TL;DR: A startup can eventually pivot to a better market or a different product. It can get funded, can hire better people. However, without a healthy culture, everything will crumble. The healthiest culture is a culture built on accountability and operational excellence, not on fancy values. One way to build accountability and performance from the start, and define the right culture, is to use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

Accelerators live and breathe startup metrics. They set the KPIs (key performance indicators — the most important metrics) that startups should report and try their best to teach them how to execute everything based on metrics. But how do accelerators fare on this themselves? How do they measure their success…

Startup is a word that gets tossed around a lot and its definition takes on many forms. It’s a state of mind, a disruptive business, a new budding venture, and many other things. Yet there are no set of rules to the game, no magic recipe for success, nor scientific…

Republished from How to Web Prior to speaking at the How to Web Conference, Valerica Dragomir asked me five questions about my views on entrepreneurship. Here is what came out of it. HTW: How would you define an entrepreneur? What makes one more of an entrepreneur: the mindset, the skill…

As an entrepreneur, we should first be very good at finding the right problem, before spending weeks, months or even years building solutions. Sometimes, despite the fact our solutions are amazing technologies or superbly-written code, they fail because they don’t respond to real market needs. …

The number one cause of startup failure is the lack of a real need in the market, according to a recent post-mortem on startups. This reminded me of probably the most important lesson I’ve learned from my mentor and friend Bill Aulet, Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for…

Eternime is launching its avatar service to first 100 users out of 30,000 on the waiting list, starting December 2015. The company aims to create the first network of personal Artificial Intelligence avatars. — The goal is to preserve thoughts, stories and memories for eternity, into digital clones that could perform natural conversations with other people. These avatars could become the oldest living digital entities known by the 22nd century and beyond.

Could an AI avatar collect all your thoughts and memories, then become a digital clone of yourself and “live” forever? — It is 2015 and we are closer to launching the Eternime avatar that will eventually become your digital alter ego, your immortal bits-and-bytes clone. Two years, two pivots, all personal savings invested, a new team, more than 30,000 people waiting for it, and we’re one step further on this amazing…