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From a Working Prototype to a Paying Early Customer
From a Working Prototype to a Paying Early Customer Funding Your Startup: Capital Literacy and Action In Article 1, we worked through four major layers of startup risk: Problem / Idea → Validation → Technical Viability Proof → Prototype / MVP Welcome to Article 2: Pilot / Early Customer. This is where your startup begins…
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Funding Your Startup: Capital Literacy and Action
Funding Your Startup: Capital Literacy and Action From a Hair-on-Fire Problem to a Working Prototype – Article 1 of 4 Over the years of mentoring and advising founders, I have found one aspect of the startup journey that has withstood the test of time: nearly every conversation eventually focuses on raising money. While nearly every founder…
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Optimism Is Killing You: Founders Need a Professional Skeptic
Optimism Is Killing You: Founders Need a Professional Skeptic Startup founders in nascent ecosystems get a lot of encouragement. That is not a bad thing. Starting a company is hard. There are plenty of days when nothing seems to work, customers disappear, technology breaks, funding gets tight, and the team starts questioning whether the whole…
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Being Busy is Not the Same as Successfully Launching Startups
Being Busy is Not the Same as Successfully Launching Startups Being busy is not the same as building my startup, and I really want to start there because I learned that the hard way. For a long time, I thought that if my calendar was full, my inbox was overflowing, and I was constantly switching…
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Amazing Tech Founders Find Answers Faster
Amazing Tech Founders Find Answers Faster The dangerous idea I hear floating around entrepreneurship: the founder is supposed to know everything. The founder should know the market, the technology, the customer, the competition, how to raise money, how to build a team, how to set prices, how to sell the product, and somehow predict what…
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Stop Lighting Cash on Fire for Your IP
Stop Lighting Cash on Fire for Your IP: Your Patent Strategy Is Probably Backward This is a typical conversation that I have had with the over 3,000 founders I’ve mentored. Founders love to say it: “We’re filing a patent.” Or “We don’t need a patent.” It sounds smart. Strategic. Defensible. But in most early-stage startups,…
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Small City Cliques Suck the Life Out of You
Small City Cliques Suck the Life Out of You Tucson is Not Immune Let’s get something straight. Tucson, Arizona, “Optics Valley,” is not an unfriendly place. People are approachable, conversations start easily, and there’s a genuine sense that people want to help. On the surface, it feels open. But if you’re a founder, an innovator,…
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Coachability is a Competitive Advantage (And You’re Failing It)
Coachability is a Competitive Advantage (And You’re Failing It) One of the most challenging concepts for the over 3,000 funders I’ve mentored and advised over the years is coachability. What the heck does that even mean? Here’s how I see it. Coachability doesn’t start after the meeting; it starts the second you open your mouth.…
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Challenge… I Need a Startup Business and Pricing Model!
Challenge… I Need a Startup Business and Pricing Model! A founder once told me they were building a SaaS platform with a freemium model and were thinking about adding a marketplace later. It sounded polished, like something straight out of a pitch deck. So I asked one question: How do you make money when your…
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AGI in 2027 + Humanoids Around the Corner = Scary Unemployment
AGI in 2027 + Humanoids Around the Corner = Scary Unemployment The conversation around AI is evolving. We are now talking AGI, which stands for Artificial General Intelligence. It’s the idea of an AI system that can do any intellectual task a human can, not just one thing, but everything across different domains. This is…
