Startups Archives - Page 4 of 41

You Don’t Want to Be an Entrepreneur, You Want What It Represents

Friday, 25 July 2025 by Paul O'Brien

If you’re asking why you want to be an entrepreneur, you probably already shouldn’t be. That’s not snark (well, not only snark), it’s insight. I wanted to write this because becoming an entrepreneur, taking entrepreneurship studies, or questions about how to be one, are prolific topics in modern society. The things, entrepreneurs, real ones, aren’t

Published in Insights / Research, Startups, Uncategorized

17 Comments

The GTM Slide is Broken: Here’s How to Fix It

Wednesday, 23 July 2025 by Paul O'Brien

The Go To Market Slide (GTM), is the most misunderstood, misused, and mangled slide in the entire startup pitch deck. It’s like the appendix of a pitch; everyone includes it, nobody knows exactly why, and when it bursts, the whole body of your presentation goes septic. Every founder knows they need one. Almost no one

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Published in Insights / Research, Startups

46 Comments

Entrepreneurship: The Illegal Move Economics Can’t Explain

Thursday, 17 July 2025 by Paul O'Brien

"Galileo Facing the Roman Inquisition" by Cristiano Banti

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Published in Economic Development, Startups

24 Comments

We Already Know How to Do This: Stop Reinventing Startup Development Organizations

Friday, 11 July 2025 by Paul O'Brien

Recently, someone asked me, “How do you make a training center for entrepreneurs to be self-sustaining and not just dependent on investors?” And I nearly threw a stapler. Not because the question isn’t valid, because it is, but because we’ve been answering it for decades. The model exists. It’s tested. It’s been done over and

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Published in Economic Development, Startups

27 Comments

Stop Pitching Your Startup Like It’s a Science Fair Project

Monday, 07 July 2025 by Paul O'Brien

Nobody cares about your startup. And it’s not because they’re stupid, or you’re too early. It’s because you’re saying the wrong damn thing. I’ve learned through my own startup, as well as working with hundreds of founders through incubators, that the answer to your frustration with this is always the same. The problem founders always

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Published in Startups

46 Comments

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

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Published in Insights / Research, Startups

20 Comments

Why Most Startups Fail to Get Enough Attention

Wednesday, 18 June 2025 by Paul O'Brien

Most startups don’t die because they lacked funding. They don’t die because of bad code, poor vision, lack of a business plan, or the boogeyman of “not having product-market fit.” They die because no one noticed they were alive in the first place. We romanticize startup failure as some noble rite of passage (cue the

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Published in PR, Startups

28 Comments