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Side Business to Startup: About 45 percent of million Americans have a side business, in addition to their regular paid employment. That amounts to nearly half of American full time workers who [...]

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. In [...]

Startup Mentor Checklist: Mentors can be invaluable to a founder to act as a sounding board for ideas and planned action. They can also play the role of devil’s advocate, challenging your [...]

Startup Exit Strategy: Founders can plan their exit—or ignore it till it happens and maybe face unexpected challenges. If you have to urge to start a business, why give a moment’s attention [...]

Startup Purpose Is Why: Startups, as well as small business and corporations across the globe have four principal terms for purposes aimed at improving social and environmental outcomes for [...]

Startup Ethical Integrity To Do Good and Well: Entrepreneurs must focus their creative energy on products and markets, but without purpose their chances of surviving and thriving are diminished. [...]

Startups for Good Chose Words on Purpose: Entrepreneurs on a mission use a glossary of words that are strongly oriented towards positive action to change the world for the better. For example, [...]

Startup—Small is Beautiful: Mindful entrepreneurs scale to the right size for good. Investors seek scale fast to maximize investment. Over rapid growth may create problems for founders, above all [...]

Startup Citizenship—Enterprise & Common Good: New business creation happens within society and the startup interacts with all stakeholders, whether intentionally or unintentionally. [...]

Outward Bound to Startup: Outdoor experiential learning and starting a new venture might seem like an oblique connection. The reality, though, is that such learning has many important lessons for [...]

Startup Business With Disability: There are already more than 1.8 million business owners with disabilities in the US (American Community Survey by US Census Bureau—ACS). Those 1.8 million [...]

Startups Need Data: Many advisers will counsel budding startups to use national economic and market data to plan their new enterprise and be sure of realistic opportunities. This can be good [...]

Mission Driven and Purpose Capital Directory—USA: Seed and venture capital funds all have very particular criteria for investment in new and young ventures. Today, the fastest growing special [...]

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

Startup Consciously: Startup consciously and brainstorm beyond business. Founders face knotty decisions personally, as well on the project itself.  There are many misconceptions about [...]

Purpose Driven Startups Challenge Accepted Wisdom, just as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, led her to exclaim, “Curiouser and curiouser!”. She explored the world conjured up [...]

Startup Books can be a boon for business founders. Startup books can be inspirational, informational and/or huge time savers. Chances are high that you are deeply into your product that is going [...]

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 [...]

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’ (meaning a Tech and Ecological/Environmental Entrepreneur) is how I describe technically/scientifically knowledgeable [...]

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 [...]

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 Tracxn, United States hosts 3,093 Accelerators & Incubators, which have invested more than $956B across 102,001 rounds in over [...]

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 [...]

Remaking Capitalism: 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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Family Offices and Venture Capital: Founders of new ventures are frequently ignorant about an excellent source of equity investment: family offices. With good reason, perhaps. Family offices are [...]

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: Tellinga (telling-a-story) was born in Houston, TX, at the end of 2018. It gives stories to friends, relatives and colleagues to delight them by receiving hand drawn [...]

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 focused passion for delivering benefit is a paramount quality for successful entrepreneurs, but you probably have not thought about doing so [...]

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: This is the most significant and useful model of entrepreneurship there is—and has been over more than 50 years. Laugh if you like, but as well as being [...]

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 [...]

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 consider that 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 [...]

“Entrepreneurship is the ability to create and build something nothing,” says my hero, the late Jeffry Timmons. He was very good guide on how to create and build something from nothing. He says [...]