Lucas Carlson's Blog, page 2

How to Create Wealth Through Startups with Josh Maher

Josh Maher is a Seattle-based author and angel investor who is written a book recently called “Startup Wealth: How the Best Angel Investors Make Money In Startups” about how to create personal wealth by investing through startups. He’s interviewed many great angel investors including Chris DeVore who was also on this podcast and invested in my startup.

Josh recently joined us on the podcast, not only to talk about his new book but how understanding angel investors is a lot different than understanding venture capitalists.

In my book, Finding Success in Failure, I talk a lot about how reading is a fantastic way to have proximity towards people you might not otherwise have access to. And I think that the key to raising venture capital from angel investors is to first understand the people behind the money. And if you don’t have a large group of angel investors that you already have relationships with, this book is a fantastic way to start understanding the people behind angel investing.

Listening and watching podcasts is another way to have great proximity. So please join Eliot Peper and me in this wonderful conversation and start to get to know Josh Maher.

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Startup Journey Log #3: My Terrible Idea

I promised you that I was going to tell you my latest terrible horrible no-good startup idea… so here it is.

A robo-advisor that automatically invests money for people at a fraction of the cost of a regular financial advisor.

(There. I said it.)

It would be similar to Wealthfront and Betterment, both of which have raised over $100M at this point, manage billions of dollars of assets, and have been around for 4-7 years.

So why would I even try?

Before I tell you that, let’s explore the huge reasons this is a terrible idea. Let’s start with the obvious ones:

Taking people’s money and investing it in the stock market comes with an enormous legal and accounting overhead. This is no easy task.

Plus I have no fin-tech (financial technology) background. This is a biggie. With AppFog, I had over a decade of experience building web apps, so creating a platform for others to build web apps on was not such a stretch. But I’ve never worked on wall street or done anything in the financial world, so technically I have no experience. Big red flag there.

Maybe you could make a case for me being the CTO if I could find a CEO co-founder with fin-tech experience. But I don’t have one lined up (yet).

I also don’t really have a way to get in front of potential investors who might want to use a robo-advisor app. Second huge red flag.

So I have no experience, no demonstrable demand, no access to the market. I pretty much have nothing. Nothing but an idea.

So why would I even try, again?

First, I should explain that I have been interested in investing (and speculating) in stocks, options, and commodities since I was in high school. So this is not totally left-field for me.

Granted, nobody has paid me to do this, per se. But this has been a long standing hobby for me. One I invested a lot of time and resources in over the years: books, newsletters, etc. I cut my teeth losing money plenty of times in many different ways. Finally I decided that Jack Bogle was right: just dollar-cost average and buy-and-hold the entire stock market.

Then something big changed everything.

Two years ago I sold my startup. It was the first time in my life I had far more money than I needed.

My first instinct was to stick a big chunk in the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index or the S&P 500 and just forget about it.

But the more I stared at the charts, the more scared I became. Seven years of crazy year-over-year growth with no significant market corrections. If you came into money in 2000 or 2008 and stuck it in the S&P 500, it could be 5-10 years before you broke even again. And as much as I wanted to be a buy-and-hold investor, I didn’t have the stomach for sticking it all in.

I could have continued dollar-cost averaging it little by little, but I decided to go on a reading binge before I made any decisions.

A fateful book

That’s when I came across Tony Robbins’ new book simply named Money. In it, he has an interview with legendary trader Paul Tudor Jones. Jones had been able to get out of the stock market before every big crash over many decades, so Tony Robbins asked him how. He said it was easy, he just looked at the 200-day moving average.

He didn’t explain any further what he meant by that in the book. And I had never heard that term during my high school years studying investing. So it sent me down a rabbit hole of learning about financial technicals and making investment (or rather speculation) decisions based on charts and formulas based only on the price data of a stock (not the earnings, profits, cash-flow, or any other piece of fundamental data).

My General Conclusion: the overwhelming majority of the technical stuff out there is pure bullshit. People putting best-fitting curves onto datasets and gleefully ignoring the primary tenant of investing: past performance is no guarantee of future results. If you flip a coin 200 times and it comes up heads every time, it does not make the next flip that much more likely to be heads. It’s still 50/50.

The smartest speculators out there are NOT the ones with the best formulas, but with the best risk management strategies. Like startups, in financial speculation mitigating the downside is much more important than optimizing the upside.

And yet the 200-day moving average that Paul Tudor Jones mentioned kept enticing me. Could it really tell me whether it was (relatively) safe to stick my money into the S&P 500?

The Death Cross

So I learned about the death cross and the golden cross. A golden cross happens when the 50-day trailing average of the S&P 500 (~3 financial months) crosses higher than the 200-day trailing average (~1 financial year). That means the short term average is higher than the long term average… hence things are generally moving upwards.

Basically the death cross is when the short term average crosses below the long term average.

I wondered what would happen if you took your money out of the stock market when the death cross happened and put it back in when the golden cross happened. Not surprisingly, a LOT of research has already been done in this area.

The General Consensus: Yes, the death cross trading system keeps you out of the biggest market crashes, which saves you a lot of money. But it also has false alarms where you lose money. And you have to pay taxes more often which makes you lose money. So the net result is that you get about the same results as buy-and-hold with a lower “draw-down” (you don’t lose as much money when markets crash as buy-and-hold investors do).

But I became obsessed with seeing if I could find a way to reduce the false alarms while still signaling the big market changes.

And now I believe I have figured it out

If I am right (that is a big if), it could be a very interesting alternative for investors who don’t want to spend their days day trading, believe in buy-and-hold in general, but don’t want to be caught with their pants down in the next big crash.

It’s not a crystal ball that predicts when a crash is going to happen. It’s a lagging indicator so it can only tell you after a crash has started to happen. Like a smoke detector for your buy-and-hold investments. But in the right hands, that information can be extremely valuable.

When I finally did make my breakthrough, I immediately thought I should create an app for this where people can invest their money and it will automatically take it in and out of the S&P 500 when the indicators told it to.

So I reached out to some investors to test the water around this idea.

Boy were my first instincts wrong! Tune in next week and I will tell you where I made my big mistake and what I am doing about it now.

P.S. If you want to guess where you think I went wrong, leave a comment.

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Startup Journey Log #2: How To Come Up With Startup Ideas

I have given plenty of advice to others for how OTHERS should come up with startup ideas, but now that it is my turn, how will I come up with my next great amazing startup idea?

Good question!

Have you ever heard a new band whose first album was amazing? Like one of your favorite albums of all time? Then their second album comes out a year later and sucks. For my wife, that happened with James Blunt. She loved his debut album but nothing else he made was as good. How disappointing, right?

Startup ideas can be like that.

A founder (like myself) after years of struggle hits an amazing idea that takes off (like AppFog). The startup is acquired (like mine) or IPOs and they think they finally figured the game out. So as soon as possible they jump into the next startup idea they have.

And the startup sucks.

Or, because of the high expectations, you might stop trying and never start a company again.

So what am I to do? How do I take the success I have had so far and become a craftsman of startups instead of a one hit wonder?

I’ve thought about this question a lot since my company was acquired. I have thought about everything I have learned about myself and startups. And now I have a plan.

It involves cultivating 3 states of mind:

Patience
Mindset
Persistence

I am not giving up nor am I diving right in.

1) Patience

I am dedicating myself to letting life unfold like a flower… in its own time.

Life will bring me an opportunity when it is ready to, I won’t rush it. My first startup was a mad rush. Everything was always in a hurry. And yet when things were working well, I always had a sense that it wasn’t because of me but rather in spite of me.

I am cultivating a faith that a great startup can happen without the mad rush and pressure I used to put on myself. That’s the thesis I am going to test with my life now.

Am I wrong? Only time will tell.

2) Mindset

But patience is not sitting around doing nothing and waiting for something to happen.

Far from it. You won’t find what you don’t seek. You won’t get what you don’t ask for. So I am also cultivating a mindset of absolute dedication and commitment towards finding a startup to do. I don’t know when it will happen, could be days or weeks or years or decades before the right idea comes to me. But I am not going to stop looking for it.

The difference is that I am looking, but not desperate and self-loathingly hard on myself like I was before. I am keeping the good part of my old attitude (the seeking) and throwing out the unnecessary self-immolation.

3) Persistence

I’m not just talking about a stick-to-it attitude. I am talking about dedication and faith that everything I am doing is leading me closer to my ultimate goal.

That includes all my hobbies and interests. Everything from the game of Go, card magic, mentalism, hypnotism, meditation, Paris, and writing novels. Maybe they lead me to my next idea. Or maybe they only correlate tangentially. Or not at all. I can’t know ahead of time.

With a combination of patience, mindset and persistence… I am not bothered that I don’t have an amazing idea right now.

I am not giving up nor am I jumping into another idea I should not be doing. The best ideas can’t NOT be done. Something draws you in and won’t let you go. Instead of you always trying to make it happen.

At some time, I might take a job or do a startup that I know isn’t it yet… but I will know that I am still searching. I won’t be thinking that it is something it is not. I am writing novels because I love writing novels. Might it turn into something bigger? Maybe, but I don’t expect it to. Regardless it’s great practice writing which will be used for whatever comes next.

P.S. This is part of a series of articles I am doing about coming up with my next startup idea. To start from the beginning, check out the first in the series: Why I Moved to Paris.

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Startup Journey Log #1: Why I Moved to Paris

“No elevator.” These words sounded like less of a problem when I read them on the AirBnB description. I thought: This could work, it will help me get back in shape. After all, it’s just for 3 months.

The reality had a lot more grunting and sweating. After lugging 4 large suitcases, 1 heavy stroller, and 2 small children up 4 flights of old wooden spiral stairs, I’m starting to wonder if I just made the worst decision of my life or the best one.

It’s 3am in Paris and my children are jet lagged after 14 hours of flying halfway across the world. My wife was sick for most of the trip and I did not sleep at all.

But we’re in Paris. And I am so happy under all this tired.

We came here on an adventure. Paris is our favorite city in the world, and we came here to live life for a while, to enjoy each other and our young children, and to disconnect before I jump into another startup.

After all, I’m an entrepreneur without an idea. It sucks. I feel like a dog without an owner.

Technically, it’s not that I don’t have any ideas. I have plenty of them, in fact. They are all just terrible. And unfortunately, I have been doing startups long enough now to be able to tell the difference.

Ten years ago, I would blindly dedicate myself to whatever whim I had in the moment. I would spend $20,000 on a website auction for a WordPress plugin site. After that failed, I tried outsourcing to India and building my own website auctioning website.

Last week, I officially quit my well paying executive VP job at a Fortune 500 and moved my family to Paris. The plan is to decompress and not work for a while. Let life unfold and see if it helps me come up with a great idea for a company. I will start with a clean slate and document everything that comes along. Blog every good idea and (probably more frequently) every new bad idea too.

I am likely to end up making a fool out of myself with this, but at least it will be in the name of science. Next up, I will tell you about the first idea I had. (and why I am pretty certain it is already doomed to fail)

 

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Podcast 31: The Uncommon Stock Trilogy Revealed with Eliot Peper

Today we talk to startup thriller author Eliot Peper about his new book Uncommon Stock: Exit Strategy which finishes the Uncommon Stock trilogy.

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Eliot Peper, co-host of this podcast and author of startup thrillers had a dream to write fiction for entrepreneurs. After years of dedication to his craft, he has finally finished the 3rd installment to his trilogy.

And it is an incredibly exciting finale. Listen to this interview to get the backstory behind it all.

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Podcast 30: Startup Culture With Kevin Kruse

What does it take to motivate your employees without necessarily changing compensation structures? In this show, you will learn the 2 biggest tips that anyone starting to learn about managing people should know as well as the 2 biggest mistakes people make.

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Kevin Kruse has turned this into a science in his book “We: How to Increase Performance and Profits through Full Engagement” where he talks about steps you can use to engage and motivate your employees today.

Most startups don’t think about startup culture very much, they assume that they will be acquired before there are enough employees for that to matter. But that’s absolutely the wrong way to think about things.

You should be laying the groundwork for a great company culture from day 1. And that means understanding how to build an engaged team.

Listen to this interview for concrete steps that anyone can put to use today.

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Podcast 29: Andrew Medal’s 21 Tips For First-Time Entrepreneurs

These 21 heard-earned lessons Andrew has learned along the way to becoming a successful entrepreneur.

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Andrew has had an interesting background having been in jail and turned around his life by becoming an successful entrepreneur.

He has also become a prolific writer on sites like Entrepreneur where he first wrote his 21 tips for entrepreneurs and it took off, being picked up by FOX News and landing him on HuffPost Live.

Today, he is on the Craftsman Founder Podcast to go through these wonderful tips and help us understand the meaning behind them in more detail. I hope you enjoy!

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Why To Start A Company

Sometimes it is hard to know why to start a company. I hope by sharing my story with you, it will help you decide whether it is time to make the leap.

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I felt like I was about to throw up as I uttered words I’d never thought I would have to: “I’m sorry, this is really hard, I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, but I have to let you go.”

He looked at me stunned like a deer in the headlights. Though he knew things weren’t going great recently, it looked like he hadn’t even thought of being fired. He said: “Ok, wow. Didn’t see that coming. So two weeks then?”

I had consulted my investors and lawyers the week before this conversation and they both told me that the termination should take effect immediately at the end of the day on a Friday. This was brutal. I said: “No, you will need to take your belongings home right now. Today was your last day.”

A year earlier, when I started my first venture-backed company and hired my first employee, I was on cloud nine. Sitting in a coffee shop with this brilliant, talented program- mer building my ideas, I thought to myself,Finally after all these years, I’ve made it. I am a real entrepreneur. Little did I know how much the real work of entrepreneurship was ahead of me. Like firing him.

Without my first programmer, I would have never been able to get the company off the ground. But as we grew from a team of two to six and twelve and twenty, the day came when the culture had shifted and we weren’t working from coffee shops and living rooms anymore. We had our own office space.

I learned the hard way that sometimes the people you need in one size of an organization don’t always fit as things grow. And though I couldn’t have started without him, it was time that my first hire became my first fire.

The idea terrified me for weeks. I felt like I had failed my employee, even though we had tried multiple times to make it work. Every time I talked to my advisors, they would tell me: “Hire slow, fire fast.” Or “Do it now, don’t wait another day.” But how could I be so cold to a friend who helped me get my company off the ground? What would I tell him? How would he react?

I hated myself. My heart was on the floor and my stomach was in my throat. I couldn’t believe the things I said. I sounded like a total douche. What was I doing? How did things get so bad? Why was I even starting this company in the first place? This was not the last time I would have to do this, though. Not by a long shot.

I’m no Steve Jobs. I’ve spent years looking up to visionaries who’ve put a dent in the universe: Richard Branson, Mark Cuban, Elon Musk. These guys seem to get it. They seem to have some natural talent for building great companies almost instinctively.

But I’m not them. I spent a decade chasing short-term gains, quick money, and early exits. I chalked up my daily frustrations — with myself and with my companies — to the rigors of entrepreneurial life and I continued to grind through it. I wore down. I burned out. I tasted bankruptcy. And ultimately I came out on the other side with a very different perspective.

With all my failures, I eventually realized that the only way I could ever build a company and a career that I was truly proud of was by treating startups as a long-term craft — by protecting the downside and exploiting upside optionality when it came.

I became a craftsman founder dedicated to skillfully building companies that held a clear mission and honored my core values, a storyteller committed to building and maintaining relationships with customers, investors, and my personal support system. I devoted myself to creating, refining, and improving my craft for the long term. I learned to see the world in a different way by asking better questions.

“Quality questions create a quality life. Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.” — Tony Robbins

My life changed dramatically after repeatedly asking myself one simple question: why? Let’s explore how. If you are like me, you started working at a startup because you hope to found a startup of your own one day. But how often have you stopped to ask yourself why you are doing this?

This question has bothered me since I was a small child. One Sunday, coming home from church, I was sitting in the back seat of our minivan and I asked my mom: “Why are we here?”

Of course she immediately thought, Uh oh, isn’t he a little young to be asking that? She tried awkwardly to skirt around the question of the birds and the bees, but I said, “No, Mom, why are we here? What’s it for?” She realized, with relief, that I was trying to ask what the meaning of life was but didn’t have the words for it yet. I clearly remember a sensation of deep dread that morning. I think it was the first time I had ever felt dread.

But the meaning of life is not what I want to talk to you about. Let’s just focus on startups. Why work at startups? Or why start a company?

It doesn’t matter if you are running a food cart, starting a law firm, or founding a high-tech company. It doesn’t even matter if you are rich from having already sold companies, or if you are still living paycheck to paycheck. If you haven’t put in the time to explore why you do the things you do, you might be pursuing the wrong things for the wrong reasons.

The trick is to go deeper than the shallow ‘why.’ Look closer at what most people are afraid to face: the underlying why of your motivation to work harder than anyone else you know.

The ultimate question is: What’s that damn chip on your shoulder that you can’t seem to get rid of?

The easy answer to the why question is: money. It’s the wrong answer, of course; it’s only surface level. But as a first-order approximation, it gives us a good starting point.

For years I thought money was my main motivation too. Sure, I wanted to change the world for the better, use the money to have more control over my life, and spend more time with my family.

But if I am honest with you, truly brutally honest… I really wanted to get rich. Badly. Embarrassingly so. I still do. I often dream of getting ‘Uncle Scrooge rich,’ right down to the swimming pool full of gold coins.

That would be amazing, albeit hard to swim in.

So, why didn’t I just start a company early in my career? Everyone knows entrepreneurship can be a fast path to wealth. So why, like many people, did I begin my entrepreneurial journey by working at someone else’s startup?

I was too scared to start my own company because I thought I didn’t know enough to succeed. So, I got a job at a startup, hoping to learn its secrets while still getting a regular paycheck.

But here’s the biggest takeaway from my time working in other people’s startups: you won’t get rich unless you are near the top of the pyramid.

It’s an incredibly rare startup that makes its employees (who often own a fraction of a percent in company’s stock) millionaires. Facebook and Twitter are the unicorns of startups, and if you are working for a startup with a fraction of a percent in equity, you are almost certainly not getting any closer to wealth than if you were working at any other regular job. Founders and executives can make out well with a small exit, but the employees rarely do better than buying a new car or maybe a small house.

There are still plenty of other great reasons to work for startups. You can wear multiple hats and deal with less (or at least different) politics. These are all valid motivations to work for startups, but getting fabulously wealthy is not a good reason to be a startup employee. After working as a startup employee for seven years, I realized that I was no closer to my goal of great wealth than when I started.

So I quit my job and started my own company. My new goal was to change the world for the better. And if I eventually got rich in the process, that wouldn’t be bad either.

Many founders want to change the world for the better, and I ask them the same question I had to ask myself: why? Why do you want to change the world for the better (like everyone else on HBO’s Silicon Valley)? It certainly sounds more honorable and virtuous than admitting to pure greed, but it still doesn’t address the deeper ‘why.’

Over the years, I have advised and mentored hundreds of entrepreneurs, and I have heard every reason in the book for starting companies. Maybe you too want to make a difference. Or you want to create a legacy. Or you want to help technology reach new and exciting heights. Or you have a deep desire to help people around the world. Or, with the accumulated wealth, you want to give back to those around you.

Good, now we are at the second-order approximation. You want to change the world with your work, or you want to earn enough money to achieve some life-long noble aspiration.

Keep digging.

On the journey to discover why you really start companies, you’ll have many false starts. My initial goal was to have so much money that I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. If I wanted to spend a year in Paris with my wife, I could. If I wanted to study the ancient game of Go in Japan while eating great ramen, I could. If I wanted to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, I could.

It took a long time for me to realize that this goal was actually a false choice. There was nothing to stop me from going on those adventures without having a lot of money. In fact, I had friends who have accomplished most of the things on my list without being rich. They slept in hostels and ate top ramen, but they made it work. Their examples were just one clue that the dream I created for myself wasn’t my real motivation.

If you want to make money or change the world, you might think you want it in order to achieve some end goal. But I am telling you that any external goal you set for yourself is like the spoon in ‘The Matrix’ — it’s just an illusion.

It might be a comforting illusion to think you have a noble reason for wanting to get rich, but that comfort keeps you from digging deeper. It’s just like climbing a mountain: the higher you go, the harder it gets. There is no spoon. Why did I want the freedom I thought money could buy? Why did I want to change the world for programmers around the world? If you look past the illusion of those goals, what is left?

The proverbial chip on your shoulder.

Things were going great at the company I started, and it seemed like I could do no wrong. I felt it was finally my turn. At least for a while. After all, I had raised ten million dollars from great venture capitalists, I had hired over forty employees, and we had signed up over a hundred thou- sand developers for the service. If you believe the statistics you read in the news, my company was in the top 0.001% of businesses in America (at least when it comes to getting outside investment).

That was until revenue growth didn’t meet investors’ expectations. I had to lay off employees, and I didn’t know if the service would stay open much longer. Firing my first employee those years earlier now looked like a walk in the park. In those difficult moments, I thought a lot about my goals in life. I examined my reasons for wanting to achieve personal freedom and to change the world for the better.

I had been working like a maniac, running my company, with no personal freedom at all. I had created a service that developers depended on. Now, I was facing a possible shutdown and pissing off a hundred thousand people. For what? Riches I might never get? To start all over again with another company? Why?

I had to peel another layer of the onion away in order to find the next answer. I did startups because I had to. I had a deep burning desire. I had been entrepreneurial since I was a kid, trying to sell dream catchers I made as a craft or when I wrote a book of magic tricks for Hoyle before I was old enough to legally sign a contract. It was in my blood. But I still couldn’t pinpoint exactly why I had this burning desire yet.

If you’re still keeping score, I had arrived at a third-order approximation. Getting here had taken years of introspection and I was finally getting close. But to make the real break- through, I had to ask myself one more time: why?

Why did I have to do startups? What did I have to prove?

Many great entrepreneurs share a secret they rarely talk about: a feeling of never being good enough. Of course, there are the Richard Bransons of the world, who claim perfectly happy childhoods, but many founders I know hide skeletons in their closet.

I will share with you one of my skeletons in hopes that it might help you discover your own. Maybe for someone out there, this story can act as a guidepost for thinking their own motivations in a new light. The hard truth is that the skeletons don’t stop chasing you just because you have more money.

When I was in middle school, my parents divorced. The divorce, however, didn’t cause me any psychological distress. My father had already been away from the house a lot, so I was used to his absence. My father’s absence caused me little distress.

In fact, in many ways I had a very happy childhood. After my parents’ divorce, my mom overcompensated with love and generosity. She took us on regular vacations and took us to new countries and cool places almost every year. At Easter, my brother and I looked forward to large inflatable bunnies as big as us, surrounded with every chocolate known to man. At Christmas, the tree was always overflowing. Look- ing back now with two kids of my own, I have no idea how my mom was able to always provide so much on a meager teacher’s salary.

But for my mom, life did become harder after the divorce. She suffered from health complications, depression, and a series of car accidents. She began turning to alcohol. When I confronted her about how much she drank, she would tell me that it was her only real friend.

Sometimes I would walk around the house and find a half-dozen glasses of half-finished white wine and know what was coming next. I would run to my younger brother’s room and urge him to just try to go along with whatever Mom said. Accept the blame, don’t fight it.

Alcohol-induced rages became a regular occurrence for a period of time. It was very scary and confusing for me as a child. I tried to protect my brother from them as best I could even though I barely had the tools to protect myself. To this day, my brother doesn’t believe my mom had a serious prob- lem with alcohol, which makes me both proud and sad.

I deeply love my mother, and she has since become sober, which has allowed me to create a new relationship with her. But in my youth, I often felt lost and out of control. I felt trapped in a scary and unpredictable world.

At the time, I thought my mom’s rages were my fault. I thought that if I could just be a better son… if I could just get along better with my brother… if I was good enough, maybe my mom wouldn’t have to drink so much.

But what does any of this have to do with starting companies? Digging into my past revealed a deeper motivation behind my drive to create startups.

I start companies to prove to myself that I am good enough. I start companies with the hope that it will help me feel more whole inside — that I am worthy. I want to feel like I have the tools to control an unpredictable world. Almost as importantly, I want to pass on these tools to others, like I tried to do with my brother so many years ago. I hope to pass these tools on to you.

Entrepreneurship isn’t about monetary wealth. Entrepreneurship is about the wealth you find within yourself when you succeed at achieving impossible goals and the growth you find when you fail. Entrepreneurship is about the relationships you build with yourself and those around you.

It can be incredibly transformative to found a company. The process requires a level of self-examination that most of us fear. But it is more than worth it. And it’s entirely in your control.

Your past can either cripple you or empower you. You choose. You can let your feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and shame keep you working jobs that suck your soul. Or you can go out and, with a little luck and guidance, write a new story of your life. It can be post-traumatic stress or it can be post-traumatic growth that defines you.

You know as well as I do that in reality you don’t have a choice. Your skeletons chase you no matter where you hide. It’s about time to find your inner strength to pull through and make something of yourself.

After laying off staff and regrouping, my company rallied with gusto. In the upswing, we were bought by a Fortune 150 company. It was not an inevitable outcome. It could have all easily fallen apart, and for many in the same position it does. But total failure would have been fine, because either way I still have work to do.

I still have a chip on my shoulder and a burning desire to help others through my work.

That’s what entrepreneurship means to me. And that’s what success means to me. Feeling good enough. Feeling worthy.

So do I feel good enough now? Do I feel worthy? Some days yes, some days no. But that’s okay. It’s a work in progress.

And it’s the work of a lifetime.

This was an excerpt from my new book, Finding Success in Failure: What I Learned From 10 Years of Startup Mistakes .

The audiobook has just been released as well.

The post Why To Start A Company appeared first on Craftsman Founder.

Podcast 26: Michelle Miller On How To Get a Book Deal

The Underwriting: Get Rich, Get Laid, Get Even is Michelle Miller’s new book. It is described as The Social Network meets The Wolf of Wall Street, as it takes you behind closed doors into a post-recession world of sex scandals, power plays, and underhanded dealings.

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But Michelle didn’t go the normal route to publish her book. In fact she talked on our podcast about self-publishing her book and even raising investment for it.

Clearly, Michelle has been doing something right because now her book is showing up in the front of Barnes & Nobles and features in magazines and more.

Listen to this week’s podcast to learn more about Michelle and her book and the story behind the book.

The post Podcast 26: Michelle Miller On How To Get a Book Deal appeared first on Craftsman Founder.

Podcast 25: How to Leverage LinkedIn for Startups with Josh Turner

Josh Turner (author of the new book Connect: The Secret LinkedIn Playbook To Generate Leads, Build Relationships, And Dramatically Increase Your Sales) teaches us how to leverage LinkedIn for startups and side projects this week on the podcast.

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Josh also runs LinkedUniversity.com which has been teaching people how to effectively use LinkedIn to get more business. This week we talk about simple things that can make a big difference with your LinkedIn profile.

The post Podcast 25: How to Leverage LinkedIn for Startups with Josh Turner appeared first on Craftsman Founder.