The fundamental foundation behind the psychology of the entrepreneur mind is simple—believe in the impossible. Let those four words sink into your conscious and subconscious. You can believe in the impossible if you allow your entrepreneur brain to become inspired by the…

When it comes to startups, speed is critical. If you’re a startup yourself, I don’t have to remind you that you are likely to be under-resourced and disadvantaged. You probably feel the entrepreneur pressure to get out into the marketplace and start getting startup traction. If you’re already in the marketplace, you’re focused on engaging the audience and keeping them.…

(Source: Damir Perge picture of Ivan Perge, © 2013 entrepreneurdex)

If you've ever worked in Silicon Valley, you quickly learn the power of the freemium business model. This is what I…

When it comes to building a startup team, incorporating diversity within your startup can provide an incredible advantage. Diversity of intellectual capital built into the power of swarm intelligence can help solve any problem, especially any startup problem you may face in the future.

I recently wrote about…

When you enter unexpected startup situations that can cause significant changes and direction in your startup outcome, the natural thing to do is to push really hard for the answers and results.

If someone (or something) is causing you startup headaches, the logical thing to do is to address it immediately. In these types of business…

When I lived in Silicon Valley, before I raised my first $100 million venture capital fund—I’m not going to deny it to you—it was very stressful. Whether you’re raising capital for a venture fund or your startup, the process can become gruesome. It is especially gruesome when you’re doing something revolutionary. In my case, I was raising my VC…

On one of the three startups we are accelerating into the marketplace, I made a knee-jerk reaction and changed a key component of the startup’s business strategy. Needless to say, the rest of the team wasn't excited about this strategic change but I did an incredibly damn good job selling them on the change. So they followed along with some huffing…

Last week a team of us from Westland Joaus Technologies traveled to Los Angeles, CA to present one of our inventions in a business plan competition.  We were in a unique position in that we had two of our entries make the finals.  We were told that we had to narrow our presentation to just one.  We were assigned a mentor through CalTech who advised on the presentation.  When we first met with the mentor a couple of months ago, he reviewed both inventions and stated that one would probably…

There is a consensus among many entrepreneurs when it comes to startup hiring practices: Hire slowly and fire quickly. I am not sure this is good enough if you want to increase the speed of your startup. When you’re a startup, unless the startup already has a “halo effect¹” surrounding it, you don’t have the luxury of hiring slowly and firing…

The old saying goes, “Karma will come and bite you on the ass,” but I have noticed that it comes and kisses you on the ass too—if you let it.  What does karma have to do with business? A LOT. Business is built upon relationships and of course sound business decision-making. However, what I want address and focus on are the relationships and the intangible of how the world works.…