Insights / Research Archives - Startup Economist

Why is “Are startup founders different?” Still a Meaningful Question??

Thursday, 03 July 2025 by Paul O'Brien

It’s always amusing when mainstream media stumbles into a conversation the rest of us have been having for, oh, I don’t know… decades? This week, The Economist decided to pose the bold question: “Are startup founders different?” as if it’s some new frontier of behavioral science. Imagine walking into a neuroscience conference and breathlessly announcing

Published in Insights / Research, Startups

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The Age of Artificial Truth

Thursday, 19 June 2025 by Paul O'Brien

If Orwell predicted a future of authoritarian oppression, we missed the plot twist: truth isn’t being silenced, it’s being distorted, mass-produced, and flooded upon us like a knock-off Rolex that still ticks. The root isn’t the Press nor Politicians, it’s not the White House or foreign influence, it’s everyone, all of us speaking at once,

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Published in AI, Insights / Research, Social Media

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You Don’t Need Traction. You Need to Understand Why They Say You Do.

Friday, 13 June 2025 by Paul O'Brien

There’s a special kind of eye twitch that founders get the 37th time they hear, “We’d love to invest, but you need more traction.” It’s a vague hand-wave of a dismissal that sounds helpful, but is really just cowardice in a hoodie. And when you ask what kind of traction they mean, they blink like

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Published in Insights / Research, Raising Capital, Startups

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Struggling? Network In Real Life.

Wednesday, 30 April 2025 by Paul O'Brien

I sat in the Texas Capitol this week, doing some legislative work, where a group of (probably) early 20-year-old staffers, having lunch, were talking about how and where to get to know more people. All, talking but on their phones, but what caught my attention was discussion of twitter, TikTok, some local venues, getting into

career contacts introductions jobs networking referrals

Published in Insights / Research, Social Media

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If You’re Asking If You Can Start a Startup, We Know How Likely You Are to Fail — And It’s a Lot Worse Than the Average

Wednesday, 09 April 2025 by Paul O'Brien

This is one of those “I did the math” posts, and it might inspire you, but it could also discourage you so before I let you go on into the depths of discouragement, let me point out that what we’re exploring here is how to avoid failure – that, if the math prove that you’re

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Published in Insights / Research, Startups

27 Comments

Is it Possible to Future Proof a Career Given AI?

Saturday, 04 January 2025 by Paul O'Brien

What Marketing Could Teach Us if We Were Actually Marketing Jack Ma, speaking at the World Economic Forum in 2019, warned:“We have to teach our kids something unique, so that a machine can never catch up with us: values, believing, independent thinking, teamwork, care for others—the soft skills—sports, music, painting, arts, to make sure humans

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Published in Economic Development, Insights / Research

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Pipeline > Data > Community > Audience > Customer

Thursday, 19 December 2024 by Paul O'Brien

Why Pipelines Trump Customers: Rethinking Value Creation in Startups It’s often said that “every startup needs customers.” That’s true. Without someone paying for your product or service, you don’t have a business. But this oft-repeated mantra misses the mark entirely when it comes to understanding value creation—the kind of value venture capitalists care about. Owning

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Published in Data, Insights / Research, Startups

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