The Startup Pitch Mistakes That Tell Us You’ll Fail Before You Start
Thursday, 22 January 2026
A startup pitch is not a sales pitch; no one in the room is buying, we are not your customer and we’re not even deciding whether your idea “will work.” What we’re doing is much simpler and harsher: we’re deciding whether what you’re doing creates enough perceived value to justify our time, reputation, and risk
- Published in Startups
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Only 10% of State and National Governments Distinguish Startups from New Businesses
Tuesday, 20 January 2026
A practical startup economic policy framework for governments that want venture-scale companies Governments around the world love the word entrepreneurship. They put it in press releases, name departments after it, fund “innovation hubs,” and cut ribbons in front of coworking spaces that end up being networking clubs for service providers seeking customers. What almost none
- Published in Startup Ecosystems
Why Riyadh and Saudi Arabia Are Rapidly Becoming a Global Startup Powerhouse
Wednesday, 17 December 2025
Riyadh didn’t become a startup ecosystem overnight. It’s rooted in a long history of adaptation and reinvention; a story about shifting from desert trade routes and tribal politics to oil wealth and now trying to crack the code on innovation-led diversification. To understand why Saudi Arabia, and Riyadh startups in particular, is increasingly attractive to
- Published in Regional Development
Better Startup Idea Validation
Wednesday, 10 December 2025
Despite countless articles and every startup program explaining how to validate a startup idea, one of the (surprisingly) still frequently most asked questions is how to validate a startup. Reading the tea leaves, that tells me not that people actually don’t know (conventional wisdom is “talk to customers”) but rather, that that advice is less
- Published in Startups
New Mexico Didn’t ‘Find’ Startups, It Built the Future: From Nukes and UFOs to Quantum Capital
Monday, 08 December 2025
If you still think of New Mexico as a quiet desert between Texas and Arizona, you’re about 80 years behind. This is the state that built the atomic age, test-flew the rockets that defined the Cold War, turned a supposed UFO crash into a tourism engine, and is increasingly the heart of quantum computing. New
- Published in Regional Development
There Is No “Era of the Bootstrapped Startup,” There’s Math, Memory Loss, and Better Advice
Tuesday, 02 December 2025
Every few years, someone declares a new epoch in entrepreneurship. We’ve had the “Era of Lean,” the “Rise of the Micro-VC,” the “Democratization of Innovation,” and (God help us) the phase where every city believed a coworking space with a yellow logo and a couple late career bankers counted as a “startup ecosystem.” With AI
- Published in Startup Ecosystems, Startups, Uncategorized
New Jersey’s Creative Class Isn’t Just Showing Up, It’s Becoming the Payoff for Its Startup Economy
Wednesday, 05 November 2025
In a few weeks, I’ll be in New Jersey, a part of the world that holds a very special place in my heart, as does nearby Philadelphia, thanks to family, foundational memories as a child and with my own kids, and now as roots to call a home. With that trip in mind, I could
- Published in Regional Development







