Your office space… It needs to be perfect, for you. It should inspire and be a place you enjoy going to. It should empower. The sunlight that comes in through the window, the pictures on the wall, it all matters. You need to customize your office so it is the right environment to perform at…
We can do it better as a collective… screw ‘the man!’ That’s the message from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and tech startup founders for the last five years. And the gargantuan sharing economy (led by Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and many more) has awoken the populous, which is freaking the shit out of big, sleepy corporations. This…
Former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson famously said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Entrepreneurs are among the best at planning, but never has any business plan gone exactly according to a script. In fact, many businesses start out with a mission to solve one problem and end up focusing on…
With all the excellent open-source website design platforms out there now such as WordPress, Ruby on Rails, Drupal etc. the shelf life for website designs has dropped dramatically. Most sustainable websites, by that I mean those that actually make a profit, are redesigned every 12-18 months. It’s the way it is now. Innovate or die….
I’ve been on both sides of the proverbial table. I’ve had businesses pitched to me, and pitched VCs on why they should invest in my business. Whether or not you even get a seat at the table to pitch your startup face to face with a potential backer comes down to the strength of your…
We are living in strange times. Western world central bankers are creating an economy based off debt, which is scary because consumers have demonstrated in decades past a general lack of fiscal responsibility when credit is cheap. What’s more, some countries in the Western world, specifically in Europe, are now under negative interest rate environments…
This is a story about the value of patience and following through on your ideas… A childhood friend, who I still hang and work with on various projects, is a very successful internet marketer. Like me, he’s been an entrepreneur since adolescence. Birds of a feather, I suppose… However, unlike me he is a blend…
Meeting the management of startups is THE way to gauge the worthiness of a possible investment, particularly with technology-related companies… Last week, along with my company which is working on a lens technology that has real game-changing potential in the imaging space, I headed to the SPIE Photonics show in San Francisco to meet vendors,…
Far too often, after they have struck it big, entrepreneurs complain about the burden of investors and the stressful phone calls with key funders during the ‘early days’. It’s funny how quickly the tide turns. In 2008/2009 every founder in Silicon Valley was desperate for investors. Now, it seems sentiment has drastically changed. We read…