Archives

Make Meaning Method: A way to help founders go beyond establishing business purpose, to make meaning through products and behavior. “Meaning is making the world a better place,” says [...]

Entrepreneur anxiety: Almost every founder has some anxieties, if not all, of these 20 challenges, each of which has to be confronted and dealt with positively. They can be transformed to [...]

Startup to Flourish—between divisive excess wealth and unjust extreme poverty. Flourishing involves commonwealth, built on tacit agreement of the people for the common good. New ventures are [...]

Sailing to Startup Success: keep your new venture on an even keel. I used to be a dinghy sailor and I can tell you that sailing requires many of the skills that an entrepreneur needs. First of [...]

Bootstrap Startup Finance is a craft that is very widely used in the creation of new ventures. In tough economic times it can be a matter of survival. For many entrepreneurs, it is a natural [...]

Corporate Venture Capital Directory—USA: The Corporate Venture Capital Directory—USA lists most of the big corporate investors. Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) involves large firms taking an [...]

Dangers of Startup Mentors: I was a startup mentor for many years. So, why would I warn entrepreneurs about the dangers of using mentors? My warnings are based on my understanding of how such [...]

Being an entrepreneur is a life that has some special needs. It is not for everybody, . There are all kinds of advice available, including on Venture Founders. Even though there are many courses [...]

Small Profits and Quick Returns (SPQR): Think as big as a Roman Emperor and start with small steps towards building your own empire. The reason for a big vision is to have clarity of purpose. The [...]

Entrepreneur Perception & Intuition: Clearly, successful entrepreneurs see things that others do not. Not surprisingly we tend to have differing perceptions of things, but the key to a [...]

Let Thousands Invest in Your Startup: Use a Community Round, which lets thousands of your startup’s customers, users, and fans invest alongside VCs and angel investors. You may feel anxious [...]

Startups Change the World: Social impact is now core to how entrepreneurs set their business purpose and assess business performance. Entrepreneurial success has been primarily determined by [...]

Coworking Directory—USA: New startups are finding shared work spaces are a huge improvement over working from home, an internet café, or committing too early to their own office lease. The [...]

Small town startup: People in rural communities and small towns across America are just as likely to be entrepreneurs as the geeks of Silicon Valley, or the app developers of Austin, Texas. There [...]

Public Contracts for Small Business: It is amazing how few startups think about going after business from Federal Government, States, Cities and other public entities. All kinds of bodies put out [...]

Purpose Driven Startup Coherence: purpose driven startups are sometimes exposed to criticism from skeptics, doubting their integrity. If you have a strong commitment of purpose to your [...]

Purpose Driven Tecopreneur: A tecopreneur (tec + eco) is how I describe technically/scientifically knowledgeable entrepreneurs, who see the need for new ventures for creative and innovative ways [...]

Mission Driven Capital Directory—USA: There are more and more sources of seed and venture capital which have a bias in favor of sustainable business. Their number is growing very rapidly; this [...]

Startup Books can be a boon for business founders. They can be inspirational and/or huge time savers. Chances are high that you are deeply into your product that is going to save the world and [...]

Equity Crowdfunding Directory—USA: Equity-based crowdfunding allows people to invest in an early-stage, private company (a company that is not listed on any stock exchange) in exchange for equity [...]

Equity Crowdfunding from Friends and Family: per this Founder Institute blog, “a Friends and Family round typically results in anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000 in funding that allows a startup [...]

Startup Citizenship: Entrepreneurs have plenty of concerns other than the social impact of their new venture. From Day One of the business, on the other hand, their new business will particularly [...]

Entrepreneurs Are Builders: The word ‘entrepreneur’ is derived from the French verb, entreprendre—to undertake in English. So, an entrepreneur is someone who undertakes things, but in English, we [...]

Burn the Business Plan: The title is arresting and has a lot of truth. I am a retired MBA teacher of new venture creation and many of my students produced business plans. For me though a business [...]

Business Incubator and Accelerator Directory—USA: According to Carl Schramm, there were 1,600 business incubators and accelerators in the US in 2016. The Business Incubator and Accelerator [...]

The Stakeholder Strategy Evaluation Tool facilitates the challenging planning process for purpose-driven startups and entrepreneurs who want their new ventures to contribute to a better world. A [...]

Sources of Startup Finance: creating a new venture is going to require money. The sources of money are almost endless. The successful entrepreneur will be financially ingenious about finding ways [...]

Purpose of the Venture:  David Hieatt, co-founder six years ago of Hiut Denim Company, the UK fashion jeans manufacturer with his wife, Clare, suggests that the question a new entrepreneur must [...]

The interdependence of business has not traditionally been part of business vernacular. However now, especially in post pandemic society, it is an imperative word for the survival of the [...]

Mindful Work: A growing number of leading businesspeople openly meditate. They may have been meditators for a long time, but now they are not shy about saying that they meditate. The late Steve [...]

Purposeful Startup: David Shahan, is the founder of SunState Laboratories, based in Broomfield, Colorado, having previously worked with Jani-King, a company with 9,000 franchisees offering [...]

Equity Crowdfunding for Purposeful Startups: Wefunder is simply the best way to raise capital from people who share your intent to change the world for the better, and with whom you want to build [...]

Profits and Purpose: It is in the founder’s interest to start the business knowing that we are all interrelated and interdependent. That is quite easy to recognize, but hard to act on. [...]

Missed Opportunity for Startup Funding Family Offices and Venture Capital: Founders of new ventures are frequently ignorant about an excellent source of equity investment: family offices. With [...]

Side Business to Startup: About 57 million Americans have a side business, in addition to their regular paid employment. That amounts to nearly half of American full time workers who have a side [...]

Founders Can Learn From Corporate Deceit*: Founders can learn more from corporate mistakes than the things they appear to be doing successfully. The big boys often say one thing and do another. [...]

Mailbox Storyboard Startup: a new personal service has been born in Houston, Texas to give stories to friends, relatives and colleagues to delight them by receiving hand drawn greetings through [...]

Startups Build a Better World: New ventures started with an international dimension are likely to prosper, because they will be sensitive to a wide variety of options. Those who start a business [...]

Re-Startup: Startups are new ventures that seek to meet a need through a viable business model for a product, service, process or channel. Chances of success or scalability are increased through [...]

Founder Compassion: You will have heard that having a focussed passion for delivering benefit is a paramount quality for successful entrepreneurs, but not about doing so compassionately. [...]

“Entrepreneurship is the ability to create and build something from practically nothing,” says my hero, the late Jeffry Timmons. He says that, both in the best founders’ reference book, New [...]

Hemp entrepreneurs are mostly known in the commercialization of marijuana in those States that have legalized commercial sales. But though marijuana and hemp come from the same cannabis strain, [...]

New Venture Creation—the Timmons Model: My own conclusion about what drives startups above all else is strongly influenced by the ideas of an amazing thinker, researcher and teacher, the late [...]

Behaviors of Successful Founders: You’ll find endless ideas about what it takes to be a successful founder—and none is perfect. Internet searches will reveal all kinds of answers. The one [...]

Spin Out Startup: the experience of three women who created their startup from the ashes of their former employer’s business seemed courageous back in 2014, when it was launched. [...]

Self-Aware Startup Teams: The creation and development of a winning team depends on the founder’s leadership. The Johari Window is a marvelous tool to help founders to develop greater [...]

Startup Data Reliability Grid: Good strategic decisions take account of market intelligence and the conclusions we draw from the data. This is especially true in new venture creation, where [...]

Staffing a Startup: What staff does a startup need? The data does not show that solo founders do any worse than those with two or more. However, my advice is that the second member of the team [...]

Startup statements of intent have a critical role to play if your new venture has a strong social purpose and the startup seeks to change the world for the better, with benefits for all. There is [...]

Entrepreneur Personality: Everyone who starts a new venture wants the keys to startup success. Many people think there’s a special ‘entrepreneur character’ you should have for [...]

Creeping Disruption: Market disruption is presented as if it is a big bang like digital photography ending film photography. But it’s much more like a gradual change—creeping disruption, [...]

Startup Workshops: The best startup workshop that I ever attended was one designed to enable a venture capital company to decide on potential startup investments. Lead entrepreneurs from about a [...]

Startup Storyboarding—what is that? Why would a startup want to use the storyboard technique? And for what? Surely that is just for film producers. Telling stories is one of the most persuasive [...]

Reducing Risk to Startup Safely: Strategy is tough for entrepreneurs when they love their product so. They just want to get on with it, producing and selling what they’ve got. Let’s [...]

Loans from Family and Friends: The first port of call for borrowing money for startups is family and friends. Historically, promissory notes have acted as a form of privately issued currency. [...]

SWOT Analysis: the initials stand for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats and provides a simple, but effective means of considering potential decisions before you implement them. [...]

Startup Staffing Grid: How to work out what skills and experience are needed to run your business may seem pretty obvious. However, it’s worth taking time to figure out what they are and [...]

SOAR Analysis much resembles a SWOT Analysis. A SOAR Analysis is a tool to improve the strategic planning process and is best done in a group setting. I have a pet theme in the strategic thinking [...]

Startup B-Words: Here is my list of Startup B-Words for business building. Have productive fun thinking about how these startup b-words can contribute to your success. Treat them almost as though [...]