Presenting in front of people is hard. Being an entrepreneur and making your idea look simple is also genuinely difficult. Here is a rough structure that may help when presenting to potential users and partners or the general public. – Maria (photo) is a (…) and spends (time/money) doing (…). {problem — it is important …
Continue reading “Some Notes on How to Present Your Startup”
The public discourse in startup land has recently focused on the value add an investor can bring to the table. Value add indeed does make a difference; at the same time though, we tend to neglect the original value an early stage investor contributes to a company. This post is an attempt to bring the …
The tasks of a CEO are essentially three; a) to shape the vision of the company, b) to hire and manage the right people to execute it, and c) to bring in the required resources for the team to execute the vision. In the case of startups the latter typically refers to venture capital, and …
The underlying economics of a venture capital fund probably stand as common knowledge to some of you, yet to many others they are not. This post is an attempt to summarise the basics, skipping out the details yet providing some context that may be of help in better understanding VC’s drivers and actions. In a …
Marketplaces stand as a frequent topic across our startup ecosystem. They also are a topic I have some exposure and experience at, if limited. Hereby I will attempt to share a part of such understanding, addressing some misconceptions I often get to encounter. First, a short and pretty rough definition. A marketplace is a business …
Optimising for valuation is a strategic mistake for early-stage entrepreneurs. In my limited experience, many founders consider valuation their top priority, even at stages as early as seed. They tend to treat a working hypothesis as an end in itself and put effort on getting this assumption “right”, rather than making it work. I believe …
Getting from a couple of entrepreneurs to a team of 5 or 20 employees is one of the most difficult tasks startup founders are facing. I call this the transition from being a doer to becoming a manager and then, eventually, a leader. In this post, I will try to provide some reasons why, next …
I have lately been a witness to a growing contradiction in the local startup ecosystem. With this post, I would like to call this discord out; I hope it might be of value. By nature, entrepreneurship (or life, if you will) is about finding the right balance in a growing variety of issues. In the …
You cannot expect from a child to be financially sustainable. Yet the next generation is a society’s biggest asset. Societies have early been mature enough to realize this and shape forms and structures (from families to student loans) to help children grow up and get educated, enabling them and the society at large to reach …
In my short career, I’m privileged enough to get in contact with a number of people in the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. With most of them being aspiring or already in the game entrepreneurs, a common question that arises is -no surprise here- how to raise money. That’s more than fine, and it’s actually part of …