Advice from first time entrepreneurs

I’ve been an entrepreneur for almost 30 years. I’ve founded or co-founded a lot of companies in that time. I’ve taught and mentors hundreds of entrepreneurs in the last decade. I’m a lifelong learner and am constantly finding and reading more advice to make entrepreneurs’ lives easier, including my own.

There is no shortage of startup advice. The trouble is, a lot of this advice comes from highly successful entrepreneurs. Especially those who hit it big on their first startup.

The trouble with their advice? They don’t know why they succeeded. They don’t know why others fail.

Most of the learning on how to create successful startups comes from experiencing or analyzing the failure stories. Far more is learned from failure than success. Step back far enough and it’s obvious why that is true. Failed startups are those with a series of mistakes or hurdles they can’t overcome. Successful startups are those with a series of mistakes or hurdles with just enough good luck and good decisions to keep going. Going until there is a long enough string of good luck to call the company a success.

Nine of every ten startups fail. For the the last decade I’ve been sharing my 30+ years of experience to help lower that horrible statistic. And it is working. Eight of our ten of the companies at Africa Eats are still running, the oldest now over 10 years old and many soon to reach that milestone? How? Business planning. By not stopping with a Plan A, as Plan A rarely succeeds. By not only...

A common problem early in the startup process, in the market research phase, is too much positive feedback. Positive feedback feels great. Positive feedback is confirmation that your product or plan will work. Everyone loves hearing positive feedback and no one get mad at you for giving positive feedback. Trouble is, Plan A rarely works and you need the negative feedback to fix those flaws. I was...

While the expectation of investors is to receive periodic financial reports from investees, in reality few of the raw numbers in those reports are what we’re interested in, but instead ratios of those values. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pinterest...

I’ve talked about the proverbial hockey stick growth in years past, as well as the challenges of predicting the future, but what I’ve yet to mention is the tendency to expect future growth to be linear rather than exponential. Above are four graphs of four technology products, three of which which have seen exponential growth in the last few years: Solar panels (PV), Electric cars...

AI is a tool. A misnamed tool at that, as the AI in the news these days is a complex web of statistics and matrix multiplication that resembles human intelligence, but which is far from actually intelligent. They are big, innovative, step-function-changing tools, like the printing press vs. hand copied books, like the typewriter vs. hand copied letters, like word processors vs. hand typed...