Save the big announcements for big deals — If you want to give your new business a decent shot at success, you need to build traction — clear, measurable evidence that people are interested in what your company is offering. And that won’t happen on Day One. So why do startups make big, splashy announcements the day they…

The more revenue you have coming in, the better the chances you can raise (and not waste) investor funds — At startups, the difference between survival and running out of runway always comes down to taking our eyes off revenue. We don’t want to do this, and we certainly don’t do it on purpose. But when we’re in the middle of the startup run, it’s pretty easy to fall into…

Yeah, that’s the worst headline I’ve ever written — I’m going to take September off from writing. I know. Most of you are like, who? What? Who cares? So… To you folks who landed here because of the writing angle, I’ll just say that when you’re writing and your mission is to make the words mean something, you need…

What I wish I had known then and what I know now — If there’s one thing I’ve learned over 25 years of succeeding and failing with startups, it’s that the more I know about why I fail, the better I get at succeeding. So I write a lot about failure — but not the standard stuff, like “You don’t know enough about…

Why “fail early and often” is a self-fulfilling prophecy — If I were to choose one nugget of advice that I would give to every first-time startup founder and serial startup founder alike, it would be this. “Do not fail. Until you absolutely have to.” One of my genuine dislikes about startup culture is its reliance on meaningless slogans and…

There are a lot of reasons to walk away, this is the one time to run — Last week, I called my stock broker, old-school style, and told the nice sales associate that I’d like to invest in 10 shares of Apple stock, please, but only if Apple bought 20 hours of my consulting time — which, I added, would only serve to make Apple a better…

Where should you integrate A.I. into your business? — The decision to integrate any form of artificial intelligence into your existing business is not one to be made lightly. And the worst thing you can do with A.I. is put it somewhere it doesn’t belong I don’t need to explain why. There are countless dystopian science fiction stories serving…

Let’s cut to the chase and answer the question everyone is asking — It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the A.I. bandwagon is running out of room. It’s time to hop on. Right? Everybody’s doing it. Shouldn’t you? Before it’s too late? Look, maybe you’ve quickly become a Generative A.I. expert. Or maybe you’ve been playing around with GPTs and know enough to be…

Three resources you’ll need to focus on to avoid an expensive failure. — It seems like anyone with an idea that includes even a brief reference to A.I. is finding their way into investor pockets to launch the machine-assisted version of any task you can think of — from A.I. for coders to A.I. for pets, the possibilities seem limitless right now. Which…