Tag: tips

You’re on stage: entertain!

Posted onAuthorHenri Asseily

I’m talking to you, the boring person on stage behind the mike, looking at your screen or notes, reading a speech with long sentences and big words in a monotonously boring voice, clicking a device to move forward an endless stream of badly edited PowerPoint(TM) slides. What is wrong with you? No, really. I mean it. What is wrong with you? You’re given a (somewhat) captive audience. You have the opportunity to impact the next 2, 5, 20 minutes or hours or years of dozens of people. And you squander it all away. Why? Do you really think you’re actually good Read More …

Don’t start a startup alone

Posted onAuthorHenri Asseily

Image caption: Leap partner Henri Asseily (right) and Farhad Mohit eating dinner in Farhad’s parents’ dining room while starting Bizrate.com in 1996. Their office was the greenhouse just outside. I got a call the other day from a young entrepreneur who’d heard we had started Leap Ventures, and that we’d invest in companies like his. Mistake #1: don’t call someone, send an email. In the email, you can structure your thoughts correctly, and you won’t be bothering that person who’s probably in a meeting and probably will want to send your info to the right analyst anyway. At Leap, send your pitches to businessplan@leap.vc. Read More …