2 min read
Founder Breakups
There is something particularly heartbreaking about the self-inflicted nature of founder breakups. Two or more smart and ambitious people...
2 min read
Guess It Until You Make It
First-time founders have one competitive advantage: they’re unsophisticated. It has been 3 long months of me trying to get my second...
2 min read
Best of 2022
In case you missed an article or twenty, here are the most-read ones of 2022. A Final Note from UrbanLeap - The most popular, and...
3 min read
Fixing The Unfixable
Founders believe that they can do the impossible. They wouldn't be founders otherwise. This cute belief doesn’t make impossible things...
4 min read
Extreme Bootstrap and Extreme VC
There are two types of startups that make investors drool all over: those who don’t need the money and those who are bigger than life. I...
3 min read
Debugging Product-Market Fit
“If you have to ask whether you have Product-Market Fit, the answer is simple: you don't.” - Eric Ries I don’t like this sentence because...
3 min read
Hire for Hunger
Everyone has that smart and talented friend who can achieve absolutely nothing. It’s the friend who was born with all the right traits...
2 min read
Endure or Quit? That is the Question
Tim Leatherman – the creator of the Leatherman multitool – endured for 7 long years before making his first $175 sale of a single...
2 min read
Shaping Past Memories
On Seinfeld, whenever George Costanza managed to pull a funny joke he would leave the room immediately. George knew that people would...
5 min read
The Bizarre World of Startup Ideas
Stuff that most people get mostly wrong about startup ideas, brought to you in a bizarre Q&A format. What’s the #1 thing people get wrong...
3 min read
A Final Note from UrbanLeap
Below is the note my co-founder Arik and I sent to our employees, investors, advisors, mentors, and customers the day we shut down our...
1 min read
Nothing Else Matters
Some things become the most important thing only when missing. If you don't build it then nothing else matters. If it has no value then...
3 min read
When Customers Don’t Get It
When one of the best violinists in the world wears dirty clothes and plays in a DC subway station nobody stops to listen. In the fancy...
2 min read
Work-Life Imbalance
John Coltrane was the greatest saxophone player of all time. His friends recount him practicing the sax for 12 hours a day. His wife...
3 min read
Missing the Forest for the Code
As a company evolves its engineers tend to devolve into code monkeys. A code monkey is not an actual monkey, it’s an engineer who sees...
2 min read
The Shawarma Method
Dan Ariely changed the way I think by making behavior economics accessible to all. One day, I found Dan’s email online, crafted a...
2 min read
Killer Startup Instincts
A stranger comes out of nowhere and physically attacks your child. What do you do? Here’s what you don’t do: you don’t ponder the...
5 min read
What Blogging Taught Me About Building Products
Startups are cool. Blogs? not so much. But blogs capture the essence of startups: create something that people want, find them, attract...
5 min read
Respect the System to Change the System
Some startups do 100x times better than yours, yet their idea, execution, and people are remarkably average. Why is that? A big part of...
3 min read
Promoting Fast and Slow
Some flowers require a perfectly comfortable environment to thrive, others will only grow strong in harsh environments. Employees are...
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