Damir Perge's Blog: Entrepreneur Insights from the Trenches, page 14

Startup Brainwashing: The Billion-Dollar Mental Game

Your entrepreneur mind is like a heat-seeking missile going after a programmed target. Your goal is to start a company, get funded, grow the business, then get acquired or go IPO. It's even cooler when you’re totally focused on growing the business into a billion dollar play by revolutionizing your industry. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are best examples of creating a revolution in their segment of the market.

Great innovators and entrepreneurs are driven with revolutionizing their industry...

Espressopreneur: Playing The Startup Game

If I can give you any startup failure advice, from an entrepreneur and venture capital perspective, after failing in startups more than once, it's this: analyze your failures as quickly as possible, and then do what most entrepreneurs fail to do after they fail — move on.

Move on … move on … move into a positive direction. Start working on your next big thing. Don’t give up.Think of it as playing a startup game. You play the game until you win.

Now back to finishing my cup of Starbucks espresso...

Espressopreneur: The Startup People Advantage

"So when you fail, try to keep the good people who failed with you and play the startup game again."

Keep in mind that the initial conditions of your startup are different every time you start a startup. Some failure lessons might not be applicable to your next startup — even if you learned some hard lessons from those failures.

Remember, just because you learned a lesson from your failure doesn’t guarantee success the next tim. You’re playing a different game in your new startup, and some of t...

The #4 Secret to Raising Money for Your Startup or Growing Business

I was talking with a friend who's an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He has a very cool startup that has the potential to revolutionize an industry. The topic of raising money came up. I guess when you’re doing a startup, the topic of raising money comes up in entrepreneur conversation most of the time. And it did in this conversation too.

This guy had previously raised more than $100 million for one of his Internet startups. I don’t know how much overall capital he's raised in his entrepreneu...

The #3 Secret to Raising Money for Your Startup or Growing Business

Because I’ve raised more than $300 million, I’m often asked by entrepreneurs to raise capital for their startups or growing businesses. Many entrepreneurs believe it happens overnight. But what amazes me even more is the lack of understanding of the process of raising capital.

I’ve written about the #1 Secret to Raising Money for Your Startup or Growing Business, which is simply that “raising capital is a numbers game.” I continued with the #2 Secret to Raising Money for Your Startup or Growin...

The #2 Most Important Secret to Raising Money for Your Startup or Growing Business

Whether you want to see it this way or not, every entrepreneur and investor is in the raising money business all the time. Unless you’re a startup or business that is printing money by generating revenues from paying customers, you’re always in the raising money business. Period.

Even if you’re doing well in your business, the natural tendency for most entrepreneurs is to want to become bigger and BIGGER. That is what a great entrepreneur dreams about, so you’re always going to need investor m...

The Power of Entrepreneur Intuition

Using "intuition" in your business vocabulary is a dirty word to some entrepreneurs and investors. Observing others over the years, and including myself, I've realized how intuition plays a much bigger part in business decisions than most want to admit. We all want to think we make logical and sound business decisions.

When it comes to the art of innovation, launching startups, or developing new markets, intuition is critical to guiding any entrepreneur through the turbulent and unknown waters...

Espressopreneur: The Continuous Flux of Innovation Fatigue

I noticed a pattern that continuously plays out in any emerging marketplace when it comes to startups — it is the continuous flux of innovation fatigue, amplified by the drowning noise of competition.

One startup creates a market, then entrants come in like swarms of bees wanting to get their honey too. The market becomes over-saturated with competitors, increasing the competitive intensity, which causes the sector to expand or contract in size. This causes fatigue as it’s played out like a vi...

The Revenue Vectors in Any Business Model

I am obsessed with figuring out various ways that any business model generates revenues. From a visualization perspective, I am working on setting up the components of a business model using a Lego-type modeling approach in order to make it easier to combine, mutate and re-combine your own business models. In some respect, this is copying nature's DNA structure and applying it to business modeling.

If your startup or business doesn't have a business model roadmap of how you're going to make mo...

The #1 Secret to Raising Money for Your Startup or Growing Business

There are plenty of secrets to raising money for any business. InStartupmentals: The Secret to Raising BIG Money for Your Startup or Growing Business — I write about the power of telling a “startup story” to investors.

However, there are secrets, and then there are great secrets to raising capital. I will reveal the biggest secret of all money raising secrets, based on my experience of raising more than $300 million. I’ve actually raised more than that but who’s counting. But before I reveal t...