Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 4, 2020

I’m sure you have all seen entrepreneurs and startups with great ideas that never seem to live up to their potential, while others with more mundane solutions seem to take off quickly and never slow down. If you tell me that you have been working on your startup for two years, but can’t quite quantify the progress, I’m not impressed.

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Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 15, 2022

At our mid-year offsite our partnership at Upfront Ventures was discussing what the future of venture capital and the startup ecosystem looked like. When you look at how much median valuations were driven up in the past 5 years alone it’s bananas. We’ll just wait until companies that last raised in 2019 or 2020 come to market.”

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Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 31, 2020

As an angel investor in startups, I’m a believer that smart investors invest more in you as the entrepreneur than the next billion dollar solution you are pitching. I’m not looking for words, but examples of how your habits and attributes have produced results, even before your startup.

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Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 9, 2020

Of course, this all has to start with you having the confidence and conviction that there is at least one solution to every problem, and that you can find it. Team members, including yourself, who are not engaged or determined will ignore problems, or will give up too soon. Marty Zwilling First published on Inc.com on 08/26/2020.

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Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 28, 2020

In business vernacular, targets are usually called metrics. A good metric has to be easily measurable, and directly correlated to results, rather than hours worked. For example, for a sales person, this metric number would likely measure new revenue or new customers. Marty Zwilling First published on Inc.com on 02/13/2020.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 15, 2020

In the spirit of helping you avoid some of our own learning experiences with startups, I will paraphrase here the nine key stages that he and I both see most businesses going through in their evolution from a startup to a successful and stable entity: You can’t sustain a business without positive cash flow.

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Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 18, 2020

Set up training courses that highlight agility, and adopt agile working practices. The passion and commitment that characterizes startups inevitably fades, particularly if things aren’t always going well. Amazon, for example , “grew up” in the last recession by continuing to expand their range of products and focused on automation.

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Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 28, 2020

If you start with a distorted or biased view of what your company needs, no execution is likely to achieve the results that win. This must include metrics and tracking, with the necessary systems and resources to act, recalibrate, and iterate as required. It’s up to you to align their hearts and minds on winning.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 1, 2021

To get you started on the right foot, here are the key principles that I see most often working: Make the resolution a part of a larger process. It’s up to you as a leader to understand and be able to explain all sides of an issue. Marty Zwilling First published on Inc.com on 12/15/2020.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 10, 2020

This almost always starts at the top, based on a founder’s dream and passion, without the proper homework on sizing the market, or assessing product realities. You can and must fix this by communicating business goals and objectives, and establishing personal metrics which only reward success.

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Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 1, 2020

In my experience, the Silicon Valley startup model, focused on disrupting established industries, has treated the USA well and created some great global businesses. It has played almost no role in the emergence of current non-US bred startups, including Alibaba in China, Waze from Israel, Paytm in India, and many more.

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Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 7, 2020

Although his focus is naturally on bigger companies, I contend that his recommended strategies apply equally well to entrepreneurs and startups: Demand a mindset of deep thinking for the long term. In my experience, even in startups, longer-term strategy often gets pushed off the agenda due to current challenges.

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Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 20, 2020

Based on my own years of experience in big business, startups, and the investor community, here are the key habits and traits that each of us needs to continually improve to be perceived by peers and others as leaders and innovators in business here and consistently around the world: Be aggressive in aspirations but prudent in execution.

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Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 2, 2020

in Physics who talks passionately about starting a business producing nuclear powered batteries. Create a written plan, with target milestones and metrics. Every startup I know, no matter how good their idea, has had to make one or more changes or pivots, as they adjust to the challenges of the real world.

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Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 25, 2020

Most of you realize that survival in business today requires grabbing hold of tomorrow’s opportunities with disruptive innovation , before your competition or a new startup gets there. Most entrepreneurs remember the sense of urgency they felt in startup mode, but don’t see it in their team today.

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Xconomy

SEPTEMBER 6, 2016

million unfilled IT security jobs globally by 2020. With a clear sense of the skills you have versus the skills needed, any organization can start to take action to shorten the gap. Once again, this starts with understanding the business. Of course, any approach for solving the skills gap will evolve over time.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 13, 2021

I will publish a lot more about the gear I used and what works and what doesn’t but today is about how I started to supercharge my workouts. I track my weight every morning first thing when I wake up on a Withings Body+ scale. I even found myself standing up in meetings so that I could “close all three circles.”

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Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 13, 2021

The ready-fire-aim approach makes sense here, but it should be combined with metrics to learn from feedback, and make pivots as required. Marty Zwilling First published on Inc.com on 12/30/2020. Thus I believe it behooves every one of you to build a go-to-market strategy, even before you build a solution.

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