Ideas & insights

What Gordon Ramsay can teach you about startups

What Gordon Ramsay can teach you about startups

In my hometown, an Irish guy recently opened a fish and chips shop. When I first got to know him, he offered four kinds of battered-and-fried foods (fish, chicken, asparagus and ri...

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Normal is crazy enough: 4 things you need to know about doing business with the Dutch

Next month, on April 30 or 'Koninginnedag', Queen Beatrix will abdicate in favor of her son Willem-Alexander. And although the entire nation will go slightly crazy - painting itself and everything within eyesight in the brightest orange available, the Dutch motto when doing business is: 'Act normal - that's crazy enough.' Even if it is not said out loud, it is always top of mind for the Dutch.  Appreciate its impor... Read more

10 cheatcodes for raising money from VC's, straight from a VC

While I was in Berlin for the Startup Camp, I took the opportunity to take some notes at some of the talks. One of them was by Sitar Teli, a VC at Connect Ventures and an early investor in Soundcloud. She’s been a VC for seven years, and her investments are all over the map - literally: she invested in companies in Berlin, Silicon Valley and London. She also remarked that when she invested in Soudcloud in 2009, Be... Read more

5 things you need to know about startup co-founders

Starting a company is a lonely job.  You’ve got to do all the work – from designing your product to picking up business cars from the printer.  You’ve got to make all decisions, big and small – from the colour of your logo to the colour of the folders you buy to keep your documents.  You put insane hours into your project, and while there’s plenty advice available, nobody volunteers to take some of the l... Read more

7 reasons why your price increases fail (and your bottom line suffers)

This will probably sound familiar: “When it comes to the prices we pay, we study them, we map them, we work on them. But with the prices we charge, we are too sloppy!” Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, in 2006 Pricing is the most important driver of profit, but unfortunately managers and entrepreneurs seem to neglect the issue. In one of our global pricing studies we asked over 3,900 high-level decis... Read more

"VC's worked themselves out of a job"

Interesting interview with Mark Heesen, the head of the NVCA (National Venture Capital Association) at PandoDaily. He says VC's have worked so hard to drive down the cost of starting an internet company - and have been so successful at it, that they've made themselves superfluous. As he puts it: "we worked ourselves out of a job". The other big change in the last ten years is that in IT, entrepreneurs don’t need v... Read more