, “Thanks for taking the time to talk. I was surprised you’d be willing to meet today.”
“Why is that?” I asked, though I suspected I already knew the answer.
“It seems like nobody is working today,” he replied. “It’s like everyone goes on vacation the week Thanksgiving starts, and they don’t come back until after New Year’s.”
“Yup, I remember thinking the same thing back when I was regularly fundraising,” I responded. “I always hated the holidays. From mid-November to mid-January, it was nearly impossible to get meetings with VCs. And, even if I could get a meeting, I couldn’t actually hope to close a deal because too many of the partners were out of the office and on vacation.” …
Technically, a new universe is a type of startup
From an outside perspective, successful startups often seem like they were overnight successes. They’ve got tons of customers, tons of revenue, tons of investment, and it all appears to have happened very quickly.
Back when I was building startups, seeing other companies succeeding so quickly gave me huge amounts of anxiety. From what I could tell, other successful companies were growing faster than my own, which, in turn, made me feel like I was headed toward failure.
I’m certain plenty of you reading this have experienced the same self-doubt. Maybe you’re feeling it right now. So I wanted to share a strategy for overcoming the depressing feeling that every other company is an overnight success while yours is… well… a long, slow, slog of never-ending challenges and frustrations. …
Yes, you can raise money with cold emails. Here’s how.
As a founder, whenever people gave me advice about the best ways to meet potential investors, they always warned me not to send “cold emails.” Instead, I was told I needed to be introduced to investors through personal connections.
To be fair, It’s well-meaning and seemingly logical advice. After all, having someone personally vouch for an entrepreneur does seem like it would make investors more likely to take a meeting and be receptive to a pitch. …
Are you forgetting the most important part of your pitch?
Take a moment to think about your favorite product. Maybe it’s your iPhone. Maybe it’s your Playstation. Maybe it’s your Tesla. Whatever it is, ask yourself this completely random question: could it have existed 500 years ago?
I realize that’s a ridiculous question, but I’m trying to make a point here, so bear with me.
The reason your favorite things couldn’t have existed 500 years ago is because startups don’t exist in a historical vacuum. They exist within the times and places in which they’re built because they rely on the unique infrastructures, problems, needs, and resources of their particular historical moments. For example, a Tesla would have been a great car in 1520, but the technology for Teslas simply didn’t exist back then. …
We can control what we build, but we can’t control the outcome
For most entrepreneurs, helping create a company worth billions of dollars would be the kind of distinction they’d proudly wear as a badge of honor. But Peter Sunde isn’t most entrepreneurs. In fact, he hates being called an entrepreneur.
Instead, Peter is a pirate. Well… not literally. If anything, Peter was more like the captain of a digital pirate ship that helped other people commit online piracy. That’s because Peter Sunde founded The Pirate Bay, the world’s most popular torrent search engine to enable (often illegal) file sharing.
Peter built The Pirate Bay because he was an outspoken advocate for the freedom of information, knowledge, art, media, and culture, and The Pirate Bay became his platform for implementing his ideals. …
Children see the world in ways adults often can’t
Successful entrepreneurs are good at asking questions about the world that other people never think to ask. These questions often reveal insights most people don’t see, and it’s what allows them to recognize unique entrepreneurial opportunities.
Asking these kinds of questions is a difficult skill to cultivate. However, if, like me, you also happen to be a parent of young children, then you have a secret weapon because kids are great at asking the kinds of questions grown-ups overlook. So, if you have kids, instead of disregarding their questions as “childish,” listen carefully. …
Learn to talk about the right things or risk wasting your time
Nearly every day since I started teaching entrepreneurship at Duke, I’ve gotten some version of the following question:
“Can we meet to discuss my idea?”
I get it in-person. I get it via email. I get it via Twitter. It comes from founders, from students, from friends who know I do “entrepreneur-y” things, from entrepreneurs who randomly find me online, and dozens of other places. Every time I see the question, I shake my head and sigh.
Don’t misunderstand me. I love talking with entrepreneurs about their businesses. If I could clone myself a thousand times, I’d be thrilled to have all thousand of my clones meeting with entrepreneurs and doling out entrepreneurial advice all day. …
Yes… someone had to invent tagging!
Tagging things online is something most of us take for granted. We add tags to our Instagram posts. We add tags to our videos. We add tags to the contacts in our CRMs. In other words, all of us are constantly using tags to keep ourselves organized and help find things. And yet, if you’re like me, you probably never once wondered where or how tagging began. But, like all things human-made, someone had to invent it. That person happens to be a programmer and entrepreneur named Joshua Schachter.
Despite the fact that he invented tagging, Joshua is actually best known for creating something else. He was the founder of social bookmarking website del.icio.us back in 2003. The project helped usher in the age of Web 2.0, and it was so popular it was famously acquired by Yahoo! …
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