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Entrepreneurship

A collection of 25 issues

Keep Going

Recently, a number of people in my network got more serious about entrepreneurship and they want to start their own startups. They have great ideas, are domain experts, and have access to engineers and data scientists. They have applied to a few well-known accelerators and got rejected without much of

What makes NYC a unique tech hub?

This week is NY Tech Week. While the events take place in various parts of NYC within one week, the tech hub that is NYC has been around for a long time. Many years ago, it used to be the case that startups go to the West Coast to raise

How to pitch your startup in 30 minutes (initial introductory meeting) in 8 steps

How to pitch your startup in 30 minutes (initial introductory meeting) in 8 steps

How to pitch your startup under 10 minutes

The following startup pitch guide is focused on presentations that need to be done within 10 minutes (or less). It is very hard, and some entrepreneurs master this. But everyone can get better at this with practice.

The Discipline of Business Updates

Sharing regular business updates is an important discipline for startups and management teams. For me, these regular updates come each week and month in the forms of weekly CEO calls and email updates from CEOs. These regular updates focus on the state of the business - finance, sales, marketing, product,

Cheerleaders and Advocates

Some of the best emails and texts arrived in my inbox in the last few days were from friends and former students informing me that the small part I played in helping them made a difference in their professional endeavors. Here is an example I got this Sunday morning, and

Capitalization Table (cap table) Basics

In my experience, I have found that even with founders and entrepreneurs have various levels of understanding of capital structure represented by what's called a capitalization table or "cap table." Basics: Cap table is an Excel file that summarizes equity ownership structure in a corporation. The

Machine Learning and Audio Data

I was excited to see WSJ featuring Shazam. The 6-minute video explains how Shazam works, albeit in a simple manner. How Shazam Makes Unique Audio Fingerprints to Identify SongsMore than 23,000 songs are identified each minute by Shazam and the app has been used over 70 billion times. But

CEO Self-Reflection

Originally posted on June 11, 2022 Self-reflection is an important skill. In startups, CEO self-reflection can be very hard to do. Sometimes it seems nearly impossible for early-stage companies. The startup is always on - building, selling, pivoting, hiring, fundraising - all with limited resources! The startup CEO is the

How to build A+ team?

Originally posted on July 23, 2022 Recent article in WSJ about Tour de France provides a good reminder of how to build high performing team and what great teamwork looks like. To win the yellow jersey in the Tour de France, it definitely takes more than the lead rider. Lead