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When you’re leading a business, you want to be viewed as extremely competent, fair, and as someone who demonstrates effective leadership skills.

But did you know that research has found that less than 50% of employees trust those in leadership roles? Not a great track record, overall.

Being an effective leader is no easy task, and sometimes, even the qualifiers for that “effective team leader” title feel a bit elusive.

Leaders–especially new ones–find themselves wondering, “What actually makes my team see me as a leader they can trust, respect, and take direction from?”

In this guide, we’ll look at some of the data, research, and findings that help add clarity to the defining characteristics of effective leaders.

Psychologists ...

Some of you may be too young to remember, but the physical Yellow Pages was one of the main ways you could find local businesses. Those meaty books were a mainstay and saw frequent usage in many many households around the world. But since the late 90s and early part of the 2000s, for good measure, the books have been disappearing. Google had a big part to play in that.

Google is the de facto search engine of choice. But there was space for better discovery of local services. So Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor, Yelp and others were born.

Going beyond discovery

To start, as an example, let’s take a look at all of Yelp’s local services categories in San Francisco:

Under each of these categories, you’ll find hundreds if not thousands of local busin...

Marc Andreessen isn’t just an industry legend, because he helped the modern Web browser. He’s not just an industry legend because he’s one the only folks who’ve co-founded two companies that exited for north of $1 billion each. Nor is he renowned simply for throwing a grenade into the cozy way venture capital had worked for decades, when he co-founded Andreessen Horowitz in 2009.

You get where I’m going with this… Andreessen might be “famous” for you for different reasons, depending on how old you are or when you first started paying attention to startups.

Plenty of conferences and magazines feature interviews with Andreessen where he talks about the future. What’s difficult is getting a man so excited about the future to talk about the pas...

The conventional wisdom in the startup community these days is that to create a successful startup, you need to move at breakneck speed in everything you do.

And, to facilitate this, you should consume as much money as you can get your hands on along the way to make sure you’re removing all obstacles from getting to market. The perception is that if you move too slowly at the beginning, you’ll miss the market and, even worse, you won’t get funding.

But, is this correct?

While we completely support the idea that getting a great product to market as quickly as possible is a cornerstone of startup success, we just don’t buy that frenetic speed is the best way to do it. It’s not what has worked for us, nor for any of the successful startups we’...

You'll hear the terms “founder” and “co-founder or cofounder” thrown around a lot in Startup Land. But what, exactly, do they mean? What's the difference between the two? And how do you find a good one? It's not very easy to find cofounders that properly fill the business needs and help in the early stages of a startup. So, where do founders even start?

We'll answer the above questions and six more in this breakdown of everything you need to know about founders and co-founders in order to ensure your company's success.

1. What is a founder?

A founder is a person who comes up with an idea (hopefully a profitable idea) and then transforms it into a new business or startup. Founders can set up a business on their own, or ...

Congrats on being an entrepreneur! The good news is – you are your own boss and you set your own hours. The bad news is – you are your own boss and you set your own hours!

One of the reasons you wanted to be an entrepreneur was the pursuit of freedom, but as you probably quickly learned, freedom doesn’t necessarily equate to free time.

Your days are filled with trying to get everything done — from creating proposals, putting the finishing touches on your pitch deck,, keeping all your documents organized and your team on the same page — all while wrestling with all the things that want to steal your attention away. As a founder, you know firsthand the struggle of managing time effectively and trying to be productive.

Having a s...

Like any “get‘er done” entrepreneur, I was once a pro at going solo. Whatever needed to be done I did it, and then I did everything else, too. Need a great idea? Just give me one minute. Need a genius marketing plan? No problem, I’m on it. Need someone to execute the plan flawlessly? Consider it done.

It’s the nature of the beast, really. Most first-time entrepreneurs have the monumental task of pulling off major miracles from scratch with little or no help. We get used to seeing our own name next to every task on the “volunteer sign-up sheet” that is our massive to-do list.

Even when I hired assistants to help me with this or that, I still felt like the captain, first mate, and the crew of my own ship.

Drifting

And while this approach cert...

If there is one quintessential task a startup CEO needs to be in charge of is not letting the company running out of money. Being on top of your Financial Model and business budget can make a difference and can enable managers and founders to make game-changing decisions. To give you an example, about nine months ago a quick prediction in our financial model enabled us to make our company profitable while duplicating our marketing budget.

The spreadsheet we use is an evolution of a template created by our investors at Carao Ventures. Over the years, I’ve simplified it to remove unnecessary modules and adapted it to serve the purposes of our SaaS business model. I’ll elaborate on the main features we used to make the model work i...

What is an LLP?

A limited liability partnership (LLP) is type of business structure in which all partners have limited liability for the business. That’s means they can’t be held personally liable if the company — or one of their partners — is sued.

In an LLP, all partners are allowed to participate in running the business. A company has to have at least two partners to become an LLP.

When it comes to taxes, LLPs avoid the double taxation that some types of corporations are subject to. In a partnership, the profits are taxed solely on the partners’ personal tax returns. In some other types of business formations, the profits are taxed first as corporate income tax and then the shareholders’ dividends are taxed on their personal tax returns...

I recently had coffee with a startup founder (let’s call him Ben) that has been working at his startup for the past year or so. His vision for his product and company had developed quite nicely since we first met, when his concept wasn’t much more than some rough sketches and guesses at what it could become. In the past year, Ben and his partner had bootstrapped their way to launching an MVP and signing up some initial Beta customers. He’s now at the point where he’s fine tuning his product to understand if it’s really serving his customers right. While the venture has been self-funded to this point, Ben plans on soon talking to investors in anticipation of later raising seed capital.

There’s just one problem: Ben has no idea how to value h...