entrepreneurs
Key Mentality Attributes For Entrepreneurs
By Martin at September 8, 2014 | 11:37 am | 0 Comment
As an angel investor and a mentor to aspiring entrepreneurs, I’m always disappointed to see founders who seem stressed out most of the time, and more annoyed than energized by the abundance of challenges they see in building their startup. The entrepreneurial lifestyle is a tough one under the best of circumstances, and it’s one you have to love in order to more...
Basic Principles Of Business Writing For Entrepreneurs
By Martin at September 4, 2014 | 11:29 am | 0 Comment
Even in this age of videos and text messages, the quickest way to kill your startup dream with investors, business partners, or even customers, is embarrassingly poor writing. Being very visible in the startup community, I still get an amazing number of badly written emails, rambling executive summaries, and business plans with one paragraph per chapter. In the more...
How To Take Calculated Risk For Your Startup Company Success
By Martin at August 28, 2014 | 11:48 am | 0 Comment
There is old saying that good lawyers run away from risk, while good businessmen run towards risk. Entrepreneurs see “no risk” as meaning “no reward.” In reality, all risks are not the same. Many risks can be managed or calculated to improve growth or provide a competitive edge, while others, like skipping quality checks to save money, are recipes for more...
What are the attributes that make an entrepreneur unstoppable?
By Martin at August 26, 2014 | 10:58 am | 0 Comment
We all know at least one entrepreneur who always gets things done, and appears unstoppable in his quest. All of you probably know many others who talk incessantly about their great ideas, but never seem to even get started, or they give up at the first obstacle. What are the attributes that make an entrepreneur unstoppable, and is it possible for people to learn to be more...
How Entrepreneurs Should Focus On Their Startup Company
By Martin at August 25, 2014 | 1:47 pm | 0 Comment
One of the most common failures I see in startups is lack of focus. Unfocused entrepreneurs boast that their new technology will generate multiple disruptive products for consumers as well as enterprises around the world. Investors hear this as trying to do too many things with limited resources, meaning the startup will not shine at anything, and will not survive the more...
Why Entrepreneurs Should Not Be Secretive About Startup Idea
By Martin at August 22, 2014 | 11:15 am | 0 Comment
It’s popular these days for startup founders to operate in stealth mode, meaning no details about the idea or progress are shared with anyone until the big reveal and rollout. The common reason given is that this prevents any competitor from stealing their idea and beating them to market. In my view, this paranoid approach costs them much more than the risk of being more...
Entrepreneurs Can Get Success Without Disruptive Technology
By Martin at August 1, 2014 | 11:23 am | 0 Comment
It may not be as sexy, but starting a new business that builds on an existing technology or business model is usually less risky than introducing that ultimate new disruptive technology. There are many levels of innovation that go beyond copying someone else’s idea, but stop short of pushing the bleeding edge. Many of the major business successes started this way. more...
Why Personal Integrity Is Important For Entreprenurs
By Martin at July 29, 2014 | 11:15 am | 0 Comment
As an entrepreneur, your personal integrity is critical for getting and keeping the support of investors and team members, and your company’s integrity is critical for getting and keeping customers and vendors. But in a practical sense, what does that really mean? Most definitions of integrity include something like “the quality of being honest and morally more...
When Entrepreneurs Or Business People Should Ask For Entitlement?
By Martin at July 21, 2014 | 11:25 am | 0 Comment
Where did this sense of entitlement in our business culture come from? I’ve written about this before, but I was reminded again a while back at a conference for startups when an entrepreneur started berating investors for not funding early-stage startups. It sounded to investors like me that they felt a funding entitlement for their startup idea. Of course, I’m sure more...
How Entrepreneurs Should Survive The Valley Of Death
By Martin at July 15, 2014 | 11:37 am | 0 Comment
The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. I often get asked about the real alternatives to bridge this valley, and there are some good ones I will outline here. According more...
Why Entrepreneurs Need To Be Accountable
By Martin at June 24, 2014 | 8:26 am | 0 Comment
Everyone seems to like the aspect of being an entrepreneur that goes with “being your own boss” and “able to do things my way.” But sometimes they forget that this kind of freedom comes with a price of personal accountability. Accountability means “the buck stops here,” and “all the failures are mine.” Too many people seem to do whatever it takes to more...
How Entrepreneurs Think & Act
By Martin at June 21, 2014 | 10:23 am | 0 Comment
Maybe starting a new business isn’t your passion, but in these days of rapid change, where everyone is dealing with uncertainty, I believe that thinking and acting like entrepreneurs will help you get ahead in any profession. In simple terms this means taking control of your life, going after something you love to do, and taking action. Stop letting life decisions more...
Top Ten 0utsourcing Mistakes Made By Entrepreneurs
By Martin at June 19, 2014 | 10:56 am | 0 Comment
These days, it is almost impossible to find a small business where everything is done at the home location, by full-time employees. We are in the age of outsourcing, by any of many popular names, including subcontracting, freelancing, and virtual assistants. These approaches allow your startup to grow more rapidly, save costs, but costly mistakes can lead to business more...
Startups Are All About Execution
By Martin at May 17, 2014 | 9:38 am | 0 Comment
I’ve always said that startups are all about execution. Sometimes I encounter self-proclaimed entrepreneurs who have been “thinking” about a concept for many years, and haven’t started yet. Some of these may be visionaries, but none are real entrepreneurs - yet.Elon Musk has built several innovative companies, including SpaceX and Tesla Motors, and is worth about more...
Entrepreneurs Are Hunters Or Farmers?
By Martin at May 13, 2014 | 8:25 am | 0 Comment
Most entrepreneurs believe they are “different,” but they can’t quite understand how. They usually explain it by insisting that they are driven to follow their passion, need to be their own boss, want to get rich quick, or want to change the world. I now believe that the roots of the difference may go back more than 10,000 years, when hunting and farming became two more...
Huge Opportunities For Entrepreneurs in Natural Resources
By Martin at May 6, 2014 | 8:34 am | 0 Comment
The cost of entry for an aspiring entrepreneur has never been lower, and the total wealth of opportunities has never been larger. You can start a new e-Commerce site on the Internet for as little as $100, with cheap smart phone apps, new technology innovations, or tapping the multitude of opportunities brought by capitalizing on our concern for dwindling natural more...
Lessons For Entrepreneurs To Learn From Good Incubators
By Martin at March 31, 2014 | 8:07 am | 0 Comment
More and more entrepreneurs are hearing about the successful graduates and investors queued behind a few well-known startup incubators, including Y Combinator, TechStars, and the Founder Institute. They dream of appearing at the door, with their idea on the back of a napkin, and popping out a few months later with investor money to burn. The reality is far more...
209th 1M/1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Spotlight on Penn Students
By Guest Post at March 24, 2014 | 10:19 am | 0 Comment
209th 1M/1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Spotlight on Penn Students During this week’s roundtable, we collaborated with the University of Pennsylvania to support their student entrepreneurship drive. All four presenters today are semi finalists of the PennVention competition. AWARE First up, John Bergantino from Philadelphia, PA, pitched AWARE, a very more...
Why Entrepreneurs Should Focus On Getting Things Done
By Martin at March 18, 2014 | 8:14 am | 0 Comment
When someone introduces me to an “idea person,” I automatically jump to the down-side conclusion that this person doesn’t do follow-up. Of course there are people who are great at getting things done, but haven’t had an original idea in their life. Great entrepreneurs, like Bill Gates, are great at both. I was with IBM in the early PC days when Bill worked with more...
Six Good Habits For Entrepreneurs
By Martin at March 8, 2014 | 9:01 am | 0 Comment
Most of the entrepreneurs I know realize they have some bad habits, like maybe procrastination or not listening well, so they focus on dropping these. New studies indicate that a more productive approach would be adopting new good habits and behaviors that clearly move your business forward, like good time management and implementing customer recommendations. These two more...
