What you learn from blogging is that you can never tell which posts will be popular:
#1 – Selling the First Telephone
By far the most popular post. Why? I’ve no idea. Not once has anyone every told me they read it. It’s read a few time every single day, and thus it can’t be some teacher somewhere who happens to assign it as a reading.
#2 – The Next Step: Podcast
This is a page, not a post, and it’s really sixtyish audio posts in one, but according to the stats, it’s the next most popular page viewed on this website.
#3 – A realistic view of the startup “hockey stick”
Ah… the proverbial hockey stick in a startup’s financial projections. No one believes it, and yet it must be included in any investor pitch.
#4 – How many entrepreneurs are there in the world?
Walk around with a hammer, and many things look like nails. Live your life as an entrepreneur (or startup investor) and it seems like entrepreneurs are everywhere. They are not.
#5 – The 140-character (Tweet) pitch
Entrepreneurs fret over the 30-second “elevator pitch”. Here in 2016, entrepreneurs should be fretting more over their 140 character, one-line “tweet pitch”.
#6 – Don’t Forget to Work (your startup) Backwards
In working with 100+ entrepreneurs I constantly see entrepreneurs looking forward into the unknown future, but few looking backward. Not backward into the past, but backward from their ultimate goal.
#7 – Your Entrepreneurship Skills
Another page, not a post. This time I know why it’s popular. I assign this to every entrepreneur I work with, and suggest you do the same.
#8 – Gemeinschaftsgefühl
The term “impact investing” was made popular by a book with that title in 2011, but there is no consensus on how to define “impact”.
#9 – The unintuitive Hype Curve (of startup value)
Why does one startup get picked over another for funding?
#10 – Forget accounting, focus on ledgers, lists, and summaries
Another lesson. The biggest pitfall I see with entrepreneurs is accounting, or more specifically, how to keep track of sales, customers, and everything else.
#11 – Breaking the paradigm of startup investment
I like this post so much I wrote a book on the topic. A.k.a. “How to invest without exits”, a.k.a. “You (investors) are doing it wrong!”
#12 – Investing without “Exits”
Similar to the above paradigm post with with words instead of video.
#13 – The Role of (startup) Lawyers
Do startups need lawyers? Absolutely, but not as much as many first-time entrepreneurs think. Lawyers play two important roles for startups. Rules and Risks.
#14 – Before the chasm… comes the valley of death
Chasm as in Crossing the Chasm, but first you need to get past the Catch-22 of startup funding that we call The Valley of Death.
#15 – Hockey sticks are really S-curves
I love uncovering hidden assumptions. One in particular gets written about every day in one form or another. The high-speed growth of a handful of startups, of Bitcoin, and other “overnight successes“.
#16 – How much money DOES it take to start a startup?
Articles like Enough Money To Start a Company? are refreshing. The quick gist, that even some of the biggest name companies on the planet started with little to no funding.
#17 – Timeless Things That Aren’t Really Timeless
It’s not just me who appreciates when “timeless things” are not as old as we think. Did you know that the pro/con list is less than 250 years old? That we know who invented it? That it was none other than polymath and U.S. founding father Benjamin Franklin?
#18 – California Capitalism
The root cause of today’s trouble is that the venture capital industry, along with most of the Angel community are following along a paradigm that works for less than 0.1% of all startups.
#19 – The most popular posts in 2018
Quite a few changes from year to year. As I said earlier, you just can’t tell what will be popular.
19 posts in honor of 2019. Thanks for reading!
