What is Your Personal Vision Statement?

What is Innovation?

How to Fund Fat Startups

While we focus a lot more on lean startups than startups that require capital to get going these days, fat startups still play an important role in developing large-scale success stories with significant, defensible, competitive advantages.

The bulk of the VC industry has moved away from the ‘fat startup’ category. Investors expect that you will have your product launched, customer acquisition model fleshed out fully, and a team in place before Series A.

However, infrastructure software, hardware, networking, chips – they all need capital. Even in cloud software, to build complex technology like personalization, analytics and artificial intelligence requires some serious investment.
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The Future: The Most Important Entrepreneurial Challenge of Our Time

The US Presidential election just concluded.

The rage of the white working class that is today poor and disenfranchised has propelled Donald Trump to the White House.

Majority of the college educated did not vote for Trump.

Large numbers, in fact, did not vote at all, finding Hillary Clinton equally uninspiring.

In my previous column, The Future: An Age of Idiocracy, I pointed out that more and more, the uninformed and the ignorant will be deciding on the future heads of states in the Western democracies. [This is already the case, by the way, in countries like India, where bulk of the voting population is uneducated, uninformed, and incapable of making rational choices.]
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The Future: An Age of Idiocracy

America has elected Donald Trump as President.

We have entered the age of idiocracy.

There will be more populist candidates both from the left and the right.
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Answers to Some Frequently Asked Questions About Accelerators

As I’ve written about extensively, there is a very real knowledge gap on both sides of the early stage start-up game. First-time entrepreneurs lack the seasoning to steer through turbulent waters. Inexperienced friends and family (and, increasingly, crowdsourced investors) lack the ability to gauge the viability of a business, or to mentor naïve entrepreneurs. I’ve come to believe that this knowledge gap is best filled by savvy accelerators. However, there are over 7,500 business accelerators/incubators around the world, and most of them fail.

Here are several 30-second videos answering the most common questions I’m asked about accelerators that can help you navigate and make informed decisions.

Why Join a Non-equity Based Accelerator?  

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Your Thoughts on Ageism in Tech?

What Do You Truly Enjoy About Your Job?