Going Pro as an Entrepreneur

Going Pro as an Entrepreneur

In college, I was busy. As a pro, I am under pressure.

As an introduction, I am Arthur Root, a co-founder of Nostra. At Nostra, our goal is to make the online shopping experience as similar as possible to the in-person experience using psychometric information. My team and I hopped on the entrepreneurial bike in 2018 while we were juniors at Indiana University. We are now college graduates pursuing our company full time. To use a metaphor, we have taken the training wheels off our bicycle and are beginning to ride full steam ahead…

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How Much Will Your Startup Have To Pay For Insurance?

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How Much Will Your Startup Have To Pay For Insurance?

Launching a startup is a wonderful and proud moment. However, most entrepreneurs won’t have much time to enjoy the moment before it’s time to get down to serious business.

When you start creating a list of everything you’ll need to put in order before your business is fully functional, you’ll realize that simply getting started is just the tip of the iceberg. And rest assured - there will be plenty of challenges along your entrepreneurial road. Once you reach the end of your checklist, you should go ahead and write down another essential matter that you might have forgotten along the way - business insurance.

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Are Startup Innovators Born…Or Made?

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Are Startup Innovators Born…Or Made?

Todd recently had an opportunity to write an article for The Conversation on innovators. The article explored what if anything makes entrepreneurs and innovators different from other people. Madam C.J. Walker is featured as an exemplar of some of the important attributes and behaviors of innovators. Based on decades of research, the basic thesis is that there are no specific personality traits or DNA that entrepreneurs are born with; however, there are some abilities and behaviors that can be learned and practiced.

An Update to “What REALLY Sank the Titanic?”

An Update to “What REALLY Sank the Titanic?”

Early in our blogging history, we had a post titled – Startup Story: What REALLY Sank the Titanic?. Believe it or not, it’s not only the most read post on our blog overall, but also every single month. That’s right. People are still very interested in knowing why something so big resulted in such catastrophic failure.

It’s the reverse of the underdog story. We want something so spectacular to be successful. We need to believe that when it fails, it was not some person’s fault but rather some uncontrollable force. There is even a management theory that explains this behavior, Attribution Theory. We tend to claim our successes as resulting from our actions. And, our failures come from actions outside our control.

The point of this blogpost is that recently a new theory for theTitanic’sfailure has come to life.

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How Venture Ecosystems Enable Startups To Succeed

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How Venture Ecosystems Enable Startups To Succeed

The focus on “ecosystems” as a contributor to startup community success has recently begun to receive additional attention from academic researchers. A healthy and vibrant entrepreneurial or venture ecosystem can provide a nurturing environment for startups and innovators. This boosts job creation, economic growth, and talent attraction. Innovation itself includes both de novo (i.e. brand new) startups as well as new undertakings by large and small organizations. As a result, we prefer the term “venture ecosystem.” Think of a venture ecosystem as being kind of like a marine reef. It is a home for a variety of life forms including coral, fish of various types, and a host of other life forms with often symbiotic relationships. So what makes up an “ecosystem?”

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Is Your Startup’s Measurement Just A Stick In The Sand?

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Is Your Startup’s Measurement Just A Stick In The Sand?

One of our family’s favorite museums in the world is the Royal Cabinet of Mathematical and Physical Instruments (en Deutsche, Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon) in Dresden, Germany. The Museum sits in the impressive Dresdner Zwinger complex which houses a range of museums and performing arts facilities. A central theme of the museum is instrumentation—the collection of measuring instruments that have allowed us as humans to evolve and innovate over time. It is fascinating to think about how being able to measure things has enabled our progress as a society.

Entrepreneurial Hustle Makes Startups Come Alive

Entrepreneurial Hustle Makes Startups Come Alive

What do entrepreneurs do to navigate the uncertainty and difficulty of launching something new and novel with only a few resources on hand? This was the question that my co-authors (Regan Stevenson, Emily Neubert, Devin Burnell, and Don Kuratko) and I sought to answer when we began analyzing transcripts from the How I Built This podcast. We analyzed 48 such transcripts from interviews with well-known entrepreneurs such as Sara Blakley (Spanx), Perry Chen (Kickstarter), Alli Webb (Drybar) and Joe Gebbia (Airbnb) to uncover the nature of the action that they took in the early days of launching their venture. We call it entrepreneurial hustle…

Startups May Need To Partner With “Competitors” In Trying Times

When you are starting a company, you have challenges from so many different directions – competitors, customers, and even what we academics call the “macroenvironment” which is also known as the general climate for business. There are generally three types of environments:

1. Benevolent - everything is awesome and it’s easy to grow

2. Turbulent – there are a lot of changes going on, some good and some bad

3. Hostile – just like it sounds in that everything is hard and it seems like nothing is good

The macroenvironment occurs at multiple levels too – for all businesses, for specific industries, and even for specific companies. In the terminology of The Titanic Effect, it can also create hidden debts, or debtbergs, for the unsuspecting startup. Right now, the overall environment is pretty hostile for most businesses. The economic conditions combined with the pandemic create both turbulence and hostility. Now is a good time to look for coopetition opportunities.

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Technical Debt: Every Startup Needs to Know When to Cut its Losses

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Technical Debt: Every Startup Needs to Know When to Cut its Losses

We’ve mentioned before that we took the concept of “hidden debt,” or debtbergs, that is the main premise for our book, The Titanic Effect, from the idea of technical debt – work is done that has to later be re-done because it has too many internal flaws. We see these same expeditious decisions being made, not just in product design, but also in choices about who to hire, which investors to seek out, and what marketing activities to undertake. We want to share our own story of technical debt with the development of our audiobook.

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What Kind Of Experience Do Startup Founders And Founding Teams Need

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What Kind Of Experience Do Startup Founders And Founding Teams Need

We’ve shared the PEP model for founding teams before - Passion, Experience and Persistence. Since we’ve already covered the 2 Ps (click above to read about them), we thought it was time to talk about Experience.

There is a myth in startups that startup founders are young people, fresh from education, and looking to disrupt the world. We see icons like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs and think, “You have to be young to start a company.” There are notable startup founders who are young. But the average age of all startup founders is 42 years.