Further validating Murphy’s Law, it seems my RSS feeds failed on the eve of some of my most intellectually stimulating discourse. In case you missed the fun, come back and check out, “Why the world needs SEO’s” (Did you know? Google’s “algorithm” only works effectively in on an efficient, optimized web) and “Fixing behavioral targeting” – Targeted ads are still terribly inaccurate and a complete waste of inventory. Why? They don’t properly take into account time to ensure ads are shown to a relevant audience.
Assuming of course, I have the feeds fixed and you actually get this post in your reader… hmm….
Related Questions
Entrepreneurship programs teach skills. Ecosystems are economic environments where the conditions for high-growth companies to form and scale actually exist. A city can run excellent programs and still have a dead ecosystem; they're not the same thing.
A credible market thesis, a defensible go-to-market, and a team with disproportionate ability to execute in a specific space. The product is evidence of those, not the fundable thing itself. Ideas aren't fundable. Validated market insight with a capable team pursuing it is.
Incubators and accelerators have a serious, operationally complex job: give founders access to global mentor networks, connect them to investors, manage deal rooms, deliver curriculum, and track relationships over time. Most do it with a stitched-together combination of video tools, Slack groups, shared Google Drive folders, and spreadsheets of mentor contacts nobody updates. The program director becomes a part-time IT administrator. What an SDO actually needs is civic infrastructure; purpose-built and comprehensive enough to deliver on what it promises founders. Ironically, an incubator's job is to teach founders to stop building things they don't need to build, and then those same incubators do exactly that with their own operations
Rare. A study of 22,000 startups found roughly 8% of the population qualifies as genuinely entrepreneurial; characterized by a need for variety and novelty, reduced modesty, openness to adventure, and heightened energy levels. That's the actual pool. The rest of the people calling themselves entrepreneurs on LinkedIn are founders, business owners, or professionals with ambition; all respectable, none of them the same thing.
Payments and money movement (Stripe, Adyen, Marqeta), communications (Twilio, Sinch), identity and verification (Socure, Alloy, Persona), payroll and HR (Gusto Embedded, Check, Finch), healthcare data (Redox, Particle Health), financial data connectivity (Plaid, Codat), tax compliance (Avalara, Anrok), and workforce intelligence (MustardHub for behavioral signals that transactional HR platforms were never built to produce). In each case the pattern is the same: the domain has regulatory complexity, specialized data requirements, or relationship infrastructure severe enough that building it internally is nearly always the wrong call.