Tag Archives: startup

Funding Your Startup

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There are many ways to fund your startup, from your personal checking account to an infusion of cash from a venture capital group. Here’s a look at the pros and cons of a variety of funding options for startups.

Friends and Family

A lot of companies got started with seed money from friends and family. But there are a few problems here, both personal and legal.

Investor Paul Graham points out:

“The advantage of raising money from friends and family is that they’re easy to find. You already know them. There are three main disadvantages: you mix together your business and personal life; they will probably not be as well connected as angels or venture firms; and they may not be accredited investors, which could complicate your life later. 

The SEC (Securities Exchange Commission) defines an ‘accredited investor’ as someone with over a million dollars in liquid assets or an income of over $200,000 a year… A startup’s life will be more complicated, legally, if any of the investors aren’t accredited.”

Graham adds another good reason not to ask friends or family for money. “It wasn’t because they weren’t accredited investors that I didn’t ask my parents for seed money, though,” he says. “The reason I didn’t take money from my parents was that I didn’t want them to lose it.”

To borrow money from friends and family legally and successfully, treat the loan like any other. Get the terms in writing and pay interest. As an example, two online services that provide these services are LendFriend and LendingKarma.

Use Your Own Money

“If you believe in your ability to make a business succeed, you should be able to put your own wealth behind your beliefs,” notes Forbes contributing writer Luke Landes. “It’s risky to put your own financial well-being on the line, but how could you expect your family, friends, or a bank to have faith in your ability and invest in your goals if you’re unwilling to invest in yourself?”

You’ll need to learn the basics of frugality if you’re bootstrapping. There is a significant difference between frugally building a business and frugality in your personal experiences. “Frugality at home saves on expenditures. Frugality in business protects cash flow,” advises Katie McCaskey, owner of a neighborhood grocery.

Microfinance

Sometimes you only need a small bridge between your personal cash and operating capital. One of the best places to look for money is through a local microlender who specializes in small loans. Many communities have this lending capacity and the terms are more favorable than those offered by the banks or online lending clubs. Find one near you through the Opportunity Finance Network.

Crowdfunding

This is a relatively new way to get investors that employ the Internet to pool the resources of individuals to finance an initiative. The Hongkiat.com staff writer Alvaris Falcon explains:

“The concept is simple — you post your project to a large group of site users, or ‘potential investors,’ and they will fund your project with money if they are interested in the project. You can start a crowdfunding exercise for free as you will only be charged when your project has raised some funds or the full amount. There’s nothing to lose and this is great for publicity.”

Three popular crowdfunding sites include Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and RocketHub. Again, a willingness to display you’ve put in your own money as part of the venture will increase the likelihood others will make a “gift” investment.

Crowdlending

Crowdlending is similar to crowdfunding, but with one critical key difference: Unlike crowdfunding — which offers “gifts” of cash in exchange for future perks — crowdlending is an actual loan that must be repaid with interest.

It works like this: You apply for a loan at a crowdlending website. You supply details about the loan and your credit history. Member lenders of the crowdlending site review your application. Loans can be funded by a group of other very small investors, ranging from three to 300 (or more) people.

Interest rates are determined by your credit worthiness as well how the money will be used. For example, you may pay more for a loan to consolidate other debt than you would for a loan on a piece of equipment that could be liquidated, if necessary, to repay the group of lenders.

One example of the sites that specialize in crowdlending is Prosper. 

Small Business Loan

Another way to get needed capital is through a small business loan. Forbes contributor Tanya Prive points out:

“The SBA (Small Business Association) is dedicated to representing small business in the Federal Government. Tireless advocates for the little guy, they are a great resource for anyone starting out in the business world, offering information, advice, and potentially even funds. [...] While they do not offer the loans themselves, the SBA is a key facilitator in the process. Utilize their website as a resource for finding the right avenue for you and your business.”

Small business loans must generally be backed by collateral such as a home, vehicle, or other redeemable asset. For small amounts of money or for those without hard assets a microloan is a better option.

Angel Investors/Venture Capitalists

Beyond the initial startup phase more established businesses are better positioned to attract venture financing. That is because these businesses have a demonstrable track record of selling or making a product, and, critically, demonstrable profitability.

While venture capitalists bring much needed capital in, the downside of angel investors or venture capital is that they usually want part ownership. As Entrepreneur contributing writer Vanessa Richardson points out, “If you give equity to investors, you’ll always have to answer to others.”

This can include, but is not limited to, giving investors or their family members vanity job positions. You give up more negotiating power — and more ownership — with every speculative venture capitalist dollar accepted and invested.

Go to the Bank (or Credit Union)

Then there’s the time-honored tradition of going to the bank to get a loan. The Wall Street Journal writer Emily Maltby writes:

“Some 39% of business owners with less than $5 million in annual revenues said a bank loan would be the best way to raise capital [...] according to a [2012] survey of 2,851 owners of small businesses conducted by Pepperdine University.”

While this may be a tried-and-true fundraising method, don’t neglect to investigate options at your local community bank or credit union. These institutions often offer better rates than big bank conglomerates and help keep dollars local to your community, too. Bankers will expect to be paid back, but you won’t have to compromise your company’s vision or direction as you might have to when you accept venture capital.

Finally, consider this: Where there’s a will, there’s way. Just because you don’t have all the financial resources you need right now doesn’t mean it should stop you. Just get started. With time, and proof of progress, the money will appear. Good luck!

Featured images:

David Soyka has covered business topics for The New York Times, Industry Today, and many other renowned publications. David is currently a freelance journalist covering small business advice for Vistaprint, a leading provider of personalized checks and other custom marketing products for small businesses across the globe.

Startup metrics – one VC’s top 10

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Here’s Redpoint VC Tomasz Tunguz’s top 10 metrics, including a new one for me – TSM – or trailing six month (average), which he says are the ones he’s found most useful in board meetings:

With the analytics tools today, it’s easy to measure hundreds if not thousands of different metrics for your business. Cutting through all the chaff to determine the most important or insightful metrics can be quite a challenge.

Below are the ten metrics I’ve found to be most useful in board meetings. They answer the questions of how should a startup founder might measuring the business at the highest level. You should have many more metrics than these, but I’ve highlighted the ones that I recommend presenting to your board and reviewing each week.

Metrics Format

Clear data leads to productive conversations. To best understand a data point and its implications, we have to put it in context.

I’ve found dividing top level data in three slides, one for company priority (Distribution, Engagement, Revenue) helps to set the right context. Within the slide, a table that shows the metric and compares it to last month, then explicitly calculates the monthly change, the trailing six month average and finally compares the metric to the goal best communicates the state of that metric. See below for an example.

Metric This month Last Month % change TSM Average Goal
Active Users 100,000 50,000 100% 125% 75%
Total User Base 500,000 400,000 25% 7% 10%

The TSM Average column is the Trailing Six Month Compound Growth Rate. It is calculated in this way:

(ending_value/starting_value)^(1/num_periods-1)-1.

In most businesses, a monthly growth percent is too volatile to be meaningful. However the TSM Average smooths out the monthly change. Comparing the monthly to the TSM, we can get a sense of whether the monthly growth is accelerating or decelerating and how it compares to the goal you set each quarter. In this example, the total user growth was slower this month than in the past six month, but activity is way up. The next question, the one board members and founders should ask, is why?

Metrics/Question Pairs

Now that we have the base format of the metrics, let’s talk about which metrics matter. Each metric is followed by the question it’s designed to answer. Pick the ones that are relevant to your business.

Distribution

  • New users added last month by channel/TSM growth rate: How are well are we growing the user base? Which user sources are the best?
  • Total user base/TSM growth rate: How important is our monthly growth compared to our total user base?
  • Cost of customer acquisition, lifetime value, pay back period: Can we grow faster through paid acquisition? Are we acquiring customers profitably? How much can we afford to spend on new customers? How is this changing over time?

Engagement

  • Active users (can defined in several different ways depending on your product) by channel/TSM growth rate: Are we getting better at giving our customers what they want/need? Which channels of users are most effective in finding us the right kind of user?
  • % of users using top 3 key features in a given month: Are our product initiatives the right ones?

Revenue

  • Revenue / TSM Revenue growth: Are we growing our revenue?
  • Conversion to paid rate in that month/by cohort: How many users converted to paid? Are we improving our ability to convert customers to paid?
  • Avg spend per paying customer of a managed account vs solo account: What is the impact of the account management team?
  • Churn rate/ TSM Churn rate: How well do we retain our customers?
  • Burn rate: When are we profitable? When do we run out of cash? When do we need to raise?

These are the metrics that have been most valuable/insightful for me working with our companies.

So if that didn’t do the trick and get you focusing on the numbers maybe this fun video from Guy Kawasaki at UC Berkley will help – skip to 08:46 to bypass the introduction – and to get straight to the first mistake entrepreneurs make:

Guy focuses on one simple message, if you wanted to sum it up, it’s that’s VC’s are just interested in the numbers. But that begs the question, what numbers are they interested in when seeking investment?

Here’s Tomasz’s answer when I asked him that generic question: “Each business is different. Each VC is different. But ultimately if you can show profitable unit economics I think that’s a good start.”

So my suggestion? To give yourself a better chance of succeeding ask the VC before your meeting what they use as key generic KPIs to judge investment, and why? Then adapt to your specific business case.

eBay's sportscar

What’s your customers’ single point of failure?

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“A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. They are undesirable in any system with a goal of high availability or reliability, be it a business practice, software application, or other industrial system.”

Thinking about customer needs when looking at creating a successful startup? Perhaps putting yourself in the customer’s shoes, and ask what is their single point of failure? The component or process which if it went down would potentially take the whole business with it?

Do I have an example? How about a few years ago while working for an award-winning ski holiday company I was presented with a ‘wicked problem’. Twin sisters I thought I had booked into a twin room were now told that they would have to share a double bed, as there was no twin rooms left. When I informed the pair the sisters were not happy at this bed-sharing prospect.

So I went back to the holiday supplier and suggested to the operator that they stand by the confirmation of the twin bed booking. They refused. They said as I had made the booking on the phone, rather by the preferred electronic online system (which was ‘down’ at the time of booking) that they would not honour it.

So I asked the company directors with many years of experience for guidance to help resolve the problem, and they were also baffled, suggesting that I might pitch human rights law at the holiday company to get them to budge on the issue. While I am not averse to using a big concept to solve a small problem it didn’t quite seem the right approach.

After sleeping on the issue I came back the next morning – and drafted a fax letter to the company. In the letter I simply asked if their response meant they regarded the telephone booking, and the online booking, as two separate distinct systems.

I waited. A few hours later, they had a ‘surprise’ change of mind, and the twin sisters got their twin hotel room. Which reminds me of the chirpy catchphrase we used in the office with travel customers, “we can request, but we can’t guarantee”.

unhappy-sisters

Startup ecosystems around the world fast challenging Silicon Valley

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While Silicon Valley is still the world’s largest and most-influential start-up ecosystem, it no longer wields the power and influence it once did. Flourishing communities in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia have grown considerably over recent years and are now beginning to challenge Silicon Valley’s domination in technology innovation.

The Startup Ecosystem Report 2012 argues that this trend suggests that countries are shifting from service-based economies to become increasingly driven by a new generation of fast-moving software and technology organisations. 

Download the full report here. You can also view the global rankings table here (and below).

The report finds that Tel Aviv, a highly advanced ecosystem, is the leading alternative to Silicon Valley, while on Silicon Valley’s doorstep, flourishing communities in New York and Los Angeles mean the USA is home to three of the largest ecosystems in the world.

Across the Atlantic, London is by far the largest startup ecosystem in Europe, although its output is still just a third of that of Silicon Valley. Outside of the more traditional markets, the startup ecosystem in Sao Paulo is growing rapidly and creates more jobs for the local community than Silicon Valley does for its own.

The report identifies the ecosystem factors which have contributed to the success of Silicon Valley and uses it as a baseline to compare how well suited other cities are to fostering entrepreneurs.

On this basis, the top 20 startup ecosystems globally are:

1. Silicon Valley
2. Tel Aviv
3. Los Angeles
4. Seattle
5. New York City
6. Boston
7. London
8. Toronto
9. Vancouver
10. Chicago
11. Paris
12. Sydney
13. Sao Paulo
14. Moscow
15. Berlin
16. Waterloo (Canada)
17. Singapore
18. Melbourne
19. Bangalore
20. Santiago

In-depth research provides tangible findings for entrepreneurs, investors and policy makers

The Startup Genome, in partnership with Telefonica Digital, engaged with more than 50,000 entrepreneurs across the world to understand how well placed different ecosystems are to support the development and success of startups. Users of StartupCompass.co – a business intelligence tool for startups – submitted information on their organisations based upon a range of factors, including financial, sales, marketing, product, business model, team, and market information.

Some of the key findings of the report are as follows:

- Even well-developed ecosystems such as New York andLondon are suffering from a funding gap: they each have more than 70% less ‘risk’ capital available for early-stage, pre-product-market fit startups

- Silicon Valley’s success to date can be attributed in part to the attitude of its entrepreneurs. Founders in Silicon Valleywork longer than anywhere else, with an average day lasting 9.94 hours. Motivationally, they tend to be driven by impact rather than product

- New York can claim to be the global capital for female tech entrepreneurs. Nearly a fifth of New York’s entrepreneurs are women and it is home to twice as many female-run startups as Silicon Valley

- Santiago is a great example of an ecosystem kick-started by policy makers, with 4.81 mentors on average (nearly 25% more than Silicon Valley)

- Silicon Valley has left its imprint on all global startup ecosystems. Berlin (4%) and Sao Paulo (7%) have the least founders that lived in Silicon Valley, Singapore (33%) and Waterloo (35%) have the most entrepreneurs that were previously based in Silicon Valley

- Even though Singapore has a relatively well-established funding environment, the risk tolerance of founders is the lowest within the top 20 ecosystems

(above video) Telefonica Digital’s Gonzalo Martin-Villa and the Startup Genome’s Bjoern Lasse Herrman explain some of the thinking behind the report.

Mapping key startup trends around the world

“I am really excited to reveal these insights around how global technology startup ecosystems stack up. Our hope is by completing the first data-driven, comparative study of this global phenomenon we will help to facilitate a constructive public dialogue,” explained Bjoern Lasse Herrmann, CEO of the Startup Genome.

“We created this report for three reasons: firstly, to put a spotlight on the emerging hotspots of technology entrepreneurship that will be responsible for powering a massive global socio-economic structural shift; secondly, to further democratise the knowledge necessary to help spread the merits of Silicon Valley; and thirdly, to give actionable insights to entrepreneurs, investors, corporate development departments and policy makers.”

Gonzalo Martin-Villa, CEO of Wayra, Telefónica Digital’s global startup accelerator, said: “These results tangibly demonstrate how entrepreneurship is flourishing all over the world. We are now seeing emerging ecosystems beginning to act as real viable alternatives to the traditional centres of technology innovation.”

Download the full report from the Telefonica Digital Hub or Startup Compass. The authors can be engaged with by tweeting about this report using #startupecosystem and mentioning @tefdigital and@startupgenome.

Rankings table - Startup Ecosystem Report 2012

Applying lean start-up principles and practice to building corporate communities

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On Monday evening I took the bull by the horns and jumped into the debate over how best to deal with building a successful corporate community at Cass Business School, organised by BrightLemon. And to give it some zip, some urgency, I based the story that was narrated with the help of some simple PowerPoint slides on my failure to create a successful online community at Shopping.com.

A confession first, being let’s say not one of the best public speakers (great to see that Cass was holding a Toastmasters event that same evening) I did my talk sitting down, and using a microphone, which was more fun and conversational in style. Anyhow in similar laid back fashion I have decided to publish my slides in text format, to add some reflective value (and pop in the occasion image now and then)..though I do relent at the end to include the clutch of slides with a lean start-up example.

My second slide was about the real subject of the talk, which is learning from setting up community to deliver to the Shopping.com mission, and how I might do it again differently with the benefit of lean start-up tools.

I also mentioned that my desire to talk about the value of start-up tools for building communities is based on discussions with community managers and entrepreneurs on the LinkedIn Community Roundtable Group and e-mint, who’ve shown support for the concept:

“I can’t say that I have really applied them directly to community building, but I certainly think that the approach makes sense. Since the fundamental tenet of the lean start-up is to be customer-focused and to continually seek actual customer validation for what you are creating, it seems to intuitively fit as a model for community development, agreed Terry Coatta.

“The biggest challenge I would foresee is critical mass. As a lean startup with a specific product/service you can engage in customer validation with a small number of customers — sometimes even just a single one. But in a community, you need to have interaction amongst the community members. So you clearly need to have more than one :-) The actual numbers are going to depend on how willing people are to contribute, but given the 90/9/1 rule of thumb, it would seem like you might need at least some tens of people involved in order to have even a minimal level of interaction.”

A little about my background experience in social media and community starting at Headshift at the end of 2005 (now part of the Dachis Group) and most recently working for eBay Inc’s Shopping.com.

Kilimanjaro

And as way of a sneaky-peeky into what I was up to at Shopping.com check out this quick overview of one successful social media campaign activity at the top price comparison site:

Spotlight on B2C: Attracting revenue through your social media activities

View more PowerPoint from Stuart Hall

The original aim of Shopping.com mission was to be ‘best place to buy online when don’t know what to buy’ which was supported by a NPS led user value proposition (UVP) piloted in our German (DE) site with improvements to search, data, product selection, and community itself as the means to improve guidance for customers.

And by the 3rd quarter of 2010 our community strategy was starting to pay dividends in DE, with good quality customer conversations, leading to successful offline top contributor meet-ups.

While in the UK we did not take part in the UVP I did get chance to look ahead for 2011 and put together a top level plan which in retrospect had its simple merits as strategy for content and community optimization:

{1} SEO:
Better SEO content => new visitors; better member content => better SEO content (revenue)

{2} Community:
Better incentives/feedback => better community (cost)

{3} Conversions:
Loyal community members => increased conversions (revenue)

The obvious weakness was in failing to understand how to get a community contribute to revenue, except in terms of creating reviews and guides which would rank highly for SEO. But I only got to try that out with a social SEO approach with a test with user-generated 40 guides created at the end of my tenure.

What I did learn was the value of using social media channels to listen and learn from the customer, as with Google’s ZMOT’s observation that people will search for reviews on small purchases like Scotch tape, understanding that for the customer that the smallest issues had significance [Dec 2012: what I now term #thinslicing - the power of bringing together an understanding of how customers make purchasing decisions with little info, together with how to listen and help customers using your social & community manager supported with social tools & data].

But the strategy ultimately did not deliver the expected positive results, and community while remaining in place on the site was called off as a ‘key business driver’ for Shopping.com.

So with the benefit of this experience what would I do differently? And thinking about previous community building experience at ICAEW when we considered surveying members on the first iteration of IT Counts, maybe the answer is as simple as asking potential community members if it’s what they want.

In other words testing the assumptions with a basic ‘mvp’ which we could quickly validate and pivot from if necessary. To illustrate this I used the nice example from the Lean Startup Machine London event I attended recently, with an idea for a per-to-peer mobile dating app called appropriately ‘You Never Know’. There’s a full list of startup entries here.

Cass presentation on applying lean startup tools to building community

View more PowerPoint from Stuart Hall

But of course there’s plenty to consider overall to make sure your community is a success, as this expert blog post from Dachis which I used in one of my slides highlights 13 high-level points to consider, including those which relate to testing with your customers/community. Clearly lean tools apply to tasks such as building to solve both a customer and brand problem, but don’t forget the value of applying a metrics led approach to validation, as outlined in the concluding slideshare below from one of the Lean Startup Machine London presenters.

I hope that’s inspired some interest in the use of lean start-up tools to validate your community proposition. But it’s also worth adding the point made to me by Rosie Sherry, that these tools aren’t just for pre-launch validation – but can add value throughout the business cycle when used with an existing community of customers:

“Another angle to look at it is how lean startup methods + communities can help build a product/business.

“In my situation, for example, I started an online community that has grown to be something special. As a consequence, it takes much more effort than an odd hour here or there to maintain. As a result, we are trying to figure out ways to create it into a sustainable business – in a lean startup kind of way. We hadn’t, when we started it, thought it would turn into what it has today. But in order to maintain it, we do need to figure out how to make it work financially.

“One advantage, is that we can reach out quite easily to people to get feedback. The community members are also not shy in saying if they think what we are doing sucks!”

Lean startup metrics

Lean Eric

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I was there!
I got to attend the BLN Lean Start-Up event last night, with Eric Ries presenting his thoughts to an audience of entrepreneurs. I talked to one attendee who’d flown in from an unnamed European country just for the event, and a lawyer who’d changed from smart casual into a suit and tie. In other words I was just there to listen, and here’s what I heard. (By the way I did get the chance to make friends with Davor Hebel from Fidelity Growth Partners, following Eric’s prompting to introduce ourselves.)

The audience for Eric RiesPhoto by Stuart Glendinning Hall

Essentially Eric said that the traditional tools of scientific management were not so much use to entrepreneurs, whatever type or size of organisation. That what was needed though was a validated means to manage entrepreneurial activity. This is what he suggests the Lean Startup methodology provides.

Suits vs engineers
Of course it’s not perfect, as he admitted when he presents to engineers they blame the lack of success on the business people, and vice versa. So there’s still some magic required to apply in bringing the business and tech people together, but how to do that seemed to lacking? Fortunately not long after I spotted a nice example of a lean approach to product development in the recent edition of Wired UK, with the piece about German games company wooga’s approach, which mixes e-commerce, usability, and games design to great effect: ‘Test. Test. Test: How wooga turned the games business into a science’. Love wooga’s slogan for sure: “Be fast and be bold. Only do features that increase DAU monetisation.” DAU stands for daily active users, btw. Which if you think about it is also a great way to get engineers and business folks to agree, using the real time data to guide product development. Certainly this holding entrepreneurs to account is a big theme with Eric Ries, that you need to do small scale testing to get validated results. So there it is the accounting method is the means to unite suits and engineers!

Q. So how does this accounting method work? Answer below, from WSJ’s ‘The Nearly Cult of the Lean Start-Up’

A. It has to be quantifiable or this is all a waste of time

This idea of value is what Mr. Ries means when he talks about accounting. “It has to be quantifiable or this is all a waste of time,” he says. We can draw a lot of valuable lessons from science. The proof in science is that you have learned how to do experiments that show the right results. The same thing is true for validated learning. If we have learned something interesting, then prove it by building products that are in line with that learning.”

This is the development cycle Mr. Ries calls “build-measure-learn”. Build your product, see how people use it, what do they like, what do they click on, what do they hate, and use that to inform your next decisions.

But in order to know how successful or otherwise you are, you need a system of evaluating value.

“That is accounting. We have all been indoctrinated with thinking that accounting is about tracking money, but money just doesn’t work very well when the numbers are so small, like in an early stage start up. There is no RoI, there is no profitability. Everything is close enough to zero that the accountants don’t care.

If 10 people in a row hate my product, isn’t that telling me something?

“The units of innovation accounting are not the gross numbers. Rather than focus on how much money we make, we might look at what is the percentage of customers who pay. We have to look at other things.

“The nice thing about those metrics is that they are not market-size dependent. If you have 100 customers you can already say what percentage are paying. If it is zero then I can already start to be a bit worried about the model.

“If 10 people in a row hate my product is that statistically significant? It is is not conclusive evidence, but it is certainly telling you something.” [note: this is the validated means to create a minimum viable product or 'MVP', one which has been tested and validated using accounting techniques]

Judging from the size of his audience at the Business Leaders Network event on Monday, the buzz afterwards, and the fact that Mr. Ries has had almost 20 meetings in his brief time in the U.K. and Ireland (including a meeting at 10 Downing Street), he is preaching to a receptive audience.

Eric Ries The Lean Startup London 004Photo by marklittlewood1

Update: a couple of things have happened since 16 January:

1. I am attending the lean start-up weekend starting 3rd February to better understand the Ries methodology (and jargon;-)

2. Using insights from the evening and this weekend I am presenting at Cass Business Business School on 13th February on using this approach in building online communities on existing platforms that is, to clarify!

Lean Start-Uppers?

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OK so I v.quickly listened to the audio book version of Eric Ries book ‘The Lean StartUp’. What key points as a non-techie, but as a social media/social sci guy stand out for me?

1. The 5 ‘Y’s – asking 5 questions to get to the root of the problem, not the surface issue:-)

2. The value of having  a common theory to share.

3. The fact that when the approach works, that production actually appears to get worse before it gets better so you need to state that up front.

4. Er, can’t remember the rest but the thematic difference between small and large batch production and what that means throughout the production approach is pretty fundamental, of course..

PS: There’s a useful 88 page study of entrepreneurship (PDF, 4.3MB) I came across a couple of months ago from the Babson Entrepreneur Experience Lab: “This first look at the observations and insights gleaned from engaging over 250 entrepreneurs launching ventures here in the United States offers a glimpse into their everyday lives. We hope their experiences will begin to evolve our understanding of entrepreneurship—to tell new stories that can shape new realities for entrepreneurs of all kinds.”


here is white text:-)