Quantcast
Channel: Entrepreneurship
Viewing all 2065 articles
Browse latest View live

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt listed the '3 big failures' he sees in tech startups today

0
0

Eric Schmidt CFE Lecture London

  • Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, gave the Centre for Entrepreneurs lecture in London this week.
  • In a draft of the speech, seen by Business Insider, Schmidt outlined what he sees as the three big market failures holding back tech entrepreneurship today.
  • He said tech startups need to be more diverse, less product driven, and more willing to partner early.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has listed the three "big failures" in tech entrepreneurship around the world.

Schmidt outlined the failings in a speech he gave at the Centre for Entrepreneurs in London this week. He later expanded on his thoughts in an interview with former BBC News boss James Harding.

Below are the three mistakes he outlined, with quotes taken from both a draft of his speech seen by Business Insider, and comments he delivered on the night.

1. People stick to who and what they know

"Far too often, we invest mostly in people we already know, who are working in very narrow disciplines," Schmidt wrote in his draft.

In his speech, Schmidt pegged this point closely to a need for diversity and inclusion. He said companies need to be open to bringing in people from other countries and backgrounds.

He said entrepreneurship won't flourish if people are "going to one institution, hiring only those people, and only — if I can be blunt — only white males."

During the Q&A, Schmidt specifically addressed the gender imbalance in the tech industry. He said there's a reason to be optimistic about women's representation in tech improving, predicting that tech's gender imbalance will vanish in one generation.

2. Too much focus on product and not on platforms

"We frequently don't build the best technology platforms to tackle big social challenges, because often there is no immediate promise of commercial return," Schmidt wrote in his draft.

"There are a million e-commerce apps but not enough speciality platforms for safely sharing and analyzing data on homelessness, climate change or refugees."

Schmidt's omitted this mention of socially conscious tech from his final speech, but did say that he sees a lot of innovation coming out of network platforms, which allow people to connect and pool data, because "the barrier to entry for these startups is very, very low."

3. Companies aren't partnering up early enough

Finally, Schmidt wrote in his draft that tech startups don't partner enough with other companies in the modern, hyper-connected world. "It's impossible to think about any major challenge for society in a silo," he wrote.

He said in his speech that tech firms have to be ready to partner "fairly early." He gave the example of a startup that wants to build homecare robots.

"The market for homecare robots is going to be very, very large. The problem is that you need visual systems, and machine learning systems, and listening systems, and motor systems, and so forth. You're not going to be able to do it with three people," he said.

After detailing his failures in tech entrepreneurship, Schmidt laid out what he views as the solution. He referred back to the Renaissance in Europe, saying people turned their hand to all sorts of disciplines, from science, to art, to business.

"No one tried to put Leonardo da Vinci in a silo," he said.

You can watch Schmidt's full lecture and Q&A here:

SEE ALSO: Eric Schmidt takes the blame for Google's social networking failures: 'I suspect we didn’t fully understand how to do it'

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How Singapore solved garbage disposal


IEX CEO Brad Katsuyama shares the 'critical' piece of advice he gives other entrepreneurs about getting through rough patches

0
0

Brad Katsuyama 2

  • Brad Katsuyama, CEO of IEX and the star of Michael Lewis book "Flash Boys," spoke on Tuesday at Business Insider's IGNITION 2018 conference.
  • Katsuyama said successful entrepreneurship means having experienced the problems you're trying to solve.
  • He was a trader for years and felt there was a need for an alternative exchange that would prevent predatory trading.
  • Katsuyama said, "In the lowest possible moments, where possibly you're even doubting yourself, you have to have a core belief that what you're trying to do is real."

Brad Katsuyama has one "critical" piece of advice for other entrepreneurs: "You have to have experienced the problems that you're trying to solve."

Katsuyama is the CEO of upstart stock exchange IEX, and is best known as the star of Michael Lewis' 2014 bestseller, "Flash Boys."

At Business Insider's IGNITION conference in New York Tuesday, Katsuyama said, "If you're doing something controversial, there's going to be a lot of people fighting against you. In the lowest possible moments, where possibly you're even doubting yourself, you have to have a core belief that what you're trying to do is real. It's a problem that needs to be solved."

Katsuyama added, "When your back's against the wall, you have to firmly believe that, or you're never going to make it through."

IEX was born out of Katsuyama's experience as a trader at Royal Bank of Canada: He founded the company in 2012 as a new exchange that would prevent the predatory trading that took place on traditional US exchanges.

In September 2018, IEX snagged its first listing from Nasdaq, Business Insider's Frank Chaparro reported.

"I lived the story," Katsuyama said of the "Flash Boys" plot. "Never for a second have I doubted what I lived through."

Katsuyama's memory of his experiences as a trader kept him going through the ups and downs of launching IEX.

Read more: IEX CEO Brad Katsuyama talks about life after 'Flash Boys' and how he's taking on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq

Some other successful entrepreneurs have similar advice. Neil Blumenthal, CEO of Warby Parker said the best way to discover a solid business idea is to write down your frustrations every day.

Interestingly, Blumenthal also said that many entrepreneurs "needed to live a little and experience a little bit of life to identify where there are problems that need solving."

As for Katsuyama, he said, "At the end of the day, when no one believes in your idea, you have to be the one who believes in it."

SEE ALSO: IEX CEO Brad Katsuyama talks about disrupting Wall Street and the power of 'Flash Boys' on the upstart exchange

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The reason some men can't grow full beards, according to a dermatologist

Barbara Corcoran on entrepreneurship, partnerships, and the advantages of being the only woman in the board room

I started my own business more than 15 years ago, and I wish I could have given myself 3 crucial pieces of advice

0
0

Ramit Sethi 3

  • Ramit Sethi is an entrepreneur and CEO of I Will Teach You To Be Rich and GrowthLab,
  • After 15 years building his businesses, he's narrowed down three pieces of entrepreneurship advice to share with people who ask.
  • He wishes he had focused on getting paying clients sooner, on moving up the value chain, and being smarter about choosing his heroes.

I often get people in their 20s and 30s that ask how I would start entrepreneurship if I were to start from scratch again.

Looking back to my 15-plus years of starting and building businesses, I want to share with you three primary things that I would focus on.

The first thing I would do is focus on getting paying clients

All these young entrepreneurs get sucked into what I call “vanity metrics” — the number of followers or subscribers they have or how many likes they’ve gotten on a single picture of them doing a hand stand on a mountaintop during a sunset. But in the end, the best Instagram account with hundreds of thousands of followers or the coolest copy in the world matters far less than paying customers when you’re trying to grow a business.

Because those things — Instagram followers and likes — don’t necessarily mean you are providing value to your market.

The ultimate sign that you are providing value is when someone pulls out their credit card and pays you.

After all, you have to be really good at what you do for people to want to pay you and stick with you.

Read more:I've helped thousands of people start their own businesses, and I've found that everyone who makes money has the same thing in common

The second thing I would focus on is to move up the value chain

What I mean by that is, I see a lot of entrepreneurs stunt their growth because they sell products for $19 or charge $30 per hour. While that’s amazing in the beginning, eventually you want to keep moving up the value chain to flex your skills and set yourself apart. For example, I started out with an ebook that cost $4.95, which was a BIG DEAL to me at the time.

Gradually I moved myself up the value chain 100X with my Earn 1K course. I knew people were getting great results from my course five years after starting my site I Will Teach You To Be Rich. And I was able to do this by:

  • Demanding more from students of my courses; and the more I demanded of them, the more they achieved.
  • Focusing on the QUALITY of my material. Some of the things that used to keep me up at night — like the visual look of my course — didn’t matter as much as I thought.

Of course, moving up the value chain is a slow, gradual, and imperfect process. It took me a lot of baby steps and mistakes.

Read More:Here's the exact email you can use to get a meeting with anyone, no matter how successful or intimidating

The third suggestion I would give to beginning entrepreneurs is to choose your heroes carefully

There are internet marketers out there that seemingly brag about how much money they could extract, what type of weird “trip wire” tactic they did, or how they analyzed these shrouded “hacks” in the backend to make 19 cents more out of every transaction. I remember attending a conference where people introduced themselves by saying:

“Hi, I’m <insert name> and I make $400K a year and work only two days per week.”

Ick. I felt like I needed to take a shower afterward.

People bragging about how much money they make and how little they work are just not the type of people I want to surround myself with.

The heroes I celebrate are those who have built businesses that last, offer amazing value, and have good ethics — someone like Howard Schultz from Starbucks.

I would encourage you to think carefully about the type of people around you:

  • Are they pushing you to be better?
  • Are they pushing you to serve your customers?
  • Do they have good ethics?

Be cognizant of the people you surround yourself with, because those values will rub off on you.

Ramit Sethi is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "I Will Teach You To Be Rich," and writes for more than 1 million readers on his websites, iwillteachyoutoberich.com and GrowthLab.com. His work on personal finance and entrepreneurship have been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Business Insider.

SEE ALSO: I spent years testing every productivity hack in the book, but nothing worked until I made a dramatic change I thought was crazy — until I tried it

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Fashion designer Christian Siriano shares the most important tool for entrepreneurs who are just starting out

The 2 traits that help the most successful people stand out from the crowd usually spell disaster for the rest of us

0
0

young woman professional job

  • In order to be wildly successful, you need to be optimistic and overconfident about your chances. But for the average person, being so out of touch with reality can lead to failure.
  • That's according to Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, who calls it a "paradox" of success.
  • Still, in some cases, overconfidence can indeed help you, especially if you're a leader.

Since I heard Daniel Kahneman speak at the World Business Forum this year, I haven't stopped thinking about one particular point he raised.

Kahneman is a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and the author of the 2011 bestseller "Thinking, Fast and Slow," in which he outlined a series of cognitive biases that affect our everyday decisions.

At WBF, Kahneman spoke about a "paradox" of success: You probably can't be wildly successful unless you're optimistic and overconfident about your chances. But generally speaking, optimism (the belief that you're less likely than others to experience bad events and more likely to experience positive events) and overconfidence (an inflated sense of accuracy or ability in a specific area) are career saboteurs.

It's the difference between, say, the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world and the rest of us.

"To be optimistic on average — it's not favorable," Kahneman said. But "extreme success is impossible without optimism."

Kahneman pointed to a 2007 paper published in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.

Researchers looked at a group of inventors in Canada and found that above-average optimists who were advised not to pursue their project ended up spending 166% more money than below-average optimists did when they received the same advice. (The researchers found that overconfidence didn't have an effect on the inventors' spending behavior, but that may have been because they didn't specifically measure the inventors' confidence in their abilities.)

Based on their findings, the researchers surmise that "a high level of optimism may act to keep inventors going in the face of adversity"— which is either a laudable or completely impractical behavior depending on your perspective.

As Kahneman described it, the average inventor would have been better off financially heeding the negative advice and taking a more traditional job; but the most successful inventors would not have.

In some circumstances, overconfidence can be beneficial

A more recent study provides some preliminary evidence that, at least among entrepreneurs, optimism can backfire.

The study, which was published in the journal European Economic Review, found that above-average optimists who are self-employed earn 30% less than below-average optimists who are self-employed. Interestingly, however, the study also found that optimists who work for companies earn more than their more pessimistic peers.

Read more: 'Entrepreneurship porn' lures young people with a pretty picture of startup life, but it glosses over the most dangerous parts

Still, there are some circumstances in which overconfidence in particular can work to your benefit. An article in the Harvard Business Review describes a study that found, at firms led by overconfident CEOs, there tends to be lower employee turnover and employees allocate a greater share of the assets in their retirement benefit plans to company stock.

The authors write in The Harvard Business Review, "At least in the corporate world, there may be a bright side to overconfidence: it can increase the commitment of other people to your venture."

As for Kahneman, he called optimism the "engine of capitalism." He said, "When you have lots of people trying things against the odds, it's not very good for most of them. Most of them will fail. But it's very good for society at large to have a lot of people competing and a few of them succeed."

SEE ALSO: A Nobel Prize-winning psychologist says the most successful decision-makers know how to use their gut feelings in a way the rest of us don't

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Barbara Corcoran on Donald Trump: 'He is the best salesman I've ever met in my life'

When I decided to change careers in my 50s instead of retiring early, I drew on a skill from acting school I hadn't used in decades

0
0

woman listening boss smiling work

  • While others were thinking about early retirement, I was thinking about a midlife career change.  
  • I committed myself to being a writer, even though I wasn't being paid to write.
  • I had no choice but to make it work, and I drew on unused skills from my college background in acting to accomplish it.

 

It's in their 50s that some people start to think about early retirement, but for me, it was when I decided to start a new career.  

For over two decades, I worked as an account manager for the independent video store Vidiots, even though I had a degree in theater arts. I had taken the job as something temporary that I could do "until my acting career took off." But the problem was, deep down, I didn't see myself as an actress, and I did nothing to pursue it — I didn't go on auditions, I didn't participate in showcases, and I sent out zero resumes and headshots.

I may have called myself an actress, but the truth was, I was more of an accounts-receivable clerk than anything.

Since I was all talk, I ended up staying at my "just-for-now" job for 21 years. When I left that job, I knew that I didn't want to be an actress or work in retail any longer. Although I loved my time at Vidiots and the people I worked with, I knew that I was meant to do more.

Becoming a writer

I decided to become a freelance writer. I'd always loved storytelling, and writing was the perfect outlet for me to tell stories and get paid for doing so. I knew that I had to do things differently this time. I couldn't just pretend I was a writer; I had to take actual steps to make it happen.

The one thing I needed to do to make writing more than a dream was that I had to commit to being a writer 100%.

I was lucky because I did have a small safety net. I lived with my boyfriend, Andy who worked as an IT consultant. But he didn't make a ton of money, and because of the nature of the tech industry, his job wasn't always secure. So, the pressure was on me not to fail.

"Are you going to get a job?" Andy would ask.

"I have a job," I'd say. "I'm a writer." The more I audibly confirmed my writer status to him, the more I believed it myself.

Since sitting around and waiting to be discovered hadn't worked for my acting career, I knew that I needed to be proactive and so I put my belief that I was a writer into practice. I lived my life as I thought a professional writer would since that's what I believed I could be.

I got up every morning and got ready for work, the same way I would if I was going into an office. Once I was finished with my chores and morning rituals, I sat down at my desk — the dining room table — and started my day. I pledged to write at least five hours per session.  I wrote about many different subjects: women's issues, relationships, mental health, and pets.

While the bulk of a writer's life is writing, writers have other tasks to do, too. I spent my days pitching publications with story ideas, writing articles on spec (writing a piece before actually having the job), being active on social media, and doing unpaid pieces for literary magazines.

Read more:I've been successfully self-employed for a year — here are 9 things I wish I'd known before starting

'Acting as if'

When I was studying acting in school, we learned to"act as if"— meaning, if our character was a banker, then we acted like a banker and truly believed we were a banker. I used that technique in my real life and acted as if I was a writer.  

I decided to do something every day that advanced my writing career, even if it was only having coffee with an established writer and asking for their advice. You've got to keep moving towards a goal — even if you're moving at a snail's pace.

Then, after five months of struggling, I got my first paid piece accepted by the now-defunct women's site, XoJane. The payment was only $50, but it felt like a huge amount of money to me — it was the first money I had ever made from writing. Then I got another piece on that site, and soon after, I had an essay published in The Los Angeles Times. There was no denying it: I was being paid to write.

The takeaway? Since labeling myself as a writer, I've had thousands of articles published on many different kinds of venues, from Women's Day to Salon, and I've gotten steady writing gigs that help provide the bulk of my income. I'm paying a larger portion of our household expenses than I used to, and while I'm not taking lavish vacations, I don't have to live as frugally as I did before.

I've learned that it's never too late to start a new career as long as you're passionate about it and can fully commit to it. And if you're anything like me, your second career may end up being much more fulfilling and creatively challenging than your first.

My office is still the dining room table, but now, people know not to ask, "When are you going to get a job?" Writing isn't my hobby — it's my job.

SEE ALSO: 5 times you can save money with senior discounts in your 50s

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Meet the 24-year-old who's the youngest female broker in the New York Stock Exchange

I built my own business by creating a half-dozen income streams, and here's the best advice I can give you on creating your own

0
0

Maleeka T. Hollaway

  • Maleeka T. Hollaway is a millennial entrepreneur who teaches small-business owners and entrepreneurs to position themselves to grow sustainable businesses and brands.
  • When she started her own business, she knew she wanted to create multiple income streams — but she wasn't sure where to start.
  • So she began doing just about everything that came her way, until she realized there was a common thread through all of her business offerings: communication.
  • Below, she explains how she built her own streams of income and where she recommends other small-business owners start.

When I started my own business about four years ago, I had no clue what I really wanted to do.

I knew that I could not build a sustainable business doing one-off projects. I needed to diversify my offerings and extend my professional reach. I needed to be one of those people who made money in my sleep.

To be that person, I knew I needed multiple streams of income. For as long as I can remember, I've heard people say that the average millionaire has seven streams of income — so that was a good place to start.

So I started digging into what it took to start a successful business, and I started seeing articles suggesting that the best thing to do was to market every skill I had that people would pay me for.

A bonus just for you:Click here to claim 30 days of access to Business Insider PRIME

Before I knew it, I was editing, ghostwriting, managing social-media accounts, coaching freelancers, consulting on building brands, pitching myself and others for media features, and getting paid to write for publications. It seemed like I was all over the place. Sure, I had multiple streams of income, but there was too much going on.

I took a step back and realized a thread joined all of these tasks together: I am a communicator. Everything I did then and that I do now in my business revolves around communicating.

Now I'm a publicist, a writer, a coach, and a consultant. I've created a small arsenal of digital products including workbooks and masterclasses that teach my customers about productivity, marketing, branding, and public relations. I collaborate with other business owners whose products or services complement mine, and I promote their products as an affiliate. I've also created a stream of income speaking and training. While the income isn't passive like the affiliate income, it doesn't feel like work because I speak about things that excite me and that I am passionate about sharing.

When you are looking to diversify your service and product offerings, consider all the things you can teach others about your area of expertise. Try these three steps:

Condense your knowledge into an informative e-book and create a mini-course teaching a specific tactic someone can use

Not only do you have to write the e-book or create the course only one time, but once it's out there it can sell while you're sleeping! Imagine putting in the work to develop your content one time and then being able to watch it sell repeatedly.

Google became my best friend as I read a few articles on how to set up my course or sell my e-books from platforms like Thinkific and Teachable. I did a bit of on-the-job training by trying both platforms before I made my decision based on ease of use.

Read more:I started my own business more than 15 years ago, and I wish I could have given myself 3 crucial pieces of advice

I learned quickly that having digital products available for sale at all times increases your chances of establishing your credibility and allows you to "make money in your sleep." Not every stream of income you have needs to be attached to your immediate attention. The creation of passive-income products allows you to reach people without taking time out of your day.

Consider being an ambassador (aka affiliate) for the products and services you already use

Affiliate marketing is where you get a commission for selling someone else's products. The first time I saw the power of affiliate marketing was when I noticed that my email-marketing platform sent me an email that said "Get a free month for everyone you recommend to use our platform!" And though I was paying only $15 a month, I figured that if one person started using the platform, it would be $15 I could save.

I started looking at every tool I was using to see whether it offered the same type of promotion, and most did. Some offered a free month of service, while others offered 20% residual of every service sold. Email-marketing platforms, scheduling apps, e-commerce platforms, and more typically have a form of affiliate marketing to offer. It's not a lot, but if you leverage the power of your network, it adds up.

If you like public speaking or teaching, turn your expertise into signature talks or workshops

Joining your local Toastmasters program can help you build a foundation for public speaking. If you are a member of any professional associations, chamber-of-commerce clubs, or business groups, find out their process for speaker selection at their meetings or events.

To get my feet wet, I started searching Facebook for business owners who were hosting events and needed speakers. I did about seven free events before I started packaging my talks to get paid to speak.

There are organizations that will pay for your genius, so position yourself to share it. Even if you don't get paid up front for speaking, learn to master the art of selling from the stage or the back of the room. Either way, you'll grow your influence and reach by leveraging your expertise and connecting with more people, and you'll have an additional avenue of earning extra income.

Maleeka T. Hollaway is a millennial, entrepreneur, speaker, and writer obsessed with personal development, leadership, and small-business growth. Her goal is to teach small-business owners and entrepreneurs to position themselves to grow sustainable businesses and brands. Meet her on www.MaleekaHollaway.com.

SEE ALSO: 4 times you never need to apologize at work, according to an executive coach

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Barbara Corcoran on Donald Trump: 'He is the best salesman I've ever met in my life'

I built a 6-figure business working no more than 30 hours a week, and here's the best advice I can give you on building a company without being a workaholic

0
0

jenny shih

  • Jenny Shih is a business coach who has taught more than 25,000 women how to earn a full-time income working 30 hours per week or less as online, service-based entrepreneurs.
  • She built her own six-figure business working no more than 30 hours a week.
  • She says being an entrepreneur without being a workaholic comes down to getting clear on your values, and setting boundaries.

I’m an unconventional business owner. I’m never going to tell you that you “have” to do something. I’m never going to insist there’s a “right” answer. And I’m never going to ask you to work 60-plus hours a week. I certainly don’t.

While I totally respect the hustle, that all-in, go-big-or-go-home attitude isn’t for me. I tried it 20 years ago, and it almost killed me. Since then, I’ve found that success doesn’t have to come from a self-sacrificing grind and built a multiple six-figure business working no more than 30 hours a week.

Here’s my best advice creating a thriving business without letting it run your life.

Get clear on what you value

One of the most amazing things about creating your own company is your ability to design something that aligns with your values. Whether you value massive financial success, tons of free time to spend with your family or traveling the world, a creative outlet, or the opportunity to make a huge impact on the world, at the end of the day, you get to choose.

This means the first step to creating what you want is identifying your top two, overall life values — and you can only have two. When you have more than two, you’re no longer focused enough to work and live according what truly matters. Your right two values are the ones that are true to you, not ones that you’ve been told you should have or believe are expected of you.

Deliberately create your schedule

When you pinpoint your top two values, your next step is to be ruthless about structuring your work and life around these values. After all, if you’re not spending your time in ways that reflect your values, then you aren’t truly living those values.

This means, if you value time with family, your desired family time goes in your schedule first. If you value health as I do, time for self-care and time not working are essential. If you value travel, put time in your schedule for that.

A bonus just for you: Click here to claim 30 days of access to Business Insider PRIME

There is no one right way to schedule your life other than however reflects your values. Give yourself permission to do things your own way. This means not following a morning routine, four-hour work week, or workation schedule that some so-called expert has declared is the secret to success. Your secret to success is whatever reflects your values.

Hold yourself accountable

Although this may sound harsh, the truth is, the rest of the world does not care about your values or your schedule. This means you hold yourself accountable to both.

One of the best ways to do this is to create a schedule that plans each day in 15-minute increments. I realize this sounds extreme, and it’s always met with a lot of pushback from my clients. The results, however, are undeniable.

When you deliberately plan and track your time, you quickly see how easily you give in to distractions and procrastination, how much time you spend doing busy work, and that you ultimately have more control over your schedule than you’ve ever realized. This epiphany might sting at first, but once you get over the ego hit, you can take back control and truly live and work according to your values.

In time, you won’t need to plan or track your schedule so closely. You’ll develop habits of focus, anti-procrastination, and routines that reflect your values. You’ll naturally manage your schedule in a way that reflects your values.

Get really good at saying no

To hold yourself accountable to living your values, you have to say “no” a whole lot more than you do right now. You’ll be saying no to everyone — from friends and family, to coworkers and employees, to new opportunities. The world is going to keep asking for more from you, and you have to hold the boundaries set by your values.

The good news is, when you are 100% sold on your own values and how essential they are to your life and work, it becomes easier to say no. Sure, the person on the receiving end might not be thrilled with your response response, but the alternative is sacrificing your own values — and this is exactly what you’re trying to stop doing.

Create systems for everything and delegate

Once you’re operating on a schedule that reflects your values and armed with the ability to say no to everything that tries to pull you from those values, you’re primed to achieve greater success. This is when it gets fun.

With a slimmed-down, focused schedule, you can easily see what work helps you achieve the maximum results you’re looking for without sacrificing your values. From here, you can create effective systems, delegate more, and free up your time to do the work that grows your company. In a nutshell, you can achieve greater success without sacrificing what matters most to you.

Working but not hustling — forever

With each phase of business growth comes further refinement at each step. Revisit your values, your schedule, everything pulling you from your values and schedule, your systems, and your team. Update and fine-tune each area to help you achieve your next level of success. It’s part of a never-ending spiral of upward growth, helping you create a successful business without ever sacrificing that which truly matters to you.

All of this means you don’t have to be a workaholic ever again— unless that’s something you value.

Jenny Shih is a business coach who has taught more than 25,000 women how to earn a full-time income working 30 hours per week or less as online, service-based entrepreneurs.

Drawing on her decade of experience in high tech and her training with Martha Beck and spiritual teacher Byron Katie, Jenny guides her clients through a no-fluff, step-by-step approach to creating thriving businesses they love without having to work long hours or make huge sacrifices.

Get her 6 steps to creating success on your terms here.

SEE ALSO: I started my own business more than 15 years ago, and I wish I could have given myself 3 crucial pieces of advice

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Workaholics have this one dangerous health risk in common


There are 114% more women entrepreneurs than there were 20 years ago, but the reason why is troubling

0
0

woman computer laptop working

  • In the past 20 years, the number of women-owned firms in the US has increased 114%.
  • Research shows that many women start businesses because it just seems like a better alternative to the demands of corporate life.
  • In the traditional workplace, women often face gender discrimination and have a hard time balancing work and childrearing. 
  •  Yet while entrepreneurship seems to offer greater autonomy and flexibility, it can also contribute to economic insecurity.


Every day in the US, women start about 849 new businesses.

And over the past 20 years, the number of women-owned firms has increased 114%.

You could herald these developments as signs that the world of American entrepreneurship is, finally, becoming more open to women. But the statistics obscure a more troubling trend.

For many women business owners, starting a company is a way to escape the often-unmeetable demands of corporate life. But more women becoming business owners isn’t necessarily good for the economy — or for the women themselves.

Women often start businesses out of necessity

A 2017 report from the National Women’s Business Council uses the term “necessity entrepreneurship” to explain what’s happening among women business owners.

Typically, that term describes people who start businesses out of economic need — but the NWBC proposes expanding the definition to include non-economic factors as well. Based on interviews with women business owners, the report highlights workplace discrimination and the fact that childrearing and household management typically fall to women.

The American workplace may be especially inhospitable to women. Consider a 2014 PayPal survey of women business owners in the US, China, France, and Mexico: In France and Mexico, 61% and 66% of women said they wanted to be entrepreneurs to have pride in themselves. In the United States, 55% said they wanted better work-life balance.

Having more autonomy is a key motivator

Morra Aarons-Mele has researched the reasons women start their own businesses, and has found that women frequently say they did so to gain more control over their time. In fact, that was part of the reason why she started her own companies: Women Online and The Mission List.

It wasn’t so much the desire to be the next Elon Musk that motivated her — “I just wanted to make a living,” she told me, and “I just never wanted to go to an office again for 10 hours a day.”

Yet in a 2014 Harvard Business Review article, Aarons-Mele writes that “the economic impact of most women’s small businesses may not be what’s best for women, their families or the economy in the long run.” She adds that “women-owned businesses are disproportionately in industries where the median receipts are less than $225,000 (and businesses with receipts less than $100,000 are more likely to fail).” 

On the individual level, most women have a hard time replacing the salary they were earning in the corporate world, Aarons-Mele writes.

That’s why Aarons-Mele suspects that many women would in fact prefer to stay in companies — provided they earned more money, had more autonomy, and saw greater leadership opportunities.

Disappointingly, and perhaps surprisingly, gender discrimination may be a problem in the entrepreneurial world as well. As Business Insider France’s Elisabeth Hu reported, enterprises founded or co-founded by women receive about $935,000 in investments on average, while those founded by men receive an average of about $2.1 million.

However, Hu reported, for every dollar of funding, startups founded by women generate 78 cents, compared to 31 cents for startups founded by men.

SEE ALSO: 'Entrepreneurship porn' lures young people with a pretty picture of startup life, but it glosses over the most dangerous parts

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 80% of startup money goes to 3 states — here's what one visionary is doing to help spread the wealth

These are the world's 16 most competitive nations for attracting and retaining entrepreneurs

0
0

Tulips

  • A huge part of economic success for any nation is ensuring that the best possible talent is in place in key industries, and that it stays there.
  • A survey from French business school INSEAD looked at four key categories for encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation: a nation's ability to enable, attract, grow, and retain entrepreneurship. 
  • Major Western economies like the USA, Germany, and the UK are close to the top of the list, but smaller nations such as Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Singapore also feature.

A huge part of economic success for any nation is ensuring that the best possible talent is in place in key industries, and that it stays there.

But which nations are best at attracting talent in business? A new survey, conducted by French business school INSEAD and tech firms Adecco and Tata Communications, aims to find out.

The survey looked at four key categories for encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation: a nation's ability to enable, attract, grow, and retain entrepreneurship. 

These four pillars were then sub-divided into categories such as the regulatory environment, quality of educational institutions, and quality of life. Each country was then given a score out of 100.

Major Western economies like the USA, Germany, and the UK are close to the top of the list, but smaller nations such as Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Singapore also feature.

Check out all the nations with scores above 70 below.

SEE ALSO: The 31 safest countries in the world

16. Ireland — 70.15



15. Canada — 70.43



14. Germany — 70.72



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Taking someone else's startup idea and making it better might sound like cheating — but it's exactly how the most successful founders work

0
0

aol steve case

  • AOL achieved tremendous success by picking up where other internet startups had left off.
  • That's according to Jean Case, a former AOL exec and the author of "Be Fearless."
  • In turn, Case writes, contemporary tech giants like Google and Facebook have benefited from AOL's innovations.

AOL was built on the backs of other businesses' failures.

And as former AOL executive Jean Case writes in her new book, "Be Fearless," the company's ability to pick up where others had left off was nothing short of brilliant.

Earlier in her career, Case worked at a company called The Source, which she describes as "a text-based information utility for consumers that featured early versions of email, conferencing, and content." While the service was unthinkably slow by today's standards, Case writes that the concept behind it "was a really powerful idea, democratizing access to information and communication."

It just needed the proper execution.

After The Source failed to take off, Case moved on to the company that would become AOL. It was founded by Steve Case (Jean Case's husband), Marc Seriff and Jim Kinsey — three founders who'd already experienced their own series of business failures.

The previous iteration of the company, Quantum Computer Service, had been a partner of Apple's, until so much conflict led Apple to back out of the deal, as Steve Case writes in his 2016 book, "The Third Wave." From that experience, the founders learned that they wanted to create their own brand and pay for their own marketing.

QCS' service was rebranded as America Online in 1989.

Read more: Billionaire AOL cofounder Steve Case says he waited 10 years for the moment he realized his company was a success

As Jean Case boasts in the book, AOL had nearly 30 million subscribers at its peak and was the first Internet company to go public. She writes that Steve Case "led the team to experiment in areas that had previously limited growth for our competitors," including consumer-friendly pricing and membership plans.

In turn, today's tech giants found success by modeling themselves at least partly after AOL.

Case writes that Facebook, Google, and Twitter "all benefited from the innovations that AOL introduced." She adds, "Innovators can take major leaps or make a Big Bet by looking at where previous efforts feel short, and fully exploiting the lessons of those failures."

SEE ALSO: Most every successful person has a story of excruciating failure in their past — and for good reason

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Understanding this one cognitive bias may help you better negotiate a pay raise

I've helped thousands of people start their own businesses, and I have an uncomfortable truth for entrepreneurs looking to raise money

0
0

Ramit Sethi 2018

  • Ramit Sethi, CEO and author of "I Will Teach You to Be Rich," has helped thousands of people build their own businesses.
  • When entrepreneurs ask him how they should go about raising startup capital, he always has the same suggestion: Start with your savings.
  • If you can’t or are not willing to save up a couple thousand bucks to start a business, he writes, maybe you’re just not ready to start one.

The people who most often ask me “How do I raise money for my small business?” are not the kinds of people who are in Silicon Valley or have the level of business savvy and sophistication to get investments from Angels or any institutional money.

They are average folk who want to know where to get an additional $2,000 to start their own small business. And this is what I ask them in return:

“How about from your savings?”

Or better yet: “What about from your customers?”

The response I get after I ask them these questions? Crickets… I never hear back from them!

Most people thinking about starting an online business expect some magical investment fairy to come to them and drop money on them. As if they can depend on the universe saying, “Wow, you’ve been doing a great job so far at life, you can have $2,000 — no, actually $20,000! Here you go!”

NO! You and I both know that the world doesn’t work that way.

No amount of wishing or asking is going to make a business, let alone the money to start your business, magically appear.

Read More:I've helped thousands of people start their own businesses, and I've found that everyone who makes money has the same thing in common

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: If you can’t or are not willing to save up a couple thousand bucks to start a business, maybe you’re just not ready to start one.

But if you insist that you are, let me ask you: Do you have a business plan?

What about a business idea or two? If yes, have you actually confirmed whether that idea is something customers are willing to pay you for?

The reality is, if you haven’t actually done any of those things, you are living a fantasy instead of putting in the right first steps to starting a real business.

I’ve helped thousands of students start and grow their businesses, so I know full well that one of the single biggest obstacles to getting a business off the ground is finding a profitable idea that works. People get stuck here because they want any and all of their ideas to be instant hits, but most ideas you come up with — at least initially — will SUCK.

And that’s perfectly fine!

There are no bad ideas in the beginning stages.

Some of my early business ideas were terrible. But I’ve gone on to create more than 18 successful products. That’s the most liberating part of coming up with business ideas: You have permission to suck.

Once you’ve accepted that, you can finally move on to the next steps.

Learn more about building a business with the Ultimate Guide to Finding a Profitable Business Idea.

Ramit Sethi is the author of the New York Times bestseller "I Will Teach You To Be Rich" and writes for more than 1 million readers on his websites, I Will Teach You To Be Rich and GrowthLab. His work onpersonal finance and entrepreneurship have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Business Insider.

SEE ALSO: I've helped thousands of people start their own businesses, and I've found that everyone who makes money has the same thing in common

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Barbara Corcoran on entrepreneurship, partnerships, and the advantages of being the only woman in the board room

At 19, I left my job to build a billion-dollar company. But I didn't do it, and considered myself a failure for years until I made a critical change in my thinking

0
0

Sahil Lavingia   Headshot by Trevor Christensen

  • In 2011, Sahil Lavingia left his job as the second employee at Pinterest to build Gumroad, which he dreamed would become a billion-dollar company. He raised about $8 million in his first year.
  • But things didn't keep growing. At one point he ended up having to lay off 75% of his staff, including his friends, and strongly considered selling his company. Eventually, he was working completely on his own.
  • Lavingia began to be OK with the fact that Gumroad would never be a billion-dollar company. He decided to grow a small team, slowly buy back investors, and build Gumroad into a meaningful business focused on our creators. 
  • "I consider myself 'successful' now," he writes. "Not exactly in the way I intended, though I think it counts. Where did my binary focus on building a billion-dollar company come from in the first place?"

This post was originally published on Medium.

In 2011 I left my job as the second employee at Pinterest — before I vested any of my stock — to work on what I thought would be my life’s work.

Gumroad would become a billion-dollar company, with hundreds of employees. It would IPO, and I would work on it until I died. Something like that.

That didn’t happen.

Now, it may look like I am in an enviable position, running a profitable, growing, and low-maintenance software business with customers who adore us. But for years, I considered myself a failure. At my lowest point, I had to lay off 75% of my company, including many of my best friends. I had failed.

I no longer feel shame in the path I took to get to where I am today. It took me years to realize that I was misguided from the outset. This is that journey, from the beginning.

A weekend project turned VC-backed startup

The idea behind Gumroad was simple: Creators and others should be able to sell their products directly to their audiences with quick, simple links. No need for a storefront.

I built Gumroad that weekend, and launched it early Monday morning on Hacker News. The reaction exceeded my grandest aspirations. Over 52,000 people checked it out on the first day.

Later that year, I left my job as the second employee at Pinterest — before I vested any of my stock — to turn it into what I thought would become my life’s work.

Almost immediately, I raised $1.1M from an all-star cast of angel investors and venture capital firms, including Max Levchin, Chris Sacca, Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant, Collaborative Fund, Accel Partners, and First Round Capital. A few months later, in May 2012, we raised $7M more. Mike Abbott from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), a top-tier VC firm, led the round.

I was on top of the world. I was just 19, a solo founder, with over $8M in the bank and three employees. And the world was starting to take note.

We grew the team. We stayed focused on our product. The monthly numbers started to climb. And then, at some point, they didn’t.

To keep the product alive, I laid off 75% of my company — including many of my best friends. It really sucked. But I told myself things would be fine: The product would continue to grow and no one far from the company would ever find out.

Then TechCrunch published Layoffs Hit Gumroad As The E-Commerce Startup Restructures. All of a sudden my failure was public. I spent the week ignoring my support network and answering our customers’ concerns, many of whom relied on us to power their business and wanted to know if they should look for an alternative after reading the news; some of our favorite, most successful creators left. (It hurt, but I don’t blame them for trying to minimize the risk in their own businesses.)

So what went wrong, and when?

Failing in style

Let’s start with the numbers. This is our monthly processed volume, up until the layoffs:

gumroad chart 1

It doesn’t look too bad, right? It’s going in the right direction: up.

But we were venture-funded, which was like playing a game of double-or-nothing. It’s euphoric when things are going your way–and suffocating when they’re not. And we weren’t doubling fast enough to raise the $15M+ Series B (the second major round of funding) we looked for to grow the team.

Every month of less than 20% growth should have been a red flag.

For the type of business we were trying to build, every month of less than 20% growth should have been a red flag.

But at the time, I thought: “It’s okay.” We had money in the bank, we had product-market fit. We would continue to ship product and things would work out. The online creator movement was still nascent; it wasn’t our fault. It always looked like change was right around the corner.

But now, I realize: It doesn’t matter whose “fault” it is, we hit a peak in November 2014 and stalled. A lot of creators absolutely loved us, but there weren’t enough of them who needed our specific product offering. Product-market fit is great, but we needed to find a new, larger fit to justify raising more money (and then do it again and again, until acquisition or IPO).

In January 2015, after our final double-or-nothing hail-mary, when our bank balance dipped below 18 months of runway, I told the twenty-person team: the road ahead was going to be a tough one. We didn’t have the numbers to raise a Series B, and we would have to work really hard over the next nine months to get even close to them. To that end, we deprioritized everything except features that would directly “move the needle.” Many were not core to our business, but we needed to try everything we could to get our monthly processed volume to where it needed to be.

If we succeeded, we would raise money from a top-tier VC again, hire more people, and start the journey again. If we didn’t, we would have to drastically downsize the company.

In those nine months, when the whole team knew that we were fighting for our company’s life, not a single person left Gumroad. From “this is gonna be hard,” to “yep, turns out it was,” every single person worked harder than ever.

We launched a “Small Product Lab” to teach new creators how to grow and sell. We shipped a ton of features, including weekly payouts, payouts to debit cards, payouts to the UK, Australia, and Canada, various additions to our email features, product recommendations and search, analytics to see how customers are reading/watching/downloading the products they’ve purchased, and add-to-cart functionality. And that was just from August to November.

Unfortunately, we didn’t hit the numbers we needed.

Slim down or shut down?

Looking back, I’m glad we didn’t hit those numbers. If we doubled down, raised more money, and appeared in the headlines again, there was a very real possibility it would only lead to a more spectacular failure.

With that off the table, our options were:

  • Shut down the business, return the remaining money to investors, and try something new.
  • Continue with a slimmed-down version of the company to aim for sustainability.
  • Position the company for an acquihire.

Some of my investors wanted me to shut down the business. They tried to convince me that my time was worth more than trying to keep a small business like Gumroad afloat, and I should try to build another billion-dollar company armed with all of my learnings–and their money.

I tended to agree with them, to be honest. But I was accountable to our creators, our employees, and our investors — in that order. We helped thousands of creators get paid, every month. About $2,500,000 was going to go into the pockets of creators  —  for rent checks and mortgages, for student loans and kids’ college funds. And it was only growing! Could I really just turn that faucet off?

And if I sold the company, it would be mostly for our stellar team, which means I would no longer be able to control the destiny of the product. There were too many acquisition stories that promised exciting journeys and amazing synergies to come — and ended with a deprecated product a year later.

It was certainly tempting. I could say I sold my first company, raise more money, and do this all again with a new idea. But that didn’t sit right with me. We were responsible to our creators first. That’s what I told every new hire and every investor. I didn’t want to become a serial entrepreneur, and risk disappointing another customer base.

We decided to become profitable at any cost. The next year was not fun: I shrunk the company from twenty employees to five. We struggled to find a new tenant for our $25,000/month office and focused all of our remaining resources on launching a premium service.

In June 2015, a few months before our layoffs, our financials looked like this:

  • Revenue: $89,000 for the month
  • Gross profit: $17,000
  • Operating expenses: $364,000
  • Net profit: -$351,000

A year later, in June 2016, our monthly numbers looked like this:

  • Revenue: $176,000 for the month
  • Gross profit: $42,000
  • Operating expenses: $32,000
  • Net profit: +$10,000

It hurt, but it meant creators would keep getting paid, and that we were in control of our own destiny.

Skeleton crew to lifestyle business

It got worse from there.

Gumroad was no longer the venture-funded, fast-growing startup our investors and employees signed up for. As everyone else found other opportunities, the skeleton crew fizzled from five to one.

I was basically alone. I didn’t have a team, nor an office. And San Francisco was full of startups raising gobs more money, building amazing teams, and shipping great products. Some of my friends became billionaires. Meanwhile, I had to run a “measly” lifestyle business. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but I had to keep the ship from sinking.

Now, I understand some people would dream to be in that position. But at the time, I just felt trapped. I couldn’t stop, but there was only so much I could do as an army of one.

I shut off the rest of the world. I didn’t tell my mom about the layoffs — she had to read the article and tweets herself to find out. My friends were worried, but I assured them I was neither depressed nor suicidal. I left San Francisco for long stretches at a time, thinking that some travel would give me adequate distance. It only made me more lonely.

Every day, I woke up and took care of all of Gumroad’s support queries. I tried to fix all of the bugs I could. Often, I had to ask for help from former Gumroad engineers. They were all employed now, but they always found time to help. Once all things Gumroad were taken care of, I tried to go to the gym, and if I had the willpower, work on a side project (a fantasy novel). Most days, I failed.

To me, happiness is so much about an expectation of positive change. Every year before 2016, there was an improvement in my expectations — in the team, the product, or the company — and this was the first time in my life when the present year felt worse than the last.

Living in San Francisco was already a struggle, and when Trump won the election, I ended up leaving for good.

New beginnings

Then one day, everything changed. Again. I’m wary about sharing this part of the story, because I don’t know if there is anything to learn from it. But it happened, so here it is.

On November 27, 2017 I got this email from KPCB, our lead investor:

I am following up our conversation a few months ago. KP would like to sell our ownership back to Gumroad for $1. Can we discuss this week?

Mike had left KPCB to start a new company, and KPCB didn’t want the operational headache of appointing a new board member. Plus, it helped their taxes. In one fell swoop, our liquidation preferences (how much we would have to sell for before dollars started going to employees) went from about $16.5M to $2.5M. All of a sudden, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Small, dim, and far away, but present. There was a path to an independent business, not beholden to the go-big-or-go-home mentality I signed up for when I raised money.

One investor joined them. We’ve bought back a couple more, since then. I keep the rest of the investors up-to-date with a brief email every few months.

The future came into focus: I could grow a small team, slowly buy back our investors, and build Gumroad into a meaningful business focused on our creators. We would never become a billion-dollar company, and that started to feel okay. Certainly, the thousands of creators selling on Gumroad wouldn’t mind.

Finding new forms of impact

The eight years I worked on Gumroad were full of personal ups and downs. There were months where I worked 16 hours a day. But there were also some months where I worked four hours a week. Here’s one way to picture that time:

gumroad chart 2

Can you tell which is which? I can’t. We had a sales team for a few years, then we didn’t. Can you tell when we made the switch? I can’t.

It doesn’t matter how amazing your product is, or how fast you ship features. The market you’re in will determine most of your growth. For better or worse, Gumroad grew at roughly the same rate almost every month because that’s how quickly the market determined we would grow.

So instead of pretending to be some sort of product visionary, trying to build a billion-dollar company, I’m just focused on making Gumroad better and better for our existing creators. Because they are the ones that have kept us alive.

Creating and capturing value

At a CEO Summit many years ago, my all-time hero, Bill Gates, was on stage. Someone asked him how he dealt with failing to capture so much value? Microsoft was huge, sure, but tiny compared to the total impact it has had on the world and on humanity.

Bill’s answer: sure, but that’s true with all companies, right? They create some value and succeed in capturing a very small percentage of it.

Similarly, I am now more focused on creating value than capturing it. I still want to have as large an impact as possible, but I don’t need to create it directly, or capture it in the form of our revenue or our valuation.

For example, Austen Allred, who’s raised $48M for his startup Lambda School, got his start selling a book on Gumroad.

 

Startups have been founded by former Gumroad employees, and dozens more companies have been massively improved by recruiting our alumni.

On top of that, our product ideas, like our credit card form and inline-checkout experience, have proliferated the web, making it a better place for everyone — including those that have never used Gumroad.

While Gumroad, Inc may be small, our impact is large. There is, of course, the $178,000,000 we have sent to creators. But then there’s the impact of the impact, the opportunities that those creators have taken to create new opportunities for others.

Opening up

I’ve found other ways to create value, too. After the layoffs, I didn’t talk to anyone about Gumroad. Not even my mom. And after moving away from San Francisco, I felt pretty disconnected from the startup community.

So, as a way to re-engage with the community, I thought about sharing our financials publicly. Founders starting their own companies could learn from our mistakes, utilizing our data to make better decisions.

It was scary: What if we don’t grow every month? It could scare off prospective customers. It’s something I would never expect a startup seeking venture capital to do. It makes sense to hold those cards as close to your chest for as long as possible when you must raise money, hire people, and compete for customers with other venture-seeking startups.

But, since we were not any of those things anymore, it was easier to share that information. We were profitable, and a no-growth month won’t change that. So in April 2018, I started to release our monthly financials publicly.

 

Ironically, more investors have reached out (we’re just interested in raising money from our customers for the moment, thanks!), more folks want to contribute to Gumroad, and our shift in focus has brought us closer to our creators.

Instead of freaking out about how ‘small’ Gumroad actually is (like I thought they would), our creators have grown more loyal. It feels like we’re all in this together, trying to do earn a living doing what we love.

Soon, we will also open-source the whole product, WordPress-style. Anyone will be able to deploy their own version of Gumroad, make the changes they want, and sell the content they want, without us being the middle-man.

In 2018 we donated over $23,775 (8% of our profits) to different causes. We raised money for the hurricane relief efforts in Puerto Rico and the floods in Kerala. We helped fund the Presence-of-Blackness project in speculative fiction, and a Mexicanx publication.

Seeking the non-binary

For years, my only metric of success was building a billion dollar company. Now, I realize that was a terrible goal. It’s completely arbitrary, and doesn’t accurately reflect impact.

I’m not making an excuse or pretending that I didn’t fail. I’m not pretending that it feels good. Even though everyone knows that the failure rate in startups, especially venture-funded ones, is super high, it still sucks when you do.

I failed, but I also succeeded at many other things. We turned $10 million of investor capital into $178 million and counting for creators. And without a fundraising goal coming up, we are just focused on building the best product we can for them. On top of all that, I’m happy creating value beyond our revenue-generating product, like these words you’re reading!

 

I consider myself “successful” now. Not exactly in the way I intended, though I think it counts. Where did my binary focus on building a billion-dollar company come from in the first place?

I think I inherited it from a society that worships wealth. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Bill Gates was my all-time hero and was also the world’s richest person.

Since I can remember, I equated “successful” solely with net worth. If I heard someone say “that person’s really successful,” I didn’t assume they were improving the well-being of the people around them, but that they had found a way to make a lot of money.

Wealth can be a measure of success, as seems to be in the case of someone like Bill Gates, who has invested heavily in philanthropy. But it’s not the only way to measure success, nor is it the best one.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to build the next Microsoft. I personally don’t think billionaires are evil. And there’s a part of me that wishes I was still on that path.

But for better or worse, I’m on this one now. This has been my path to not building a billion-dollar company. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

GUMROAD LIVES. #gumroadHQ

A post shared by Gumroad (@gumroad) on Jan 27, 2014 at 9:03am PST on

 

Let me know if you have any questions. I’m happy to help, or at least to listen.

Gumroad is a product of many people’s hard work, including our alumni: Leigh McCulloch, Sidharth Shanker, Anish Bhayani, Kathleen Warner, Heather Whiles, Benjamin Nguyen, K. Tighe, Steve Kaye, Tuhin Srivastava, Avinash Ananth, Joel Packer, Katsuya Noguchi, Matan-Paul Shetrit, Amir Haghighat, Ian Atha, Emmiliese von Clemm, Kate Yu, Sri Raghavan, Ryan Delk, Al Hertz, Travis Nichols, Maxwell Elliott, Phil Howes, Ben Reynolds, Michael Klocker, Bryan English, Laura Biester, Jake Heimark, Aaron Relph, Ben Walsh, Greg Terrono, Donald Huang, Paul McKellar, Francisco Gutierrez, Kyle Doherty, and Jessica Jalsevac. Thank you.

Sahil Lavingia is the founder and CEO of Gumroad, an e-commerce startup that has helped more than 40,000 artists and creators earn over $180,000,000. In his free time he writes and paints. You can follow him on Twitter.

This post was originally published on Medium.

SEE ALSO: A CEO who built the skills that helped him sell his first startup for $1 billion explains how he got there from starting at 'absolute zero'

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Steve Case on why he's investing more in startups outside of Silicon Valley and New York

After studying self-made millionaires for 5 years, I can tell you entrepreneurship probably isn't what you think

0
0

wealthy man suit

  • Thomas C. Corley spent five years studying millionaires and gathered his insights in "Rich Habits: The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals."
  • Many of the millionaires he interviewed were self-made, and he found they largely described entrepreneurship as intensely boring.
  • But they stuck with it for three reasons: They believed in themselves, they were optimistic, and they loved the work they were doing.

When you think of successful entrepreneurs, what images immediately come to mind?

Do you see a well-dressed individual surrounded by a jet-setting posse, traveling from one exciting place to the next in private planes, exotic cars, and yachts?

Or do you see someone sitting all alone in their underwear, working behind a desk, computer, or stack of books at 5 a.m.?

In my Rich Habits Study, I interviewed 233 wealthy individuals (177 of whom were self-made millionaires) with at least $160,000 in annual gross income and $3.2 million in net assets.

As I discovered in my five-year study, many self-made millionaire entrepreneurs found that the journey toward success can be intensely boring, where little to nothing happens day after day despite the entrepreneur’s best efforts.

Read More:After studying millionaires for 5 years, I isolated a habit that will keep you from ever building wealth

For other entrepreneurs in my study, that journey felt like a slow walk through hell. A hell in which they were forced to overcome one hurdle after another, one let down after another, one disappointment after another, or one rejection after another.

A close cousin of rejection is being ignored. Many of the Rich Habits entrepreneurs found the journey very frustrating. Important people ignored their emails. Phone calls were not returned. Meetings got canceled at the last minute.

The early stages of being an entrepreneur are like being stuck in a cave for many years, the outside world oblivious to your amazing talents, skills, products, or services.

Read More:I studied millionaires for 5 years and realized being 'rich' comes down to only two things

Perhaps the worst part is knowing that, with just a little luck, everything could change in a heartbeat — but luck seems to elude you.

What keeps most entrepreneurs in the game?

Three things:

  1. Belief in themselves.
  2. Eternal optimism.
  3. Love for the work they do.

Successful entrepreneurs just believe they are good enough, or will become good enough to succeed.

They are optimistic that they will succeed and that success will pay big dividends down the road.

They also love the work that they do. That love of work is the source of their energy, motivation, and enthusiasm, despite the stifling nothingness or constant hardships they must endure.

So the next time you see a successful entrepreneur, don't envy their wealth. Instead, be impressed by the fact that they tried at all.

Thomas C. Corley is the author of "Rich Habits: The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals," and "Rich Kids: How to Raise Our Kids to be Happy and Successful in Life."

SEE ALSO: I studied millionaires for 5 years and found it's definitely possible to get rich working for someone else — if you follow 7 rules

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's why we give better advice to our friends than we give to ourselves

This CEO used to help startups at Silicon Valley's hottest mentorship program. Now, with a professional network for women, she'll go through it herself

0
0

Elpha_Team_Photo

  • Last week, Elpha launched as an independent company, spinning out of the famed Y Combinator startup accelerator program.
  • Cofounders Cadran Cowansage, Kuan Luo, and Abadesi Osunsade founded Elpha to build an online network of women in tech to provide each other with advice and resources — especially since women often find themselves as the only female member of their team.
  • Elpha will become part of this summer's Y Combinator batch.

Cadran Cowansage, former engineering lead at the famed Silicon Valley startup mentorship program Y Combinator, had always wished that there were a professional network of women. Now, she's working to make that dream a reality.

Cowansage, along with cofounders Abadesi Osunsade and Kuan Luo, have started up a new company called Elpha — an online community to provide advice and resources for women in tech.

"I started it because I didn't have a place to talk candidly about being a woman in tech," Cowansage, now Elpha's CEO, told Business Insider. "Having that sort of business insight coming from other women is something I always wanted."

Elpha began its existence as Leap, a project that Cowansage started and spearheaded while working at Y Combinator. In early February, after accruing some 7,500 members, Leap was spun out into its own indepdendent company, and given its new moniker to match the occassion. Appropriately, Cowansage originally connected with cofounders Luo and Osunsade via Leap.

It's already gotten its first round of angel funding to get it off the ground. To bring things full circle, Elpha will join this summer's batch of Y Combinator startups. The Y Combinator program — which counts Dropbox, Airbnb, and Twitch among its alumni — puts founders through intensive coaching, while also investing a small amount. 

As an employee of Y Combinator, Cowansage observed the process; now she'll be part of it.

"I just had this realization that to take Elpha to the next level, I needed to have a little bit of pressure and have a founding team," Cowansage said. "I wanted to apply the lessons I was learning by watching startups and do it myself. I feel like there's a major opportunity here."

How Elpha works

Cowansage was inspired to start Leap, and later Elpha, by in-person interactions with other women. She wanted to recreate these kind of connections online to build friendships.

On Elpha, women can search for job opportunities, or seek advice on a particular topic. Users can ask questions about fair compensation and how to get a promotion, learn what tech companies are more women-friendly, or even get book recommendations.  

"We're expanding on this kind of network and creating opportunities for experts to share their experiences for the female lens," Cowansage said. "I'm thinking through how you can use real identities [or] conversations in order to build those kind of relationships. Those have been valuable and helpful."

This is especially important as women in tech often find themselves being the only one on their teams, Cowansage says. She herself has found herself in that situation during her career, she says. According to the National Center for Women and Information Technology, only 26% of jobs in computing are held by women.

Elpha isn't just for engineers, either. Women who work in other professions in the tech space, as well as students, are welcome to join.

"Knowing that there are other women out there in their industry or their field is really really nice to keep you going and staying motivated," Cowansage said.

Read more: This startup wants employers to stop giving its workers lavish perks and start helping them pay their student loans

As Elpha rolls out and expands its horizons, the team also plans to tackle the challenges of building a culture and getting the word out.

"I think thinking through what the culture is that we're shooting for, and how to build it and how to maintain it as the community grows, and how to keep that authenticity and making sure our members feel comfortable as we continue to expand — that's something that's going to be an ongoing challenge," Cowansage said. "We want to get the word out so that women know it's a place for them."

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Meet the three women who married Donald Trump


The same thing I was bullied for in middle school became the foundation of my successful business

0
0

laura belgray 4

  • Laura Belgray is a copywriter who charges over $1,000 a hour.
  • She's built her own successful business by being unabashedly herself — the same thing she was bullied for in middle school.
  • "In grade school, not fitting in can mean nowhere to sit in the school cafeteria," she writes. "As a brand, meanwhile, fitting in is the kiss of death. Being polished and perfect makes you boring and forgettable, and being unlike anyone else is the golden ticket."

When I was in sixth grade, my mom handed me a letter.

“It’s from a secret admirer!” she said, lingering in hopes of further information.

I waited for her to leave, then opened it. Secret admirer? I had my doubts. Boys didn’t like me.

“I’ve been watching you and have a crush on you,” the note, in telltale middle-school girl’s bubble letters, said. “Your hat is so sexy and so are your Wrangler jeans. And I love the way you walk — like a duck!”

My face turned hot. I tore the letter into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet.

Within one line, I knew who it was from:

My former best friend, Beth Y., and her new bestie, Beth F. —  who’d stolen Beth Y. from me on the first day of school and made my sixth grade life hell.

Read More:I earn $950 an hour writing from my couch — here are my best tips for people who want to work for themselves

We’d been Beth ‘n’ Laura. Now, they were Beth ‘n’ Beth, or — as one teacher nicknamed them, Beth Squared.

Beth F. took over my group of friends and got me kicked me out of pizza Wednesdays, when we all went to the famous V&T Pizza up by Columbia.

She stood by like a mob boss, her arms folded across her chest, while boys tossed around my green felt hat — an unfortunate fashion statement I’d brought back from camp and made a point of wearing every day as my signature “thing.”

She rolled her eyes and elbow-jabbed Beth Y. whenever I said something in class.

“You walk like a duck, Laura,” Beth F. yelled at me more than once, unleashing a torrent of unconnected accusations. “You’re a spazz. You’re so weird. You suck at gym. You don’t even have any designer jeans!”

It was true. I wasn’t graceful. I was obsessed with Archie comics and video games, not eyeshadow or General Hospital. I skipped gym whenever I could get away with it and stayed in the art room drawing “Save Water” posters on oaktag. (New York was going through a drought.) And no, I didn’t have the right jeans.

(In my defense, I’d tried on every acceptable brand. Sassoon, Calvin Klein, Jordache, Gloria Vanderbilt, you name it. They weren’t made for a kid with a butt, and my dad didn’t want to pay “highway robbery prices” for “dungarees” anyway.)

All in all, I was too “me” to fit in.

Luckily, life isn’t middle school. Neither is business.

In grade school, not fitting in can mean nowhere to sit in the school cafeteria.

As a brand, meanwhile, fitting in is the kiss of death ....

Being polished and perfect makes you boring and forgettable ….

And being unlike anyone else is the golden ticket.

I know this not only because of tired buzz-phrases that put a premium on being different, like “outside the box,” “disruptive marketing,” and, of course, Apple’s famous “Think different.”

But, speaking first-hand, I’ve made a lucrative business of being unapologetically me; of sticking out and being what I call “flawsome” — showing off my weirdo imperfections everywhere I can.

Between my social posts, my blog, my marketing emails, even the copywriting services page on my website, sharing those quirks and shortcomings that once got me kicked out of pizza Wednesdays is what now wins me fans, buyers, and clients.

These people know my whole deal:

They know that I sleep too late, get dark thoughts about my industry, fight old ladies for food samples at the supermarket, am a lazy procrastinator, leave the house looking like a hungover raccoon, and have a very strange way of eating a sandwich.

They know that I have a shopping problem.

They know that I hate my feet and that I love Real Housewives way too much.

They comment on my posts and write back to my emails with thanks like:

“Have you been reading my journal?”

“I’m so glad I’m not the only one.”

“You’re so different from the other businesses I get emails from.”

“This is just what I needed to read today. Thank you for being real.”

And, best of all, they follow up with, “I need to work with you.”

Being relatable and different is what sells my copywriting mini-products and courses, my writing retreat in Italy, and my $1,450/hour copywriting services. (I often have a wait list.)

In business, it’s tempting to look around at what’s working for everyone else, and do that. That website font and color scheme, that tone of voice, that feed of glorious, filtered-to-death, I’m-on-a-boat Instagram pics.

But fitting in — though it may keep the Beth F's of the world off your case and spare you from fake “admirer” mail in sixth grade — will only get you honored in the Business Hall of Same.

It’ll make you bland, generic, overlooked.  

And for us former middle school outcasts who dare to stay different, standing out is sweet revenge.

Laura Belgray, founder of Talking Shrimp, is an award-winning copywriting expert and unapologetic lazy person. She writes TV spots for clients like NBC, Fandango, and Bravo, and helps entrepreneurs and creatives get paid to be 100% themselves. Get her 5 Tips for Non-Sucky Copy here.

SEE ALSO: How I went from earning $100 per hour to over $1,000 per hour working for myself

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Understanding this one cognitive bias may help you better negotiate a pay raise

A CEO gives the same piece of advice to all new entrepreneurs about picking a compelling business problem to solve

0
0

kara goldin hint

  • The best business advice from Kara Goldin, founder and CEO of Hint, is to solve a problem you've personally faced.
  • Otherwise, you may lose interest down the road.
  • Hint was born out of Goldin's personal health struggles, but the beverage she created wound up appealing to a wider market.

Successful entrepreneurship is about knowing how to build a business from the ground up. It's also about picking the right problem to solve in the first place.

Kara Goldin, founder and CEO of Hint, talks to tons of entrepreneurs in the nascent stages of starting a company. And she gives them all the same piece of advice: Choose a problem you've personally experienced.

"You start to lose interest if it isn't something that you really see is truly solving a problem for yourself or someone you really love," she told Business Insider.

"If you're a founder and you don't have any affiliation with the product," she added, it's tougher.

"It's very rare that I hear entrepreneurs say, 'Well, I've heard all of this from lots of consumers and therefore I've decided to launch a product.' Instead, it typically starts with you or somebody you know. So you're really passionate about it and you're really attached to it in some way and then you go out and talk to people and really see what the market is."

Read more: Taking someone else's startup idea and making it better might sound like cheating — but it's exactly how the most successful founders work 

Hint was born out of Goldin's frustrations with her health

This is the approach Goldin took in 2005, when launching Hint, which makes natural-flavored water and natural-scented sunscreen.

Goldin speaks often about her struggles with weight management, low energy levels, acne — and a diet soda habit — around the time she started tinkering with fruit slices and water in her kitchen. That is to say, Hint was born out of Goldin's individual frustrations, but the product ended up appealing to a much wider market.

Goldin's advice recalls wisdom from Brad Katsuyama, the CEO of upstart stock exchange IEX (and the star of Michael Lewis' 2014 bestseller, "Flash Boys").

At Business Insider's 2018 IGNITION conference, Katsuyama said,"You have to have experienced the problems that you're trying to solve" as an entrepreneur.

IEX was born out of Katsuyama's experience as a trader at Royal Bank of Canada: He founded the company in 2012 as a new exchange that would prevent the predatory trading that took place on traditional US exchanges. 

As for Goldin, she doesn't hesitate to tell entrepreneurs that they've got it all backward. "When I meet entrepreneurs, I frequently say, if the first few reasons that come out of their mouth are, 'Well, I've always wanted to be a beverage executive' or, 'There's this product that's out there and I heard that they sold it for $1 billion and I think I can do that too,' it's the wrong reason."

That's not to say that just because you've experienced a particular issue, success will come easy. You'll still need to gauge the size of the opportunity and the market. Goldin's point is more that if you start with something more abstract, the entrepreneurial journey will be that much harder.

She said, "The chances of actually being super successful are limited if you can't really put yourself in the shoes."

SEE ALSO: The founders of tech startup Basecamp have a warning for execs who think they're changing the world

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's why we give better advice to our friends than we give to ourselves

A CEO shares the key question all startups should keep in mind when pivoting to a new product

0
0

kara goldin hint

  • Hint CEO Kara Goldin's best entrepreneurship advice is to keep thinking of ways to solve consumers' problems.
  • That might mean expanding into new products. Hint started out selling naturally flavored water, and now sells sunscreen as well.
  • Both products were born out of Goldin's personal health issues.

Scaling too quickly or expanding too broadly can be a startup's downfall. But there's one question experts say entrepreneurs should keep in mind when expanding into new territory: Will the new product solve the same problems as the old?

Take Kara Goldin, founder and CEO of Hint. When Goldin launched Hint in 2005, she was a pioneer in the naturally-flavored-beverage market. Since then, Hint water has become a staple at Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook.

More recently, though, Hint expanded its product offerings to include sunscreen; soon, the company will start selling deodorant as well.

For Goldin, moving into these different product categories didn't seem like a particularly risky move. As she told Business Insider, she knew from the outset that she never wanted to be a beverage executive or launch a beverage company. Instead, she wanted to solve consumers' health problems.

"I never thought of this as, 'Ok, I want to go launch the next Red Bull," she said. "It really started with a purpose and a determination to solve a problem that started with me."

This is true of both Hint water and sunscreen. Goldin devised the water recipe when she was struggling with health issues and trying to find an alternative to diet soda. She then created the sunscreen after consulting a dermatologist about some precancerous skin cells on her nose.

In both cases, Goldin said, she realized there were tons of options on the shelf, but consumers had no easy way to tell which was the healthiest choice. And even if they could, it would probably be out of their price range.

Creating a safe, affordable sunscreen was a "similar puzzle" to concocting a nutritious, tasty beverage, Goldin said. "If you can satisfy a need to a consumer, that is what great brands do."

Startup founders should constantly keep their end users in mind

Goldin's focus on her customers — and the problems they faced in their everyday lives — recalls advice from some other successful entrepreneurs.

Read more: The best advice for entrepreneurs, from 16 real people who started their own companies

Kelly Peeler, founder and CEO of NextGenVest, which helps students navigate the college financial-aid process, told Business Insider, "You should wake up thinking about your end user and go to bed thinking about your end user." And Evgeny Milyutin, cofounder and CEO of math-education startup Happy Numbers, said his best advice is to invest time in understanding your customer.

As for Goldin, she cautioned that "it's not in your best interest to go and launch every product." But she perceives a clear link between offerings like water, sunscreen, and deodorant: They're all helping people live a healthier lifestyle on a daily basis. "In my mind, we work for the consumer," Goldin said. "We solve problems."

SEE ALSO: A CEO who launched her company 14 years ago says too many founders have it all backward

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook is the first thing he checks when he wakes up. Here's how 9 billionaires start their mornings.

Jeff Bezos says he wants to see 'a Mark Zuckerberg of space' — and thinks Blue Origin will lead to 'dorm-room' entrepreneurship off Earth

0
0

zuckerberg bezos space 4x3

  • Amazon founder Jeff Bezos gave a private talk about his rocket company, Blue Origin, in New York this month.
  • Bezos said he wants "a Mark Zuckerberg of space" to exist, but he said it's "impossible" for that type of off-Earth entrepreneur to exist today.
  • "Two kids in their dorm room can't start anything important in space today," Bezos said, because the price of entry is far too high.

When you buy something on Amazon, Jeff Bezos says you're funding, in part, an audacious plan to populate the solar system with 1 trillion people.

As a step toward getting scores of humans to live and work and space, Bezos — the founder of Amazon and the rocket company Blue Origin — wants to enable "a Mark Zuckerberg of space" to exist.

Bezos, who liquidates about $1 billion of stock a year to fund Blue Origin, discussed that vision during a private lecture on February 19 at the Yale Club in New York City. 

"Every time you buy shoes, you're helping fund Blue Origin, so thank you. I appreciate it very much," Bezos said at the event, which was was moderated by Jeff Foust, a senior staff writer at Space News, and hosted by an aviation group called the Wings Club.

Bezos says the first step to settling outer space is making it cheap and easy to get there. The most pressing issue, he added, is creating rockets that can be reused instead of thrown away after every launch — which would save tens of millions or even more than $100 million per mission.

"We want to drive down costs using reusability, and the vision is to figure out how there can really be dynamic entrepreneurialism in space," Bezos said.

How Bezos plans to fuel space entrepreneurship with Blue Origin

new glenn rocket launch flight moon earth illustration blue origin

Last year, Bezos he described Blue Origin as "the most important work I'm doing."

The mega-billionaire said he plans to debut the company's reusable rocket system, called New Glenn, in 2021. The largest and most expensive portion of the rocket — called the lower stage or booster — will heave an upper stage toward space, then land back on the ground for refueling.

After New Glenn, Bezos is also planning an even larger launch system called New Armstrong.

Read more: SpaceX's list of competitors is growing — here are nine futuristic rockets in the pipeline for the new space race

Bezos explained how such systems could seed off-Earth innovation, using his personal history as an example:

"I've witnessed this incredible thing happen on the internet over the last two decades. I started Amazon in my garage 24 years ago — drove packages to the post office myself. Today we have 600,000-plus people, millions and millions of customers, a very large company.

"How did that happen in such a short period of time? It happened because we didn't have to do any of the heavy lifting. All of the heavy-lifting infrastructure was already in place for it. There was already a telecommunication network, which became the backbone of the internet. There was already a payment system — it was called the credit card. There was already a transportation network called the US Postal Service, and Royal Mail, and Deutsche Post, all over the world, that could deliver our packages. We didn't have to build any of that heavy infrastructure."

Bezos then described "an even more stark example" of how building up infrastructure opens doors to entrepreneurship: Mark Zuckerberg, who co-founded Facebook in his Harvard University dorm room.

"Here's a guy who literally, in his dorm room, started a company — Mark Zuckerberg started a company in his dorm room, which is now worth half a trillion dollars — less than two decades ago.

"How do you get that kind of entrepreneurial [advancement] in space? You need to lower the price of admission right now to do anything interesting in space, because it requires so much heavy lifting and so much infrastructure development. The entry price point for doing interesting things is hundreds of millions of dollars. Nobody is going to do that in their dorm room. You can't have a Mark Zuckerberg of space today. It's impossible. Two kids in their dorm room can't start anything important in space today.

"I want to take the assets that I have from Amazon and translate that into the heavy-lifting infrastructure that will [help] the next generation to have dynamic entrepreneurialism in space — kind of build that transportation network. That's what's going on, that's what Blue Origin's mission is. If we can do that, then the whole thing will take off and there will be thousands of companies doing creative things."

Bezos hopes that his company's launch systems will serve as a crucial first step toward making that vision of the future a reality.

"I don't know all future steps, but I know one of them is we need to build a low-cost, highly operable, reusable launch vehicle," Bezos said. "No matter which path you take, it has to go through that gate."

Of course, Bezos is not alone in the push to make access to space cheap. Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX, is working on a fully reusable launch system called Starship that could launch into orbit as soon as 2020.

Changing the way people and cargo get to space — and how much it costs to do that — is a hugely expensive and complicated endeavor, which is why Bezos says he has taken on that goal.

"It's not something that two kids in a dorm room are going to do. But I really want that dynamic life and civilization for our grandchildren's grandchildren."

SEE ALSO: NASA's first moon landings in nearly 50 years may happen in 2019. The agency thinks these 9 companies can get it to the lunar surface.

DON'T MISS: Jeff Bezos nearly died starting his rocket company, Blue Origin. Here's what happened.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic plan on taking you to space

VCs say these 19 startups for open-source software developers will blow up in 2019

0
0

DEV Co Founders

  • We asked several venture-capital investors to tell us which commercial open-source startups will boom in 2019.
  • These startups make some of their software available as open source, meaning anyone can use, download, or modify the code for free.
  • Open-source software is quickly becoming popular among developers and companies, so we asked the investors to name the startups they're excited about, from seed startups to ones that may make an exit soon.

Last year, open-source-centric software companies were at the center of some major deals: Salesforce acquired Mulesoft, Microsoft acquired GitHub, VMware acquired Heptio, IBM announced it would acquire Red Hat, Cloudera and Hortonworks merged, and Elastic went public.

These companies often make the core of their software available as open source, meaning people can download and use the code however they want. The companies make money by offering additional features or better technical support to business users.

While many in Silicon Valley were skeptical of the open-source business model for a long time, investors are now betting that it will help these kinds of companies spread like wildfire and find an audience. Last year's megadeals have shone a light on just how pervasive it can be in the business.

As we wait for the $34 billion Red Hat-IBM deal to close, we asked venture-capital investors to name the open-source software startups they think will boom in 2019. Those investors identified startups both within and outside their portfolios that they are particularly excited about for the rest of 2019.

Read more:Here's why investors are throwing money at startups that give away their software for free

What follows is a compelling list of commercial open-source software startups set for success in 2019. They range from fledgling companies with hardly any funding to well-established ones that could very well be heading for a huge exit.

The funding information is according to official announcements, as well as Crunchbase and Pitchbook, keepers of such records.

Databricks

Startup: Databricks

VCs: Eric Anderson, principal of Scale Venture Partners, and Aaron Jacobson, partner at New Enterprise Associates

Relationship: Jacobson is an investor.

Total raised: $497.36 million

What it does:Databricks offers a data-analytics platform with machine-learning abilities, making it easier for data scientists to handle large amounts of information. Databricks just closed $250 million in funding in February, and its software has been used to help drug companies make better medicines. Anderson called Databricks one of "the next big OSS exits."

Why it's hot in 2019:"They are considered experts and sponsors of extremely popular open-source projects," Anderson said. "Users of open source are making large, complex, mission-critical deployments that are difficult to manage, which leads users to want to outsource to experts. In some cases, customers are spending eight figures with these companies to run these complex systems."



Sonatype

Startup: Sonatype

VC: Daniel Levine, partner at Accel

Relationship: Investor

Total raised: $157.17 million

What it does:Sonatype develops open-source security and automation products to help businesses reduce security risks and be more productive.

Why it's hot in 2019:"Open source continues to proliferate. Sonatype helps take open source into the enterprise, allowing enterprises to govern it with things like security policies. Enterprise adoption of open source is accelerating, and so will Sonatype."



Hazelcast

Startup: Hazelcast

VC: Salil Deshpande, partner at Bain Capital Ventures

Relationship: Investor and board member

Total raised: $16.92 million

What it does: Hazelcast offers an in-memory computing platform, which uses only a system's main memory to store data, rather than a disk, allowing systems to obtain and analyze data more quickly.

Why it's hot in 2019:"'In-memory computing,' or 'DRAM databases,' are riding two major waves: the rise of unstructured data, and the need for databases to hold more and more data in DRAM rather than disk. DRAM is 10,000 times faster than disk in theory, and 100 times faster in practice."



See the rest of the story at Business Insider
Viewing all 2065 articles
Browse latest View live


Latest Images