If you're vesting equity shares, it's important to understand 83(b) elections. Learn why an 83(b) can save you—and your company—money and when you need to file.
Contributor
Marilyn Morgan Westner
Head of Learning Design and Content Creation, HBS Accelerate
As a learning designer, writer, and educator, Marilyn specializes in creating dynamic learning experiences for adult learners. This involves applying technology-enhanced learning strategies and tools to enhance existing courses and developing new content for new learning initiatives.
As a co-founder of the HBS Accelerate project, she has worn many hats, including investigating research trends, storyboarding ideas, writing video scripts, filming and editing interviews with thought leaders, deploying content, and assessing results. Marilyn investigates research trends and scholarship and she loves collaborating with faculty and experts to design learning objectives and create helpful resources. But her favorite part of this project has been listening to and observing the remarkable entrepreneurs who have shared their time and stories to create this resource. After earning a Ph.D. in history, she has designed and instructed courses at Havard University, the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Brown University
Contributions
Learn By Function
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Why You Should Focus on Mission & Communication as You Scale
Adam Enbar, serial entrepreneur and investor, shares how a well-defined mission helped him grow his startup from a small idea into the Flatiron School, a rapidly growing coding school that is disrupting higher education.
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What Qualities Do VCs Look for in Founders? Investor Nick Grouf Shares Insights
In this short, focused interview with Shikhar Ghosh, Nick Grouf identifies the qualities and competencies that signal future success for many investors. He offers insightful takeaways about the importance of your business model, team composition, clarity of thought, and attitude towards risk that can help entrepreneurs understand what VCs want.
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What Founders Should Know about the Sales Process
Every entrepreneur begins by selling an idea. But, often, founder-CEOs lack fundamental knowledge about the sales process that underlies selling products. In a focused interview, sales expert Lou Shipley defines fundamentals that all founder-CEOs should know and understand about the sales process.
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Wendy Tsu Shares Quick Tips on Ideation & Teams
AlleyCorp's Wendy Tsu shares her insights on the process of developing a good business idea and why your team matters as much as your idea.
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Ways To Improve Your Relationship with Your Board
Your board makes critical decisions, including whether to enter strategic transactions and whether to hire or fire senior management. Identify and avoid the common mistakes many founders make when interacting and learn ways to strengthen your relationship and leverage their expertise.
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Want to Build a Strong Team? Spend More Time on Recruiting—Not Money
Studies show that companies spend more money on hiring today than ever before. Despite the infusion of resources, conventional hiring tactics yield poor results. Shikhar Ghosh talks with six experienced entrepreneurs about how to attract and retain top talent by spending time recruiting outside of conventional channels.
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Turn Your Idea into a Product Users Want: Identify the Right Problem
Ready to start building a prototype? Before you start, it's important to validate that the problem your product addresses is a problem worth solving. Julia Austin, Senior Lecturer at HBS and expert in product development, shares helpful tips and tools to help you ensure that you're on the right track.
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Tips for Technical Hardware Startups Working with Enterprise Customers
Rescale's co-founder and CEO Joris Poort shares valuable insights about the challenges and cycles for market testing and sales cycles unique to hardware startups.
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Tips for Scaling Startups from NOW Corp’s CEO
Lara Hodgson, Co-Founder and CEO of NOW Corp, shares practical lessons she learned while scaling 2 startups, including how to build a powerful and passionate founding team, get the most from your board, and maintain balance as you scale.
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Tinder’s Co-Founder Shares B2C Marketing Strategies
How can you save time and money while maximizing your marketing techniques? Dinesh Moorjani shares some core tactics he applied at Tinder that every consumer-focused startup can use to get their products to market more successfully.
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Thinking about Firing Someone? CEOs Share Advice for Framing Your Decision
What do you do when your instinct tells you that someone has the potential to drag your company down? Deciding to let someone go is costly, complicated, and emotionally draining for everyone involved. Five entrepreneurs share tips on deciding to fire an employee—and how to do it in the least disruptive way possible.
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Sunil Nagaraj of Ubiquity Ventures on Co-Founder Compatibility
Many founders start ventures with a friend, assuming their values and goals for the startup will align. But friendship doesn't guarantee compatibility in business. Sunil Nagaraj, founding partner of Ubiquity Ventures shares what he learned about the importance of long-term co-founder compatibility.
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Structuring Equity Splits to Mitigate Co-Founder Conflict
Before you begin discussing how to divide equity, the smartest thing you can do is to build in mechanisms to make your agreement dynamic. Learn the benefits and drawbacks of common methods.
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Strategies for Optimizing Wellness & Productivity
What can leaders can do to support employees' personal wellness without sacrificing productivity? Learn practical behaviors you can implement immediately—and ones to avoid—to create a genuine culture of well-being.
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Strategies for Building a Strong Remote Team Culture
It's challenging to create a sense of community when the newly assembled team of your early-stage startup is forced to work remotely. But it’s not impossible. Sanchali Pal, co-founder and CEO of Joro—a technology platform that enables users to track and improve their carbon footprints on their smartphones—shares tips on how she strengthens her team as they work remotely through the COVID-19 crisis.
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Staying Motivated through Disappointments & Failure
How can you stay motivated during times of failure? Hind Hobeika, solo-founder and CEO of Instabeat, shares insights on staying motivated through different scenarios, like manufacturing failures, running out of funding, disappointing customers, or missing a deadline to ship your product.
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Should You Bootstrap?
Some legendary entrepreneurs advise startups to raise a minimal amount to retain more equity. Is bootstrapping the best bet for your business? Before you raise, be aware of the risks that come with raising too little money.
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Should You Add a Co-Founder?
Having a co-founder dilutes your equity and authority. When does adding a co-founder add more value than hiring an executive with similar skills? Understanding the unique role a co-founder plays can help you determine if and when you need one.
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Searching for a Co-Founder? Lara O’Connor Hodgson on Why Perspective Matters More than Skills
Choosing a partner who can bring a different perspective to the table help you balance the business. Lara O'Connor Hodgson reviews why good co-founder fit rests more on compatible values than complementary skills.
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Scaling Your Startup? Focus More on People
What sets apart a founder who scales successfully? Many say it's shifting your focus away from executing to building and managing your team. HBS professor Shikhar Ghosh talked with serial entrepreneur and investor Nick Grouf. In this quick exchange, Grouf shares core insights on why founders need to focus more on people, especially as their business scales.
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Scaling Myths That Could Impact Your Startup
During scaling, the role of CEO differs dramatically from that of an early-stage startup. Your focus will shift from proving your idea works, building your product, and getting others on board, to hiring a competent leadership team, creating processes, and being the face of your startup’s mission and culture.
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Saving the Planet from Your Smartphone: Sanchali Pal on Leading a Mission-Driven Startup
In a focused interview with Shikhar Ghosh, Sanchali Pal, co-founder and CEO of Joro, discusses her unexpected path to entrepreneurship, insights she gained on fundraising, and the daily realities of being CEO at a growing early-stage company.
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Reasons to Write a Formal Founders’ Agreement
Research shows that establishing a founders’ agreement prematurely often generates founder conflict—a leading cause of startup death. Can writing a founders' agreement help you mitigate future conflicts and save your business? Before you rush into an agreement, understand the underlying mechanics and learn how to customize them to strengthen your co-founder relationship.
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Raising Money at an Early-Stage Startup? Tips from Joro’s CEO
Perfecting your pitch deck and following best practices doesn't guarantee you'll receive a term sheet. How and when you present the details of your pitch matters. Sanchali Pal shares how repeatedly hearing "no" from VCs helped her strengthen her pitch, tighten her focus, and successfully raise from the most appropriate investors.
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Quick Tips for Finding Co-Founder Fit from Sunil Nagaraj
Sunil Nagaraj, founding partner of Ubiquity Ventures and co-founder of Triangulate, shares why having too many similarities with your co-founder could damage business.
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Mindfulness & Entrepreneurs: How Meditation Makes You a Better Leader
Research in marketing, management, and entrepreneurship claims that mindfulness has myriad benefits for entrepreneurs. Can regular meditation enhance mindfulness, improve your leadership ability, and enhance your business acumen? Serial entrepreneur and seasoned meditator, Matthew Bellows, shares his insights and tips on the power of mindful meditation for entrepreneurs.
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Managing the Pressures of Rapid Growth
As you scale, the strengths and habits that enabled you to launch—visionary thinking, working nonstop, or making decisions based on experiential knowledge—can become liabilities that damage your startup’s capacity for long-term growth and have serious negative consequences. In an interview with Shikhar Ghosh, Careem's co-founders Mudassir Sheikha, Magnus Olsson, and Abdulla Elyas reflect on their meteoric growth from 2012-2014. Candidly sharing the mistakes they made, they identify the consequences of rapid scaling and share practical advice for other founders.
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Magnus Olsson on How To Find Your Purpose
Magnus Olsson, co-founder of Careem, a mobile-based ride-hailing service that became one of the first unicorns in the Middle East, shares tips on finding your purpose.
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Layering Value—A Different Way of Dividing Founder Equity
Lara Hodgson, co-founder and CEO of NOW Corporation, shares how she and her partners assign value to founder contributions as they change over time and allocate founder equity iteratively.
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Key Terms to Include in a Founders’ Agreement
A poorly-constructed agreement often leads to founder conflict which can kill your startups. We can’t promise that your founders’ agreement will prevent all founder conflict. But we can provide a framework that will help you avoid common mistakes and equip you to handle conflict.
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Kevin Ryan Shares Insights on What Makes Great CEOs
What qualities make a great CEO? As founder and CEO of AlleyCorp, Kevin Ryan has handpicked CEOs for each of his companies with great success. He shares tactical tips on how to evaluate the best candidates when interviewing and the metrics he uses for evaluating teams can be helpful to anyone building a team.
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How to Value Your Equity at an Early Stage Startup
Deciding to start or join a startup entails risks that many believe receiving equity in the company offsets. But how do you know how to value the equity shares you're offered? HBS professor and expert in entrepreneurial management, Chris Stanton, shares a simple formula to help you understand how to value your equity.
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How to Mentally Prepare for a Difficult Conversation
How do you mentally prepare for that difficult conversation? Matthew Bellows shares how meditation can help you mentally prepare for the dreaded conversation of firing a colleague. And he shares a three-minute guided meditation you can do before any stressful situation.
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How To Get More Value from Your Board
How can you benefit from the experience of board members and get more value from your board? In conversations with serial entrepreneurs, we explore ways to reframe your relationship with your board. Learn to maximize their value to your business and strengthen your relationship.
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How to Express Empathy While Working Remotely
Expressing empathy during times of crisis can help your team become more resilient. But how can you express empathy when your team is physically separated? We connected with entrepreneurs at various stages who share strategies for demonstrating empathy to help your team weather the COVID-19 storm.
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How to Build a Great Pitch that Hooks Investors
It’s easy to find templates, checklists, and techniques that promise to improve your pitch. But even the majority of good pitches fail to raise venture capital. What drives investors’ interest? How do VCs make decisions? How can you turn your pitch into a great one that has investors eager to hear more about your startup?
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How Mission Helps You Build the Best Team
Adam Enbar, serial entrepreneur and investor, shares how having a well-defined mission helped him grow his startup from a small idea into the Flatiron School, a rapidly growing coding school that is disrupting higher education.
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How Hiring for Growth Mindsets Can Help Your Startup Scale
As co-founder, CEO and President of her latest venture, Lara Hodgson doubled the company’s growth twice in four years. As she prepares her team to double in size again, she shares her insights on team building and why focusing on mindset is so important.
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How Do You Identify a Big Idea? AlleyCorp’s Kevin Ryan Shares Tips
Kevin Ryan, founder of multiple billion-dollar tech companies, shares his insights on identifying big ideas in an exclusive interview with Shikhar Ghosh.
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How Culture Helped Careem’s CEO Scale a Startup into a Unicorn
Reflecting on Careem's meteoric growth from 2012-2014, Careem's co-founders Mudassir Sheikha, Magnus Olsson, and Abdulla Elyas share why creating a company culture was the key to scaling Careem.
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Going Solo: Founding a Startup without a Co-Founder
Anecdotal evidence suggests that being a solo founder carries more risk than co-founding a startup. Hind Hobeika discusses her reasons for not adding a co-founder and provides ways to rethink the critical decision of having a partner or going solo.
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Entrepreneurs, Stress & Depression
Two entrepreneurs share their experiences with varying levels of stress and depression as twenty-somethings at early-stage startups.
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Entrepreneurs and Depression—Ways to Help Yourself or a Colleague Who Is Struggling
Entrepreneur, investor, and advisor, Andrew Dubowec's professional and personal experience make him uniquely positioned to discuss mental health in the startup community. In a dialogue with Shikhar Ghosh, he shares tips on how to help protect your mental health or help a colleague who's struggling.
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Dinesh Moorjani on Finding the Right Co-Founder
Finding the right co-founder for your venture is one of the biggest early challenges founders face. Dinesh Moorjani shares why co-founder compatibility and chemistry matter as much as skills.
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Customer Interviewing Techniques That Uncover Your Users’ Unmet Needs
Customer interviews can help you understand users' needs and yield invaluable data. But often, people ask questions that yield irrelevant responses that send them in the wrong direction. Julia Austin and Wendy Tsu share their insights on how to conduct better customer interviews to obtain more meaningful feedback and gain a deeper understanding of market needs.
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Common Terms & Their Implications
Most VCs have standard expectations about equity, control, and governance. Having a solid understanding of common terms—and their consequences—at the outset may help you in negotiating.
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Common Funding Mistakes when Scaling
Many founders conflate raising a significant amount of venture capital or getting a high valuation as validation of their current business model. But as you scale, past behaviors stop working effectively and often processes are strained and break. How do you avoid the most common scaling mistakes?
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Co-Founder Equity Splits—Ways to Approach Allocations
How you divide equity reflects your values, directly impacts your co-founder relationship, and influences how your team and investors perceive your startup. Read more to learn methods for dividing equity that align with your values and can minimize conflict between founders.
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Choosing a Co-Founder? How to Find the Right Person
Asking someone to co-found your business is one of the most critical decisions you'll make as a founder. How do you identify and choose the right person?
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CEO Dulcie Madden on Navigating Cash Flow Shortages & Adversity While Raising Your Family & Team
How do you handle the more extreme lows on the founder's journey, that you couldn't predict, like an unexpected acquisition offer or being sued by a large manufacturer? Entrepreneur Dulcie Madden shares lessons she's learned growing her hardware startup, Rest Devices. Madden's story is compelling and unique. But her insights on founding team dynamics, marrying your business partner, being CEO while raising a family, leading a company through legal problems and cash flow shortages are useful to any entrepreneur.
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AlleyCorp’s Kevin Ryan on Traits of Great Business Leaders
Kevin P. Ryan, founder of several multiple billion-dollar tech companies spanning industries from mobile gift registry to news shares his process for building a business and hiring an outside CEO.
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5 Mistakes Founders Make with their Boards—and How to Avoid Them
Just closed a round of financing? Funding carries expectations and one of the most important things you can do is learn how to leverage your board. This guide offers 5 practical tips on how to manage relationships with investors and your board, helping you to avoid common missteps.
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3 Topics To Discuss Before Writing a Founders’ Agreement
You found a great co-founder. When should you formalize your relationship? You may be tempted to draft a founders’ agreement to demonstrate trust in the partnership, but before you make a legal commitment, make sure you’re aligned with your co-founder in 3 critical areas.
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3 Hacks for Calculating How Much Your Startup Needs to Raise
Many startups make fatal mistakes when calculating how much they need to scale. These 3 essential things can help you figure out how much capital you need to raise to scale effectively, without getting overwhelmed by options and opinions, or swayed by offers.
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3 Consequences of Hypergrowth & How to Prepare
Growing at a rate of nearly 30 percent per month turned Careem, a mobile-based ride-hailing service, into the first unicorn of the Middle East. But rapid growth created internal strain. Co-founder and CEO Mudassir Sheikha shares how creating a distinct culture helped Careem navigate the challenges of scaling.
Workshops
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How to Convince Investors to Make the Leap
These slides contain all of the content hosts will display during the workshop.
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How to Build a Great Pitch the Hooks Investors
Ready to turn your pitch into an outstanding one that has investors eager to hear more about your startup? Learn a tested framework that teaches founders how to build a strong, authentic, and compelling foundation to a pitch. Exercises allow you to practice delivering your pitch, get feedback, refine, and increase your chances of getting funding.
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How Much Funding Do You Need To Raise?
These slides contain all of the content hosts will display during the workshop.
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Guide for How to Convince Investors to Make the Leap
Hosts should read this guide in advance of the workshop. It contains a detailed overview of the workshop with links to materials that should be printed in advance of the workshop and ready to distribute to participants in person during the workshop.
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Guide for How to Build a Great Pitch the Hooks Investors
Hosts should read this guide in advance of the workshop. It contains a detailed overview of the workshop with links to materials that should be printed in advance of the workshop and ready to distribute to participants in person during the workshop.
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Guide for How Much Funding Do You Need to Raise?
Hosts should read this guide in advance of the workshop. It contains a detailed overview of logistics with links to materials that should be printed in advance of the workshop and distributed to participants right before the workshop commences.
Case Studies
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Case Study Wes Hall’s Rise from Mailroom Courier to Board Room Exec
Entrepreneur Wes Hall shares how he worked his way from the mailroom to become a law clerk.
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Case Study Wes Hall’s Journey: An Entrepreneur Addresses Systemic Racism
Can entrepreneurial skills and experience be applied to social change? Founder and Executive Chairperson of Kingsdale Advisors, Wes Hall risked his financial security and reputation to launch a new venture, BlackNorth Initiative, to combat systemic racism. How can he build his company to accomplish that goal? How would he establish the organization—what steps can he take to ensure its mission continues?
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Case Study Wes Hall on the BlackNorth Initiative CEO Pledge and Summit
Entrepreneur Wes Hall shares how he founded BlackNorth Initiative.
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Case Study Wes Hall on Systemic Racism—How It Affected Him and Why He Felt Obligated To Act
Entrepreneur Wes on systemic racism: how the George Floyd video affected him and why he felt obligated to act.
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Case Study Wes Hall on Origins and Influences on Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneur Wes Hall shares how growing up in Jamaica then moving to Canada as a teenager influenced his career path.
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Case Study Wes Hall on Motivation for Founding BlackNorth Initiative
Entrepreneur Wes Hall shares how watching the video of George Floyd being killed in police custody motivated him to start BlackNorth Initiative.
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Case Study Sunil Nagaraj on the Mindsets of Entrepreneurs & Investors
Sunil Nagaraj, founding partner of Ubiquity Ventures and co-founder of Triangulate, reviews the key differences between the mindsets of entrepreneurs and investors. And he shares tips to help founders better understand their investors' mindsets and help them succeed.
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