As a career management advocate turned Entrepreneur Evangelist, I recently had an epiphany that clarified some of the change I’ve experienced over the past two years, as I’ve moved from my old life to my new one. I’ve been lacking an effective metaphor to describe both the process and my present (and potentially future) state. [...]

For any entrepreneur, the value of a mentor can almost never be overstated.  Whether it’s building your business plan, defining your market, figuring out a product strategy, or trying to sell your spouse on the idea that giving up a steady paycheck from someone else is a sane thing to do, a mentor is one [...]

I love startups. I love the chaos. I love the insane hours. I love the energy. I love the types of people who are attracted to work on high-risk ideas with long odds. I love the culture that evolves around them. I love it all. I have spent my career hopping from one startup to [...]

Tim Berry has a recent post on MyVenturePad that is highly worth reading.  He takes issue with a VentureBeat post that essentially recommends to entrepreneurs that they sacrifice their life until they get their business successfully built. Tim hits the nail on the head right out of the gate: the absurdity of that recommendation is [...]

One of my favorite parts of the end of any year are the ‘year in review’ and/or ‘next year’s prediction’ lists.  And when it’s a year that ends in a “0,” the lists are usually longer, more interesting and cover a longer window.  So, too, already with this year.  As we head into 2010, we [...]

Personality tests are one of my favorite types of brain candy.  I find something innately amusing about trying to discern something about someone’s psyche from how they answer a quiz or the way they seat themselves around a conference table during a meeting.  Whether there is validity to them or not is always secondary to [...]

In the American Express OPEN Forum article, Effective Word-of-Mouth is Made Not Born by Yvonne DiVita of Windsor Media Enterprises, the author discusses some tips to cultivating what is called “word of mouth marketing.” Aside from just being a reasonably trendy buzzphrase, word-of-mouth marketing is a marketing tactic designed to maximize the marketing leverage possible [...]

Recently on VentureBeat, author Jacob Brody reported on an entrepreneur’s Meetup in NYC where the founders of several successful startups discussed a common sales problem for small businesses: how to get larger, established organizations to take you seriously enough to be able to close a deal. It’s not surprising that this was such a hot [...]

As someone who consumes most of her daily doses of new information through the blogosphere (as opposed to traditional media), there are different bloggers I read for different reasons.  As I’ve been trying to streamline my process for writing more (and better), myself, I’ve been thinking more and more about what I specifically get out [...]

I’ve had an interesting few weeks. My husband and I have been dealing with a lot of things at home, hence my absence from blogging for much of the past month, and I have started a new project with the New Media (a.k.a. “web”) team at KXAN-TV here in Austin. Between getting settled into the [...]