One of the largest banks in the country, with branch locations in your town, advertises everywhere. You know their jingle. Those ads are tempting for small business owners—it’s hard to resist the ten largest banks because they control over $10.1 MORE

Take a look at 3 valuable lessons from high-achievers who have successfully maintained fulfilling personal lives while advancing in their career. Lifestyle lifestyle success advice work-life balance MORE

The idea of exactly what your business is going to be usually comes first. Secondly, most often, is giving a title to your idea. What exactly is going to be the name of your business? Some people turn to their childhood for inspiration or a beloved family pet. MORE

By definition, most entrepreneurs are thought leaders. They have the ability to recognize a market need, the skills to design and implement a solution, and the drive to start a business from that solution. It all comes from within themselves. MORE

Most venture capital investments are made, over time, by syndicates. This means a group of venture capital firms develops around a company, usually built over multiples rounds. Some of the firms in the syndicate agree to (or require) having a partner from their firm join the Board of the company. If you look at the roughly dozen boards I am on, most of them have multiple venture capitalists on them. MORE

I’ve come to despise the phrase “culture fit.” ” I don’t remember when I first heard it, but it was many years ago. Over time, it became woven into the world of entrepreneurship, as companies used it as a primary frame of reference for hiring. MORE

Managing and motivating a team in a startup is more than just using the right interpersonal skills. It’s more than providing recognition, tangible incentives, and clear work goals. MORE

Life is short. It is time to point out an ugly truth, and to be the brave person that you are, the intelligent rational assessor of reality that you are, and kill all the organic social media activity by your company. All of it. Seems radical, but let’s take it one step at a time. MORE

Guest post by Marcus Gosling, VP of Product, Long-Term Stock Exchange. I’m excited to reveal the final cover for Eric’s next book, THE STARTUP WAY , coming October 17. MORE

Almost on a weekly basis, I meet new aspiring entrepreneurs looking to execute on their ideas. Some believe in the all-in approach to product development: build an advanced app. If it works, they’ll hit it big, and if it doesn’t, they’ll make some changes and do it again. MORE

Procore Technologies, which makes construction management software, is hosting a Summer Solstice Kick-Off party next Thursday. And you’re invited. The event takes place at Procore’s Austin office at 221 W. 6th Street on the 18th floor starting at 5:30 p.m. MORE

This article originally appeared in the Harvard Business Review. As more and more companies face disruption from globalization, new technology, and startups that have more capital than the incumbents, the continuing cry from Wall Street investors is, “Why can’t companies be as innovative as startups?”. Here’s one reason why: Startups can do anything. Companies can only do what’s legal. Startups can do anything. MORE

There are certain topics that even some of the smartest people I talk with who aren’t startup oriented can’t fully grok. One of them is whether profitability matters. MORE

by Michael Burdick, CEO of Paro. When it comes to financial activities, trust and credibility matter. They affect how well your financial team performs, your company’s reputation, and, ultimately, its bottom line. MORE

Light a path for the better angels. Thank you, Chancellor McLellan, President Florizone, Dean Charlebois, Dr. Hewitt, and Dr. Kilfoil for the invitation to speak today and thank you for the honorary degree. I’m honored to speak at a university whose motto is: Pray and Work. MORE

The entrepreneur’s challenge is to effectively communicate their value proposition, not only to customers, but also to vendors, partners, investors, and their own team. Especially for technical founders, this is normally all about presenting impressive facts. But in reality facts only go so far. MORE

We just finished our second Hacking for Defense class at Stanford. Eight teams presented their Lessons Learned presentations. Hacking for Defense is a battle-tested problem-solving methodology that runs at Silicon Valley speed. MORE

I don’t believe that one starts an apology with the sentence “ The past 24 hours have been the darkest of my life.” In my world, the apology is to another person. It’s not a tone setting exercise, or a plea for sympathy, for the one making the apology. I was fuming after seeing the public apology on Axios from Justin Caldbeck. I could be wrong, but it felt like it was written by a crisis management PR firm. I spent most of Friday evening angry and upset. Embarrassed by the behavior of some men. MORE

One of the hardest decisions entrepreneurs make when they start a company and raise outside capital is figuring out what an acceptable “burn rate” is. MORE

This is the first in a series of posts summarizing our speakers’ insights from the Data-driven Marketplace Meetup on May 16. Today, we just need to pick up a phone to order groceries or a fully cooked meal, or hire someone to do our laundry or walk the dog. MORE

Being an entrepreneur is a source of pride. It also evidences an individual with a huge amount of discipline and focus to be able to build a business a lot of times from just an idea. It is the ambition of an entrepreneur that built the most profitable and successful companies. MORE

We very rarely hire anyone at Foundry Group (although we are hiring an Executive Assistant ). However, many of the companies we invest in are often hiring. Over the years we’ve had a Foundry Group Jobs Page but we’ve never found software that was painless for us to use to keep it current. As a result, it would often get out of date and have to be updated manually. MORE

Each business has a story. No matter if the business is a Goliath like Wal-Mart, or a local business owned by a couple or family, the business has roots in an idea. For each business owner, the story of their journey can range from monetary needs or the passion for a unique project. MORE

The best sign of technology maturity is this – it becomes invisible. It’s there in our everyday lives, but fades into the background, it requires less attention and it forms part of our everyday ambient environment. Like electricity does. MORE

Recent reports show Ottawa as the most attractive tech hub in Canada with the best cost of living and second best average salary. Located in the same timezone as New York and Boston, it is increasingly becoming a promising city for job-seeking tech talent looking north. MORE

Are you a woman who is an undergraduate or graduate student enrolled full-time at an accredited university in the US, in a STEM field? If you are, you now have an opportunity to apply for a Women Forward in Technology Scholarship. Distil Networks just led a group of us, including Foundry Group, Techstars, Cooley, Yesware, Help Scout, Cloudability, Kulesa Faul, FullContact, and Anchor Point Foundation, to raise $50,000 to advance female representation in technology. MORE

The Customer Happiness Canvas is a tool for teams to visualize strategies for getting and keeping customers. The post Guest Post: Introducing The Customer Happiness Canvas appeared first on GrasshopperHerder.com. MORE

Music can change your spirit. If you’re having a bad day and listen to your favorite song, it can change your entire mood. Music can also help you to get through difficult moments in life. One of the hardest things anyone can ever do is start and run a business. MORE

I’ve met and emailed with many pre-seed and seed GPs in the past year. Over sushi last night with two of them, who are also long-time friends, one of them asked me “Brad, how do you think we are differentiated?” ” This generated a rant from me that went something like this. MORE

I was in Boston and was interviewed by The Growth Show about my current thinking about innovation in companies and government agencies.The interviewer was great and managed to get me to summarize several years of learning in one podcast. It’s worth a listen. At the end of the interview I got surprised by a great question – “What’s the Problem that Still Haunts You?” ” I wasn’t really prepared for the question but gave the best answer I could on the fly. MORE

Cooley, one of the top startup law firms, has open sourced the legal documents required to do a Series Seed or Convertible Note financing. They are available on Cooley’s CooleyGo document generation platform and also on GitHub. Kudos to Cooley for doing this. We need to make the transaction costs of getting a financing done as low as possible and putting the legal docs into the public domain is a great step forward in doing that. MORE

Over the weekend, Mark Suster and Fred Wilson each put up awesome posts discussing the idea of profitability in startups. Mark’s is a master class about how to look at the financial characteristics of a startup and Fred’s discusses what he’s been working on with some of his more mature companies. They are both worth reading right now. I’ll be here when you get back. MORE

Entrepreneurs are usually highly creative and innovative, but many innovative people are not entrepreneurs. Since it takes a team of people to build a great company, the challenge is to find that small percentage of innovative people, and then nurture the tendency, rather than stifle it. MORE

If your startup is looking for an angel investor, it makes sense to present your plan to flocks of angels, and assume that at least one will swoop down and scoop you up. Or does it? Actually numbers and locations are just the beginning. MORE

Every business professional needs to stay cool under pressure, to be a top performer, and for the sake of their own health. Yet everyone has a melting point – a critical threshold where pressure causes them to respond irrationally. MORE

Automobile manufacturers shipped 88 million cars in 2016. Tesla shipped 76,000. Yet Wall Street values Tesla higher than any other U.S. car manufacturer. What explains this more than 1,000 to 1 discrepancy in valuation? The future. MORE

The category of Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) software has been rapidly evolving from its document management and audit roots to automation of complex legal language and sophisticated measurement of exposure to risk. That came out loud and clear when I. Silicon Collar Vertical Markets (Banking, Retail etc MORE