By Laura Desmond Think the customer is always right? Entrepreneur Kelly Fitzsimmons says in these three cases, you want to listen to your gut, not your customers. Would you bring a new product to market if your current customers said they didn’t want it? Well, that is exactly what happened in 1992. The product? Voicemail. […]

By Patrick Hall Often I’ll hear from people, especially on Twitter, who try to pitch me on their product in a roundabout way — asking questions and making small talk before finally revealing they just want to sell me something. First they ask what product I’m using for X, and I do my best to answer because I […]

“You have to debug your business model.” I looked across the table at the VC I was having lunch with. It wasn’t going how I thought it would. I was ready to tell him about the cool technology I had developed. How it would transform the world of enterprise computing. He wasn’t interested in that. […]

Taming the wildfire that is viral marketing and harnessing it to grow your brand at a breakneck pace. Come spring, golfers spanning the world set their tee times, dust off their clubs and take to the links for yet another season of slapping the little white ball across acres of rolling green. Each golfer might […]

Yes, your thesaurus is wrong. Many entrepreneurs often confuse the words innovation and invention. If you have too, you’re not alone. So, what makes these words different? The difference is subtle but crucial. Don’t trust your dictionary — or thesaurus When people don’t understand a word, they look it up in the dictionary or thesaurus. Well, sorry. No […]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing by leaps and bounds, with exciting new applications launching every day. But a blockchain-based startup believes the transition from an “information economy” to an “intelligence economy” will prove a bumpy ride for many people. Large corporations have built most  of the common AI systems that many people use today. CEN […]

By Millena Miller Cybersecurity is the latest of the non-traditional industries turning to apprenticeships to recruit talent While many employers now are grappling with the tight job market and historically low unemployment rate, one industry in particular is facing a severe hiring shortage. Cybersecurity companies have struggled to find enough good, qualified hires for decades and the situation is only getting […]

But can any company afford to manufacture one-off medical treatments? The first time someone pitched Genentech’s senior leadership on a personalized cancer vaccine, it did not go well. “I thought there was going to be a riot,” Ira Mellman, then Genentech’s head of research oncology, recalls. From across the table, he watched the scientific review […]

By Patrick Hall To achieve ‘blitzscaling,’ you have to go against common sense When it comes to startups, there’s growth, and then there’s ultra-rapid growth—what I like to call “blitzscaling.” Blitzscaling a company isn’t easy; if it were, everyone would do it. Like most things of value in this world, blitzscaling is contrarian. To succeed, you’ll have […]

How do you manage a successful software company without a deep knowledge of coding? Danielle Weinblatt (SB2011) offers some lessons from her own experiences. As a founder of a software company, I often get asked about my ability to code. The answer is simple: I can’t code at all. At first, I thought what many […]