WSJ on Why You Need a Business Plan
Browsing and searching last night, I discovered “Why You Need a Business Plan” by Colleen Debaise on the Wall Street Journal’s website. This is a good, strong post and a good reminder. Her five reasons: Identify your company’s strengths and weaknesses. Figure out how much money you’ll need. Get clear direction, which can help eliminate stress. Summarize for lenders, investors or partners. Evaluate the market for your product or service and size up the competition. My personal

The Gift of Not Getting Funded
There was a good reminder placed on thefunded.com yesterday. It’s a note from an entrepreneur entitled The Gift of Not Getting Funded (Early). I really like this quote: What our lack of funding made us do is go back to basics. We know we had the seed of a good idea but struggled to come up with a sustainable model. Along with lots of hard work we talked with potential customers and came up with a solid way to generate re

Understanding the Healthy-Company Money Trap
This may surprise you. From an investor’s point of view, self sufficiency in a startup or emerging company isn’t always a good thing. In many cases, it’s an investor’s nightmare. Here’s a hypothetical example. Suppose you just invested $250,000 in Acme LLC., a promising startup. Let’s say you got 25% ownership for your money. Years go by, and Acme grows in sales, profits, and cash flow. In fact, it’s so good that it becomes cash flow independent, meaning it’s gen

You Will Make Mistakes. Deal With It.
I’m not a baseball fan, and I don’t particularly like sports metaphors. But there’s a lot of baseball in primetime these days, and one of the fundamentals of baseball that applies beautifully to entrepreneurship is about making mistakes. In baseball, pitchers don’t always throw strikes (good pitches). They get up to three bad pitches per batter. And batters don’t always hit the ball. Players who get successful hits more then 30% of their times at bat are really good. In

5 Things Missing From Most Entrepreneur Pitches
I found this list in a very good post from Charlie O’Donnell on his blog This is going to be BIG. I don’t know him, and I didn’t know his site, but on digging I discover he has done time with Union Square Ventures and teaches entrepreneurship and practices what he preaches with a couple startups he runs. But what really matters is that this is a very good list. It matches my dealings with startups and investors, on both sides of the table. 1) Strong sense of the key milestones – Entre