Tomorrow is Demo Day at TechStars Seattle and the teams are readying their pitches for a group of prospective investors.   Following Demo Day, the pace of courting and closing investors will be super fast.  Here are 7 tips/actions I have been giving the teams to prepare for an effective

Going deep and engaging with customers is a critical part of start-up success.  I recently did a talk on this at the Founders Institute outlining the ways I like to do this and with many examples from our early days at Gist.  If you are developing a new business idea,

Building a company requires building a tribe (team, advisors, investors, users, partners…). To build a tribe, you need to provide frequent updates to make sure everyone stays informed, aligned and energized.   But, keeping these groups informed is a technical challenge. So, when I found the guys at ThinkFuse (during Techstars)

I work with a lot of startups as a mentor, advisor and as a CEO on my own.  I am often asked about how, who and when to partner with other companies.  Here is what I usually say; Don’t partner until you have product/market fit – It is very

I am confident that a few things will be really important over the next few years (mobile and social).  Esteban Contreras put together this deck with lots of good stats.  Here are the ones I found most interesting with a few takeaways for entrepreneurs; – WRT to social networking users, Indonesia

Within entrepreneur groups, there seem to be lots of questions about when you should quit your day job and go full time on your new startup idea.  Generally, I am a fan of keeping your day job as long as possible as everyone needs money to live and having a

Over the past month I have had the privilege of attending or speaking at a StartupWeekend in Boise, TechStars “for a day” in Seattle, TechStars New York,  Microsoft Kinect Accelerator in Seattle, TechStars Boulder (with Jason Mendelson) and finally mentoring at a Startup Weekend in Medellin, Columbia.  It’s been

I get asked for my advice on new startups alot and I like to give it.  I have also been very fortunate and had great mentors, advisors and investors.  So, I can say that the best relationships are ones where the entrepreneur works hard to manage his advisors.  This generally

Customer Development = The pursuit of customer understanding Part of Customer Development is understanding which customers make sense for your business.  The goal of listening to customers is not please every one of them.  It’s to figure out which customer segment served his needs – both short and long term. And

I work on lots of new ideas for companies. I’ve developed the following tool that helps me (and it seems many others) to quickly develop and evaluate these ideas. In the simplest form, it helps create an elevator pitch, (e.g. for www.gist.com – We focus on relationship-centric