This is part of my ongoing series “ Start-up Lessons. ” This is a very important post to me because I find myself giving this advice all the time and if you don’t follow the basic advice here you can cause yourself much heartache down the line – even if your company ultimately becomes über successful. Sometimes they’re working full time at a company or sometimes they’ve already left their employer and they’re bouncing around ideas with friends.  These 8221;  If you want to subscribe to my RSS feed please click here or to get my blog by email click here .

This post is part of my series “ Startup Lessons ” Elephants, Deer and Rabbits – Some thoughts on start-up segmentation Nearly all of the mistakes I made at my first company I fixed by the time of my second company.  This This is the only mistake I repeated twice and it is a mistake that I see many, many I know that this advice won’t apply to every possible startup – but I think it applies to many.

This was evident at the Twiistup pre-event company pitch last week at UCLA.  Francisco Francisco Dao came up with the idea of letting 10 companies that weren’t selected for Twiistup to do a presentation the night before to a group of people and let the audience pick one company to win the final slot at Twiistup.  I I’m not saying the companies were bad – many were not.  But Most people suck at presenting to big groups.  It’s It’s a shame because the ability to nail these presentations at key conferences can be once-in-a-lifetime

For me I’ve stated publicly that 70% of my investment decision is the team and most of this is skewed toward the founders.  I’ve watched people who went to the top schools, got the best grades and worked for all the right companies flame out. It’s the person who never gives up – who never accepts “no” for an answer.  This is part of my new series on what makes an entrepreneur successful .  I originally posted it on VentureHacks , one of my favorite websites for entrepreneurs.

This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice .  Many entrepreneurs who start technology companies are product people, technologists or savvy business people who worked previously for a larger company.  Most start-up entrepreneurs have little or no sales experience.  I know I didn’t.  But through nearly a decade of startups I learned that sales comes down to three essential elements:

I think this is a perfect way to think about the world when you’re designing your product / company.  Quite Quite honestly I see way too many company pitches that are designed for Techies but I only want to invest in products designed for Normals.  Here’s Start by defining the problem you’re solving – I see way too many early-stage entrepreneurs who start their companies with a product definition rather than a market problem.  You Chris Dixon wrote a blog post last week titled, “ Techies and Normals ” in which he defined “Techies” as people who are not just “early adopters” but also have more of a geeky, technical, product bent.  Normals

started the series talking about what I consider the most important attribute: Tenacity . Street Smarts - OK, so you’re a tenacious person – you never give up.  Well obviously that’s meaningless if your startup idea sucks.  I don’t think it takes book smart This is part of my new series on what makes an entrepreneur successful .  I originally posted it on VentureHacks , one of my favorite websites for entrepreneurs.

Yesterday I wrote a post about how much capital your startup should raise .  In That is so self centered it winds me up.  Tell Fail fast = quit and give up easy = spaghetti against the wall = no clear strategy going into your business = no ability / willingness to try and pivot as market conditions change = easy way out = today’s management mantra that will be laughed at in 10 years.  Who In that post I was talking about how it is a bad strategy to be underfunded.  In In general when capital is available take it (provided it’s on the right conditions and from the best

started the series talking about what I consider the most important attribute:  Tenacity .  I Yes, there is the mythical company you all heard about that walked into Sequoia and had a term sheet 24 hours later.  Every entrepreneur starts with an idea that they believe makes sense.  This is part of my new series on  what makes an entrepreneur successful .  I originally posted it on VentureHacks , one of my favorite websites for entrepreneurs.

of  all statistics are made up.  I started my life as a consultant.  Fortunately I had to read each report, synthesis it and then come up with our best estimate of the markets going forward.  In But all of the data projections were so different so I decided to call some of the research companies and ask how they derived their data.  I How to Interpret Analyst Reports The headlines in the media are filled with that latest stats.  Stats