Struggling to find a co-founder for your startup? CoFounders Lab has the answer to all your entrepreneur networking woes.
Think it’s hard to find love in this crazy world? Try finding the perfect co-founder for your business idea. There might be less awkward small talk and confusion about how to split the bill, but there’s no less anxiety involved. But CoFounders Lab has come up with an interesting solution for entrepreneur networking, explains Elisha Hartwig in this post at Mashable.
It’s time to turn those innovation initiatives towards your org chart and create new business organizational structures.
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of history can tip their hat to many of the truly groundbreaking developments of the Industrial Age. But even the staunchest history buff would agree that, while remarkable for their time, those innovations would be antiquated at best in today’s business landscape. So why do the vast majority of companies continue with an employee hierarchy that wouldn’t seem out of place in a museum? In this post at GigaOM Dave Kashen, founder of Unleashed, points to examples of new business organizational structures and explains why you should consider adopting one.
Featuring
Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits
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One of the most powerful entrepreneur lessons you can learn is discovering it’s the driving force behind your vision — not the vision itself — that’s truly important.
You might be surprised to find out that becoming recognized as a visionary has very little to do with actually coming up with a vision. Offering another one of their valuable entrepreneur lessons, Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits, co-authors of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Entrepreneur, point out that ideas alone don’t make great innovators.
Innovation and intrapreneurship strategist Philippe De Ridder, co-founder of Board of Innovation, shares six personal innovation habits that will have a profound impact on your performance, happiness, and success as an entrepreneur.
I’ve recently discovered the power of forming daily habits to reach my goals, and I’m keen to share my experience and thoughts to get some discussion going. As a person active in innovation — as an innovation manager, consultant, R&D manager, business developer, product manager, or C-level leader — you’ve most likely set yourself personal goals around being more inspiring, up-to-date, convincing or creative. Have you also considered which daily habits you could form to reach those goals?
The breathless mentality that fuels startups is ideal for a company’s early days, but it doesn’t age well. SEOmoz co-founder and CEO Rand Fishkin explains that as companies mature into the growth stage, that fast-paced approach can sometimes do more harm than good.
A Better Motto for Scalable Company Growth
As your company grows, so should your approach to leading it. In a recent interview with OpenView, Fishkin explained that changing his mindset around speed was the first major shift he had to make.
If you’re starting a company with an end game in mind, you’re probably doing yourself a disservice focusing on becoming a target for acquisition.
More often than not, a startup is founded with dreams of eventually becoming acquired. It’s a natural thought — most entrepreneurs fall asleep dreaming of a big payday. But according to Rod Favaron, President and CEO of enterprise social media software company Spredfast (an OpenView portfolio company), setting out specifically to make yourself a target for acquisition not only has a tendency of not leading to that result — it can also be a critical mistake.
Whether bootstrapping your way to hiring help, or navigating toward profitability under investors’ eyes, an entrepreneur’s path is often a long and lonely one. Dino Dogan, founder of blog amplification platform Triberr, talks about the lessons he’s learned firsthand while carving out a new space in social media for his company.
The story behind Triberr will sound familiar to many entrepreneurs: founder Dino Dogan saw a common problem without an easy solution. “I was doing SEO for a long time,” he says, but optimizing content “didn’t work for what I was trying to do.” Dogan wanted to build a community around his blog to include more than immediate friends who would comment on and share his posts, but that required “a lot of heavy lifting.”
Enter Triberr. Dogan’s social network “allows you to set up a blogging tribe” of like-minded writers who share each other’s work in a “streamlined, frictionless, no-heavy-lifting kind of way.” He recently spoke with OpenView to share how he’s learning from criticism, educating customers, and bootstrapping “a Facebook for bloggers.”
It’s important to learn from your mistakes as an entrepreneur, but don’t make choosing a co-founder one of those lessons.
It’s important to have a co-founder, and not just because you want someone to celebrate with when you get purchased by Google. You want your co-founder to not only complete the knowledge that you lack, but be an integral member of a truly awesome team.
Which is why, in this guest post at OnStartups, Jessica Alter, co-founder and CEO of FounderDating, says choosing a co-founder is such an important step in starting your business.
Featuring
Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits
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Do you need to be a visionary to be a successful entrepreneur?
We’re all familiar with the notion of the entrepreneur as visionary. It’s one that Hollywood loves to perpetuate — misunderstood geniuses and sudden epiphanies always make for a good story. But according to Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits, co-authors of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Entrepreneur, believing in the myth of the visionary as an overnight success can be a dangerous thing for aspiring entrepreneurs. In fact, it can severely limit their potential.
If your startup could host a commencement speaker when it graduates to the expansion-stage, who would it be? Here are 10 excellent candidates who would deliver insight, inspiration, and a healthy dose of practicality to prepare you for what comes next.
They’ll talk about what graduating students can expect in the coming years, what they need to remember and plan for, and what they need to keep in perspective when their paths inevitably take turns they didn’t plan for.
Which got us thinking — that actually sounds like advice many startups could benefit from, as well.
