Building a successful business is a series of lessons. Many fail. Enough succeed. What I’ve learned from doing this process for three decades is that the quicker you learn the lessons, the easier the path to success. And by lessons, I don’t mean the big lessons that the world throws at entrepreneurs, but the little lessons that you set out to learn yourself, as you hypothesize on how...

I thought it would be enough to write a book about the startup pitch. I was wrong. I thought maybe that was too many rules, too many details, simplify it down to a slide-by-slide guide. Far more often than not, wrong again. What is missing from the vast majority of the pitches shared with me is the story. Pitches are supposed to tell a story. A nice, simple, logical story of a business. What...

It is incredibly useful in business decisions to have a financial model, and a critical (but often overlooked) step for startup fundraising. That said, over the last decade I’ve worked with thousands of entrepreneurs whose favorite Office tool isn’t Excel, who don’t know how to analyze someone else’s financials let alone create a financial model from scratch. It...

Now that we’re all used to Zoom, the question arises as to the courtesy of how to talk on a media which has an inherent lag time. The most common expectation is that you wait for the other person to finish speaking, then wait for the lag, then take your turn. But I was raised in a part of the world where those expectations were not the norm for in-person conversations, and that half second...