The slowdown in equity financing is changing venture debt too
Debt funding is an interesting option for start-ups in two scenarios: you can increase your funding base while times are good in order to maximize growth or you can use it stretch your runway when equity raises are tougher (or you don’t want to price your equity). But as the equity funding market is cooling […]
How did Jeff Bezos scale Amazon without destroying its entrepreneurial culture?
Running a start-up is profoundly different than running a big company. When you’re small, founders are close to the action and can make sure all the important things happen. But as a start-up scales, founders can’t have their hands in everything: many companies lose focus on the customer; decisions get bogged down; and there are […]
Learning from Jeff Bezos: Big winners pay for so many experiments
Amazon’s Annual Letter to Shareholders has become a must-read for entrepreneurs, investors, and business leaders – and the recent 2015 letter provides great insights into how Jeff Bezos thinks and how one of the most successful companies on Earth operates (this year, Amazon became the fastest company ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales). […]
What does “great” look like?
One of the biggest challenges for first-time founders with little work experience is that they don’t always know what “great” looks like in every area required to build and run a successful business. Understanding “great” is one of the single most important levers to push your team to greatness, hire the best people possible for […]
Stubborn on vision, flexible on the details
We have all seen Jeff Bezos’ great quote on being stubbornly flexible at Amazon: “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work. We didn’t […]