Giving a good pitch can make your career as an entrepreneur. 

Giving a bad pitch can break it.

When you pitch investors on your startup, they aren't just watching you to see if they want to invest. They want to assess your powers of persuasion—which you'll need to woo talent, customers, and partners.

New York angel investor, and Gust founder and CEO David S. Rose says bad pitches tend to fall into three major categories:

• The content is bad, off-base or not well-thought-out.

• Slides or visuals are poorly executed or confusing.

• The founder is unprepared or lacks basic presentation skills.

With that in mind, we scrounged up some of the most unbelievably bad startup pitches we could find.

Lumier founder Cullen Dudas was incredibly awkward and painful to watch

Company: Lumier

Product: Software to personalize your Windows experience.

Founder: Cullen Dudas

Where: TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2011

Why it's not a great pitch: He doesn't do a great job of telling us why we should care, nor what the company actually does. He awkwardly rambles on during his pitch, and the MC even says "I think I've just been punked."

Where Lumier is now: If you head over to Lumier.com, you'll see that the company has yet to launch to the public. As of right now, it's only accepting email sign-ups for the beta product.

Amanda Schlechter of Ledge Pillow went after too small of a market

Company: Ledge Pillow

Founder: Amanda Schlechter

Product: A pillow to help women with large breasts or implants comfortably sleep on their stomachs

Where: Shark Tank 2012

Why it's not a great pitch: For starters, Ledge Pillow is going after a very small, niche market. Investors typically don't invest in companies that lack a broad appeal. Also, the sales she disclosed weren't very impressive, having only sold 83 products since launching in 2008. Ultimately, she didn't communicate well what the value proposition was. It simply didn't solve a big enough problem for a large enough market.

Where the Ledge Pillow is now: According to its website, the Ledge Pillow is temporarily out of stock—but has a big announcement coming up.

Yaron Bazaz of CrowdFanatic couldn't explain the company's business model

Company: CrowdFanatic

Founders: Yaron Bazaz, Gabriel Melman

Product: Online engagement platform.

Where: Dragon's Den 2012

Why it's not a great pitch: For starters, Bazaz and his team came out screaming and chanting. That didn't impress. Then they failed to comprehensively explain their revenue model and had no sales to back up their claims. It also wasn't totally clear to the investors what the business is actually trying to achieve.

Where Crowd Fanatic is now: The site is still up and running, but there are no SEC filings showing CrowdFanatic raising venture-capital funds.

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Somewhere in Scandanavia there's a startup. And investors think that startup is worth a lot of money.

Supercell is a two-year-old company that is cashing in on iOS games. Titles include Hay Day and Clash of Clans, and the company frequently appears in the App Store's top grossing chart.

According to PandoDaily's Hamish McKenzie, the 60-person gaming company is rolling in revenue, so much so that it makes many Silicon Valley app companies "look like a humble paper route." In October, The New York Times said SuperCell was pulling in about $500,000 per day. Its founder, Ilkka Paananen, says daily revenue is now "quite a bit more." McKenzie says it's likely in the $750,000 range now.

In addition, operating costs are reportedly low -- about $60,000 per day. McKenzie says VCs have clamored to offer SuperCell term sheets at a $600 million valuation.

Index Ventures' Ben Holmes thinks Supercell could easily overtake a dwindling Zynga in the next year or two.

"They are one of the few companies, along with King.com, who are now on a regular and reliable basis producing winning games,” he told McKenzie. “Both companies have very good shot at overtaking Zynga in terms of revenue, profits and valuation over the next year.”

At its current rate, Supercell could generate $130 million annually, after Apple's cut of sales. But hit games can be unsustainable fads, as Zynga well knows. In the mean time, Supercell plans to keep working on its secret sauce: tablet games.

"We view the tablet as the ultimate gaming platform,” Paananen tells McKenzie. “The entire strategy is to create the best possible game experiences on the tablet, and the interesting side effect of that strategy is that we also make the games better on iPhone, because designing the games for a higher spec is also what makes the games better on the smartphones.”

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A great idea and hard work are obviously essential for startups. Even more important? Timing.

We recently spoke to Roman Stanek, the founder and CEO of GoodData, who previously sold NetBeans to Sun Microsystems in 1999, and Systinet to Mercury Software/Hewlett Packard in 2006. 

His first company succeeded because he was able to act as a gatekeeper for American software coming into Eastern Europe as his native Czechoslovakia came out from under communist rule. Netbeans sold the right kind of software just as the internet was becoming widely used. 

"At the end of the day, I was lucky with the timing. '97, '95, you know the first bubble. That put me on the map."

Communism ended at the right time, and then the internet came at the right time? 

"It's always like that. You look at any successful company, you always find a piece of luck. That's the last piece that makes it perfect. You have to have all of that hard work and all of that preparation and so on, and that gets you to the point where you can leverage it."

Roman illustrated the point perfectly with the story of how he took the below photo.

"Photography, it's luck, isn't it? The right light and so on. I was taking pictures of a rowing competition. As I was standing there, one of the rowers actually looked up at me while I was on a bridge. If she looked one second earlier or one second later, how do you stage that? And this was a race, she was not supposed to look up, she was supposed to be racing. 

It was timing. It was luck. It was also me being there with a good camera, with the right light, all of that preparation, then the simple fact that she actually looked up at me. That's the last piece, that's the piece that separates the good from excellent.

That's true for every startup, every successful company— look at Netcape, Mark Andreesen — you always find that timing, that they looked at it at exactly the month they were supposed to. You look at Facebook, all of those things that happened exactly at the right time, and people before them and after them failed because they didn't have the right timing. 

It's the last 5 percent. The rest of it is effort." 

Still, the importance of that last 5 percent can't be overstated.

Stanek gave the example of Facebook. The idea was great, as was the execution. But the timing was what made it a multi billion dollar company, because the company grew incredibly at the same time as a massive change in the way people thought and cared about privacy and sharing information on the internet. Other companies did the earliest, hardest work changing people's perceptions, and Facebook was in the right place to take full advantage. 

NOW READ: Why Startups Will Keep Disrupting Big Companies

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The New York Times today has a story about how not everyone who makes iPhones apps for a living makes it big.

Daveid Streitfeld's story centers on a couple, Shawn and Stephanie Grimes.

Shawn got laid off a couple years ago and the couple decided to start working on iPhone and iPad apps for toddlers.

Since then, they've sold their cars, cashed out his 401(k), and avoided taking more sure-fire jobs.

 "I'll retire when I die," says Shawn.

Streitfeld says the couple has lost about $200,000 in savings and potential earnings.

So far, it hasn't been worth it: the toddler apps have only brought in about $5,000 in sales.

Streitfeld also tells the story of Ethan Nicholas. Nicholas's first app for the iPhone did very well, and it made him a millionaire. He used the money to create more apps and a pair of startups. Since then, none of his apps or startups have done nearly so well.

According to a very small survey of 252 gaming developers from Streaming Color Studios, 25% of all game apps make less then $200 in their lifetime, 25% make more than $30,000, and just 4% make more than a million.

So here's a reminder: Software startups – like almost all startups – are very hard, and usually fail.

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CHENGDU- In China’s own Silicon Valley in Sichuan Province, the Chengdu cloud computing company has decided to reward its employees for falling in love, reports the People’s Daily.

The "Love Bonus" was set up to coincide with last week's Singles Day, a new Chinese tradition started in the 1990s by college students wanting to create a Valentine’s Day for singles. Singles Day got its name from the four "1"s that make up the date Nov. 11, reports Xinhua. The digits, look like four bare sticks, which sounds a lot like the word guanggun – Chinese for “bachelor.”

Chengdu executives told the People’s Daily, that they came up with the idea after seeing the emotional turmoil of his young workers, awarding a financial bonus for workers willing to tuoguang – “strip” – slang for saying goodbye to the single life.

Each “stripper” would get a bonus of 1112 Yuan ($180) a number that was chosen to represent 1111+1. The company hopes that if their employees fall in love with their colleagues, they will “have an even more harmonious team” - a notion that leads us to believe that they have not really thought this through.

Still, the company doesn't mind it if their employees fall in love with their counterparts in other Chengdu IT firms. On the contrary! The employees finding love outside work will be awarded a bonus of 500-1000 Yuan ($80 to $160). The idea is that the Chengdu cloud company will be able to poach these enamored young engineers.

If things don’t work out though, the company was thoughtful enough to create a special leave for the lovelorn, giving their employees two days off to “mourn” at home.

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Philadelphia is not just a historical stopover anymore. It's a growing hub for startups, an emerging culinary center, and a great place to open a business.

Click here to go straight to the businesses >

We recently spent some time trekking around Philadelphia to find the coolest additions to the city that have opened or expanded in the last year (one of us is a Philly native).

Within the last year, the city has seen the opening of several new gastropubs, artisanal cocktail bars, and gourmet food trucks—all at very affordable prices. More startups are calling Philadelphia home too, attracted by the low cost of living and the city's low-key vibe.

The top 25 businesses that blew us away are listed here in alphabetical order.

Alla Spina

1410 Mt. Vernon Street

What it is: Italian gastropub

Why it's cool: Alla Spina is the latest restaurant from Mark Vetri, one of Philadelphia's most successful restaurateurs and arguably one of the best Italian chefs in the country. 

The North Broad gastropub has a selection of Italian beer on tap, including Negroni. It serves dishes like fried pig tails with fennel agrodolce and poutine with guinea hen leg bolognese and mozzarella curd. 

American Sardine Bar

1800 Federal Street

What it is: Neighborhood gastropub

Why it's cool: This Point Breeze gastropub, which has been open for about a year, features an authoritative list of beers and a constantly changing menu of casual, affordable food. Creative dishes, like the Pittsburgh cheesesteak sandwich, the local apples and ricotta sandwich, and the $2 sardine sandwich, take advantage of local produce.

Brideside

Online only

What it is: An online wedding catalog that exclusively features bridesmaid dresses and accessories.

Why it's cool: A product of the fall 2012 Philadelphia DreamIt Ventures accelerator program, Brideside allows brides and wedding parties to peruse through wedding photos for inspiration, connect with other brides on forums, and shop for styles that they like. 

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Almost all startups have a CEO – the person that sits atop the org chart –  but not all have a CDM (Chief Decision Maker). Every new business needs one person who is going to make important decisions about how the business is to move forward, no matter what the rest of the group consensus is. The problem with many startups is that they can have multiple founders, and by virtue of having many founders, there’s not one person early on who is accorded the responsibility of making the decisions to get the business beyond idea phase; rather they all want to take part in the decision-making process. In order for a business to become a business, the people within it need to implement their ideas, test products, and interact with customers, leveraging positive customer service and word-of-mouth-marketing. The CDM is the leader in the group who gets the members to stop talking and start acting.

Here are four reasons why every company needs a CDM, and some of the key decisions every CDM needs to make to ensure his business survives and thrives.

Not all the founders are valuable to the business. When ideas are tossed around at the inception of a startup, there’s very little at stake. The project is still in idea phase and you have time to project the number of ways that your customers will use your product and what that product will look like before getting results to show what actually works. Some of the people involved in the project serve a technical or mechanical purpose that would normally be outsourced to an employee or contractor. But when the business finally starts getting going, the people that matter most are the manager and the financier. There’s typically one person within the group whose vision is the prevailing one and another (or group of people) whose money will be used to fund the beginning operations. Just because someone was around to share a few ideas at the inception of a project doesn’t mean they are needed to operate the business. If this person (or multiple persons) is preventing the company from moving forward because of their unrefined and muddled ideas, then it might be better to move on without them and use some of the funds to fill in their role, especially if they are demanding a significant amount of equity in return for their participation.

The launch timeline has shortened. The time a business has to get an idea to market in the form of a product or service has never been shorter. New innovations disrupt great ideas every day turning promising startups into failed projects. Figure out what value you can add to your market, what that product looks like, and get it in front of customers to test your business’ viability. The quicker your brand can be associated with a real product and with effective problem solving required to troubleshoot issues as they arise, and the sooner you can learn what about your product needs to be changed, the better positioned you will be to adapt to innovations within your industry. The longer it takes you to launch your product and realize what information you should be taking away from it, the less likely you will be to succeed. Sometimes the difference between perishing and succeeding is a matter of no more than a day – or even hours; therefore, a CDM needs to be established to pivot the company to a place of safety from where it can iterate again to insure its future.

The opportunity cost of capital has never been cheaper. At a time when real returns on investments are arguably the lowest they have been in years, companies can have far more “at-bats” than they have had in a long time to learn about their business and customers. The reason for this is because there’s far less risk in losing out on 2-3% investments (such as government bonds) than there would be otherwise if the economy were better and yields were higher. Therefore, companies have more “real” opportunities to generate returns on their deployed capital because the effective rate of return on their uninvested money is almost zero. But in order to have an at-bat, and create opportunity, you must step up to the plate. The concept of opportunity cost of capital refers to the fact that if you have a dollar tied up in one thing, it can’t also be tied up in something else. If a dollar is tied up in an investment that yields 5% when it could be in another investment vehicle earning 10%, then you have to find ways to free up that dollar so that it yields the higher 10% return. While the opportunity cost of capital is cheap, the risk of not making a decision to not generate a higher return than what the market can yield is also a danger in not acting decisively. Businesses need to know that their capital can do more for them if deployed correctly, but the only way they can find out how to deploy it is to be decisive about their business model, find out the best ways to get ROI (Return on Investment), and repeat the process again.

Because getting credit is far less important than getting results. A business is not meant to be a vehicle for vanity. A business is about having a vision, establishing a concept with a scalable profit margin, and creating a positive culture that improves the lives of the people within the organization and the community of which it is a part. I see so often when startups at the very beginning worry far more about equity percentages, press attention they’re going to receive, and setting up conference calls than getting down to business and selling their product. There comes a point in time in which the CDM needs take charge of the critical decisions that involve creating the essential product and selling it. If you’re that person then step up to the plate and worry far more about putting the best people in place that are going to help you get the results that you need than about how others feel about getting the credit that they think they deserve.

NOW READ: How To Create A Website That Makes People Want To Buy Things

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Want to do your own startup? Step one is coming up with an idea for something could eventually blossom into a business.

How do you come up with that idea? Paul Graham, who sees hundreds of startup ideas every year through his startup accelerator program Y-Combinator, laid it out in a long blog post.

If you're serious about doing a startup, it's worth a read. But, if you're just curious about how people can come up with ideas for a startup, here's the simple, two minute version of the story.

• Method One: Figure out what's a problem in your life, then solve it. If it's a problem for you, then odds are its a problem for others. Don't worry if you think your problem is super narrow. That's okay. Just make sure you're solving a problem for yourself and others. Make sure the product make is a must-have for your narrow set of users. Once they're hooked, then you can think about broadening out.

• Method Two (and this one is trickier): "Live in the future and build what seems interesting," says Graham. Essentially, you should start thinking about the world is going to be, rather than how it has been, and from there, you spot where the next opportunity will be, rather than where the last opportunity was. How do you get your mind in the future? You have to start using leading edge technologies. You have to hang out with people developing leading edge technologies. Then you have to figure out what those technologies will lead to, and how you can exploit what they lead to.

Other tips on doing a startup:

• Don't worry about competition. In fact, if you see a lot of companies trying to do what you're trying to do, but none are dominating, it's a good sign. It shows there's demand, but no one has figured out how to meet the demand.

• Attack annoying, unsexy, messy problems. There are a lot of companies waiting to be built, but people are either too lazy, or not attracted to solving the problem.

• Just do it. Don't take a class about doing a startup, just do it. If you fail, you fail, but at least you tried.

Read Graham's whole post →

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You're always hearing about how people quit their cushy jobs to do a startup and then got rich.

But sometimes the story doesn't go that way.

Before GoalSponsors founder David Murray landed a role on Bravo's "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley," he had a comfortable job as a product manager at Google making six figures a year.

He decided to give up his cushy job to start his own business.

He soon found himself in debt. 

(It didn't help that he bought a no-money down mortgage on a house that eventually went under water.) 

Now, he's doing contract work on the side in order to survive. 

"I feel like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place because I don't want to ask for funding because I don't want some random person taking control of my company and doing something crazy with it," Murray said in the latest episode. "But I need money to live on and we can't pay the mortgage."

In the show, Murray ends up asking his pal and fellow cast member Sarah Austin, who lives at the Four Seasons in Silicon Valley, for a $3,000 loan to help pay back the money he took out to refinance his home.

"Ah, that sucks," Austin replied.

Austin told Murray that a family member recently asked her for a loan so she's not in a position to give another one.

"A loan's a loan," Austin says in the confession room. "It's not that different from a bank. I'm not a bank."

Despite not landing that loan, there is still hope for Murray. He launched his GoalSponsors iPhone app for helping people achieve personal health and fitness goals earlier this month.

Don't Miss: Bravo Reality Star Kim Taylor Quits Her Ampush Media Job To Start A Company >

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When Tony Hsieh first got involved at Zappos.com in 1999, it was as an investor and advisor.

He had already sold a company—Internet advertiser LinkExchange—to Microsoft for $265 million because it was not a fun place to work anymore. 

Since he didn't want to repeat that mistake and always wanted Zappos.com to remain a fun place to work, he made his No. 1 priority at Zappos.com getting the culture right from the start.

His rationale isn't just touchy-feely.

In a panel about growth strategies at the Ernst & Young Strategic Growth Forum, Hsieh referenced a key finding of Jim Collins's leadership book Good to Great: What separates great companies from mediocre ones in terms of long-term financial performance, Hsieh recalled from the book, is the great ones have strong cultures—as well as a higher purpose beyond profits that ultimately also enables them to generate significantly more profits.

How do you do the same? Here are seven recommendations from Hsieh:

1.  Build a company—not necessarily a product—you're passionate about. 

"I've never been interested in shoes," said Hsieh. "My passion has always been customer service, company culture, and community."

Don't sway from that passion, even if an opportunity arises that seems like it presents an immediate financial return.

2.  Want to motivate? Inspire first.

"While there are lots of ways to motivate employees—fear, recognition, incentives ("If you do 'x,' I'll give you 'y'), what we stumbled into and figured out over the years is there's a huge difference between motivation and inspiration," said Hsieh. 

In essence, Hsieh said there's a much bigger financial payoff if you inspire employees with your mission—in Zappos.com's case: customer service, company culture, and community—than using other techniques.

"If you can inspire employees through a higher purpose beyond profits, that you're doing something that can help change the world," said Hsieh, "you can accomplish so much more."

3.  Be the architect of the greenhouse.

If you think of your company as a greenhouse with a lot of plants, many think the CEO is the tallest, strongest plant all others aspire to be, said Hsieh.

"I view my role as the architect of the greenhouse," and try to foster "what's already natural among the empoyees so they flourish." 

4.  Encourage "collisions."

Hsieh is moving Zappos.com headquarters from suburban Henderson, Nevada, to downtown Las Vegas, and—through his Downtown Project—helping make it possible for employees to live downtown, too, by buying and constructing residential buildings. 

Hsieh wants to increase employee productivity as Zappos.com continues to grow. When cities double in size, Hsieh said, productivity increases 15 percent. But when companies double in size, productivity declines. So to avoid that fate, his theory is that a hybrid operation between a company, community, and city will help different forces come together and "accelerate serendipitous innovation."

"Most innovation comes from outside your industry applied to your own," said Hsieh.

He is also setting up his new offices to encourage interaction. The reality is, he pointed out, if employees sit twice as far away from each other, they see each other "half as often squared, not half as often—because of the inverse-square law."

He's shutting down a sky bridge connecting buildings to force employees out on the street.

5.  Make your company values flexible enough to adapt in China—or Kentucky.

Zappos.com has an office in China and ran a warehouse in Kentucky that until recently had several thousand employes. It also, of course, has departments that run the spectrum from accounting to a call center. To get people behaving in all these places with the same attitudes, he set out to create a list of 10 core values that are flexible enough they can be effective regardless of an employee's job function or geography—and evolve over time.

6.  Make sure your employees are learning—all the time.

Hsieh teaches his employees classes on Good to Great  as well as the book Tribal Leadership,  by David Logan. 

This week, he's hosting a speakers' series in downtown Vegas.

7. Offer a clear career path.

If employees join at entry level, make it possible to get to a senior level within a certain number of years. "Set expectations on both sides," Hsieh said. 

This post originally appeared at Inc.

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Publishers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have full-blown pay walls that prevent people from reading their content without coughing up a monthly fee.

Others make all of their content available to readers for free.

Cleeng is a startup based in Europe that wants to give publishers an in-between option. It lets them pick which content they'd like to paywall, whether it's the video portion of a single article or a feature story that took a lot of time and research.

Former Apple Vice President and GM for Europe, Pascal Cagni, is one of a few people who invested in the startup's latest, half-a-million-dollar funding round.

He thinks there's a big opportunity to help publishers monetize their content.

“The opportunity to offer a simple, straightforward, robust solution to monetize content, being TV programs, videos, or live events is simply huge and this is exactly what Cleeng is doing, very well…" Cagni said in a press release. "Their success so far is remarkable and knowing the Cleeng team inside and out, I believe they are uniquely positioned to further harness this transfer value and to fully benefit from this opportunity.”

Cleeng is already used by magazine giant Conde Nast and tech site VentureBeat. It launched last year and will use the $500,000 to start making a name for itself in the US.

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Ask any successful entrepreneur or investor what attributes are critical to building a successful business, and it's a safe bet that "perseverance" will be near the top of the list.

And there's no better illustration of this than the stories of two of the country's original successful startups -- the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies.

In those days, of course, "surviving" as a startup meant something different than it means today.

In those days, surviving meant, well, surviving.

The Jamestown settlement was sponsored by venture capitalists of the Virginia Company of London, who were hoping to cash in on the presumed riches of the new world (the dotcom bubble of the day). 

Jamestown launched in 1607, after several other US colonization ventures had failed.  After two years of investment, the colony had grown to 214 "employees," but had yet to export any commercial products. 

Then came the winter of 1609-1610, in which a combination of drought, the delayed arrival of a convoy of supply ships, and a breakdown in trade negotiations with the Indians devastated the colony. That winter, 164 of the 214 colonists died.

This setback was so severe that in the early summer of 1610, the remaining colonists decided to abandon Jamestown and actually boarded ships for home.  It was only an encounter with a new convoy of supply ships a short ways downriver--along with new senior management--that persuaded them to return to Jamestown and continue the project.

In 1612, five years after the colony's founding, Jamestown finally figured out a business model, when a colonist named John Rolfe farmed and exported tobacco.  In 1619, a dozen years after the colony was founded, the first shipload of women arrived.  And then the colonists discovered slave labor, which had a beneficial impact on the bottom line.

(Not that it was smooth sailing from there. In 1622, Indians killed 347 colonists and kidnapped others. In 1644, Indians killed 500 colonists. In the next 50 years, Jamestown's statehouse burned to the ground 4 times.  For more on Jamestown, see A History Of The Jamestown Settlement).

And then there was Plymouth.

Before the Pilgrims arrived in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, the area had been the thriving home of ~2,000 Wampanoag Indians.  But a few years before the Pilgrims got there, thanks to bubonic plague imported by European fishermen, 90% of Plymouth's Wampanoag inhabitants died.  This made room for the Pilgrims.

The Pilgrims had intended to go to Virginia, but ended up in Massachusetts. At the end of November, 1620, they anchored in what is now Provincetown Harbor on Cape Cod, where they stole corn from some Indians and debated where to establish their colony.  A month later, on December 20th, they arrived in Plymouth and began to build a settlement.

The first winter was, to put it mildly, rough.  There were the Indians. There was the lack of food. There was disease. There was the lack of manpower. There were the constant arguments about priorities, leadership, and rules. And there was, above all, death.

As Nathaniel Philbrick describes it in Mayflower:

"Tensions among the Pilgrims remained high. With two, sometimes three people dying a day throughout the months of February and March, there might not be a plantation left to defend by the arrival of spring.  Almost everyone had lost a loved one.  Christopher Martin, the Mayflower's governor, had died in early January, soon to be followed by his wife, Mary.  Three other families--the Rigsdales, Tinkers, and Turners--were entirely wiped out, with more to follow. Thirteen year-old Mary Chilton, whose father had died back in Provincetown Harbor, became an orphan when her mother passed away that winter... By the middle of March, there were four widowers... With the death of her husband, William, Susanna White...became the plantation's only surviving widow.  By the spring, 52 of the 102 who had originally arrived at Provincetown were dead."

In other words, six months after the launch of the Plymouth startup, half of the original employees had died.

Plymouth struggled for the next several decades, and it never made a profit for its original investors. But unlike many other early settlements (and other startups), it survived.

See Also: 17 Facts About China That Will Blow Your Mind

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I have learned to pay attention in life when the hairs stand up on the back of my neck or my stomach churns, as if my gut instinct is saying, “Something’s not right here.” I also get an equally powerful flutter in my chest when something is going well. I may know these things about myself now, but in my first year of business, I discounted my intuition in a big way.

Even though I spent several years in the first part of my career working to shape microbusinesses in developing countries, I decided I needed a business advisor to help guide me from the moment I called myself an entrepreneur. On the recommendation of several people I trusted, I invested heavily in programs, business coaching and a mastermind group with a single advisor.

At first, things went smoothly. She spoke my language as a coach and she seemed to know the ins and outs of online marketing. But something was always amiss: missed appointments that her virtual assistant had “failed” to reschedule, critical resources that were months behind the agreed timeline, and constant changes in the curriculum. Any one of these details would be excusable, but over time, they had me questioning whether she was the real deal. The answer was in my trailing bottom line and my failure to grow my business in any significant way over the course of nine months.

Needless to say, she vanished in month 10. Poof. Gone. It was an expensive lesson that cost me both time and money. I take responsibility for my results, and I expect my clients to do the same.

My great mistake was not paying closer attention to what my intuition was telling me and not trusting the years of experience, knowledge and skills that I had behind me. As I picked up the pieces of my business, I returned to my own strength and power — and turned up the volume on my intuition.

Since I work as a strategist and coach to help young women launch social change careers and businesses, I am always cognizant of my rocky entrepreneurial start. I am careful to design experiences and agreements that help them move forward in the right direction — for them.

From this experience alone, there are three lessons that I readily share with my clients and peers:

1. Diversify your investments. Just as you would with your financial investments, you want a diverse support and advisory network as you build your business. Seek advice and feedback from multiple directions on the work that you are doing. No one individual will have everything you need, so rely on your head and heart to determine where you spend your time and money. And remember, you are often your greatest asset.
2. Credibility matters. Ask to speak with references. Ask for specifics on education, training, real-world experience or anything else that matters to you. If someone you’re working or partnering with has what you’re looking for, they will be happy to share it with you. In the coaching world, the International Coach’s Federation (ICF) is the accrediting body for professional coaches worldwide. The ICF holds all of its members to specific levels of training, experience and continued education. While certifications such as these don’t guarantee results, they do demonstrate a professional commitment on the part of the individual.
3. Trust yourself first. I believe that we thrive when we ask for help and collaborate with others. However, at the end of the day — this is your business. When your intuition alarms sound, it’s time to pay attention. Your initial read on your intuitive hit may not be correct, but the fact that it’s telling you something matters. As the CEO of a business, it’s important to hone and trust those internal cues so that you can be agile, flexible and resilient in your business decisions.

As with all failures, I’m a better business owner because of them. I feel fortunate that I lost and found my way so early. While I know that there are more mistakes in front of me, I’m confident that it won’t be because I ignored my intuition.

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Union Square Ventures founder Fred Wilson addresses the slowdown in VC investments in consumer Internet companies on his blog, A VC. His post is entitled "What Has Changed."

As I read this post in the WSJ about the changing nature of VC funding of consumer web companies, I thought that we may be looking at the symptoms and not the disease. As the WSJ notes, VC funding of consumer web and mobile companies is down 42% in this first nine months of 2012 (vs the first nine months of 2011). And the big falloff is not in seed rounds, which are still getting done, but in follow-on rounds, which are not.

So what has changed in the past couple years? A lot, actually.

1) the consumer web has matured. we are almost 20 years into the consumer web and we have large platforms that are starting to suck up a lot of the oxygen. google, facebook/instagram, amazon, microsoft, apple, twitter, ebay, yahoo, AOL, craigslist, wordpress, linkedin together make up a huge amount of the time spent online, particularly in the english speaking world. there are still occasional new entrants into this list and departures too. tumblr and pinterest have risen a lot in the past couple years while myspace has declined. but consumer behaviors are starting to ossify on the web and it is harder than ever to build a large audience from a standing start.

2) the consumer is moving from desktop/web to mobile/app. we've talked about this transition ad naseum on this blog. it is the single biggest megatrend in the consumer internet space right now. most new consumer internet startups need to build for iOS, Android, and web at the same time. it is making the startup more expensive and time consuming. distribution is much harder on mobile than web and we see a lot of mobile first startups getting stuck in the transition from successful product to large user base. strong product market fit is no longer enough to get to a large user base. you need to master the "download app, use app, keep using app, put it on your home screen" flow and that is a hard one to master.

3) the momentum/late stage investors have moved from consumer to enterprise. there is a large pool of money in the venture capital asset class that is opportunistic, momentum driven, and thesis agnostic. this pool is driven largely by the public markets. this pool of capital was "all in" on consumer web/social web in the 2009-2011 time frame. it drove a lot of activity throughout the venture capital markets because each layer of the VC stack (angel, seed, Srs A, Srs B, Srs C, etc) needs to be aware of what the next layer up wants to fund. when the momentum/late stage wanted web/social, the layers below gave them web/social. now that the momentum/late stage wants enterprise, we should expect the layers below to give them enterprise.

The combination of these three factors is making it harder for consumer internet companies (web and mobile) to get funding. But the first two factors are also making it harder for consumer internet companies (web and mobile) to breakout which is more and more a prerequisite for funding. As venture portfolios fill up with promising companies with solid products that are struggling to breakout, the VCs will naturally be drawn ever more to the companies that are in fact breaking out. It is a pernicious cycle and we see it playing out very clearly in the consumer internet space these days.

What does that mean for USV? Well not that much actually. We are thesis driven to the core. We believe in what we believe in, for good or bad. And that is large networks of engaged users that have the power to disrupt big markets. We are investing at the fastest rate right now in the history of our firm. We are doing a lot of Srs A and Srs B rounds right now because that is where we see the biggest vaccum in the market. We have not done a real seed or angel round in quite a while. But that doesn't mean we wouldn't and our next investment could well be a seed or angel round.

But we are a small firm. We put out maybe $40mm to $50mm per year across all of our core funds, across initial investments and follow-ons. That is a tiny fraction of the venture capital market. We are small on purpose. We don't want to be the market. We want to invest in a tiny slice of the early stage ecosystem where our thesis collides with great teams and unique and differentiated products.

All that said, these three trends are impacting our portfolio. We have fifty portfolio companies, with the vast majority in the consumer internet space. We encouraged our portfolio companies to raise a lot of capital in 2011 and many did. But even so, we are seeing fundraising challenges everywhere, even in our very best portfolio companies. We are also seeing many of the youngest companies in the portoflio, those started after the summer of 2010, struggling with the breakout challeneges I mentioned earlier in this post. We are patient investors and believe in our portfolio companies and the teams we have funded. We are seeing patience being rewarded, particularly in the mobile market. But it is a tougher time for early stage consumer internet companies than I have seen since the 2001-2004 time frame. And I think we are still in the early innings of this more challenging environment.

So things have changed. As they always do in tech. Those who adapt to the changing dynamics, who see the openings that were not there before and slice through them, will succeed. But the wind that has been at our back for 7-8 years in consumer internet is no longer there. It's tougher sledding and will likely continue so for some time to come.

There's an excellent discussion of this post over at Fred Wilson's blog, A VC. You can check it out here >

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There have been over 300 new startups launched in Dublin over the last year.  It’s a great stat and one which genuinely underpins our ‘startup country’ marketing. I think there’s a growing realisation that our entire growth strategy is essentially predicated on starting new companies. Unfortunately I don’t think people have also grasped that failure is an essential part of this same strategy.

Most startups fail for any number of this reasons. THIS IS NORMAL. Ireland has built a genuinely good ecosystem for starting companies (and the numbers seem to be proving this out). But we’ve got to stop obsessing with people’s failures for the sake of them. Yes, a lot of property developers lost a lot of money. Yes, by all means analyse how it happened. But stop turning it into somekindoffetish.

It’s a slippery slope to suggest content policy for the media so I’ll suggest it for everyone else instead: Stop perving on the failure porn.

Being serious about startups as a country means being accepting of failure. It’s time to move on with our attitude.

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According to VC Fred Wilson, one big reason consumer startups are not very attractive to venture capital investors at the moment is that "the consumer is moving from desktop/web to mobile/app" and startups that are built for mobile are "more expensive and time-consuming" to launch."

Wilson:

Distribution is much harder on mobile than web and we see a lot of mobile first startups getting stuck in the transition from successful product to large user base. Strong product market fit is no longer enough to get to a large user base. You need to master the "download app, use app, keep using app, put it on your home screen" flow and that is a hard one to master.

Cristina Cordova, who works in business development for $200 million payments startup Stripe, says that this problem – user retention – is "the biggest problem in mobile."

Cordovoa would know. Stripe helps mobile developers accept payments, and it probably has lots of data about spikes in user payments followed by fall-offs.

On her blog, Cordova writes:

"Companies and the press often talk about downloads, flips, check-ins or even activity among active users. They avoid discussing monthly active users. Why? By far, the biggest problem facing mobile companies today is retaining the users that download their applications."

"An app is only a long-press away from being dismissed to the second, third or fourth page of apps on a user’s device. How mobile companies aim to defeat the retention problem in a world of fickle social users will be their true test."

She cites four startups that managed to get a lot of initial traction, but quickly fell off:

Socialcam: In June, Socialcam had 83.6M monthly active users connected to Facebook. Today, it has 4.3M. This is a decrease of 95% in 5 months.

Viddy: In June, Viddy had 20.9M monthly active users connected to Facebook. Today, it has 660K. This a decrease of 97% in 5 months.

Draw Something: In April, Draw Something had 36.5M monthly active users connected to Facebook. Today, it has 9.1M. This is a decrease of 75% in 7 months. 

Path: In December, Path had 250K monthly active users connected to Facebook. Almost one year later, they have about 780K monthly active users. While the 2.0 version of their app led to much initial growth, that growth has not been sustainable. 

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For startups, a big part of the battle is becoming visible. It's difficult to grow when nobody knows who you are. Unfortunately, the things that can make you visible, big ideas, big promises, and being a part of a hyped trend can end up being your downfall. 

According to GoodData founder and CEO Roman Stanek, that's an especially big problem for founders that move on to start a second company.

They start to focus on themselves, overrate their own experience, and spend too much time on what Stanek calls the "air wars," on publicity and image rather than actually making something customers want. Here's how Stanek puts it:

"The second company is harder. Most people fail at their second companies because they believe they have the magic formula. They think 'I will only fix the problems of the first company and the second company will run like it's on autopilot.' But the problem is that the environment is always different. 

One of the takeaways from my second company is that there's a clear distinction between what I would call air wars and ground wars. The air wars are talking to analysts going on speaking trips and so on. The ground wars are selling stuff to your customers and solving a real problem. Every company has to do both. The air wars help to build the brand. The ground wars help you win customers. Most failed startups mix those two up.They are selling air wars to their customers, they are selling big hype and big promises and customers are not interested. From a customer's perspective, you always look at what's the value? What do I get today and how does it help me run my business?

We have to be strong in the air wars, we have to do PR, we have to have to seek coverage, but at the end of the day it's a good product, it's good salespeople, it's the features and so on that actually win.

You have to go out there and sell your product. But its essential to remember that visibility isn't a goal in itself. It's a way to help customers find you. If you don't have something that they actually need, they're not going to stay.

NOW READ: What It Was Like Trying To Raise Money The Day Lehman Brothers Collapsed 

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There has been a lot of talk lately about a Series A funding cliff and how it's becoming harder for early stage startups to raise money.

But Greycroft Managing Director Alan Patricof said at our IGNITION conference today that he wouldn't call it cliff. 

"I would say that we've had a plethora of startups in this country," Patricof said. "A lot of these people should probably get jobs instead of starting the next company that duplicates something else."

He also says that there are simply too many startups at the moment, and not enough investors to support all of them. 

In 2013, Patricof says, it will be about the survival of the fittest.

"[Startups will] get together or they'll fold," Patricof said. "I would say that today, I don't expect a cliff. I just think it's going to be a gradual sifting out."

DON'T MISS: Groupon CEO Andrew Mason Once Asked His CFO What It Would Take For The Company To Go Bankrupt >

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Parents don't always have the easiest time finding things to do with their kids.

That's where Red Tricycle comes in. It just raised a $1.5 million round led by Maveron with participation from 500 Startups, Richmond Park Partners, Zulily, Paul Bucheit, Bob Pittman, and Jason Calacanis.

Red Tricycle helps parents find things to see, eat, do, and buy with their kids. Parents can sign up to receive Red Tricycle's email newsletter or simply visit its website to find relevant activities. 

Red Tricycle formed in 2006, but bootstrapped for a few years while it figured out how to scale the business. 

What took so long?

Red Tricyle founder Jacqui Boland tells Business Insider she wasn't initially sure if there was a opportunity to scale given the emergence of social media, and the increasing number of companies entering the market, like DailyCandy and UrbanBaby.

"In 2010, we decided we understood the business well enough, and saw a market opportunity, as Daily Candy was cutting back on kids content after Comcast's acquisition and UrbanBaby was struggling after [the] CNET/CBS acquisition, but users and advertisers were still interested in local parenting news and connecting with moms on a local level,"Boland says.

Now, Boland is going after the $2.1 trillion mom market. The company started with about 18,000 subscribers in its launch city of Seattle and has grown to more than 300,000 subscribers across six cities.

Red Tricycle has also partnered with Zulily in a co-marketing deal to fuel geographical expansion. 

"We're working closely with Zulily on a plan for content integration and distribution that will launch in the coming months," Boland says.

SEE ALSO: Dyn Is Turning New Hampshire Into A Startup Wonderland

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Y Combinator, Paul Graham's startup accelerator program, recently announced a new venture fund, YC VC.

Under the structure of the new fund, four investors, Yuri Milner, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Maverick Capital, will put $20,000 into each YC startup for a total investment of $80,000.

That's nearly half the amount YC startups have been receiving -- $150,000 -- from an informal investment pool Yuri Milner and Ron Conway put together two years ago.

Paul Graham wrote his reasoning behind the decreased investment moving forward:

"We're decreasing the amount invested because experience showed $150k was too much. It's good for startups to get some amount of investment automatically; it lets them continue working on ideas that still look like ugly ducklings on Demo Day. But $150k was more than the successful startups needed, and it sometimes caused messy disputes in the unsuccessful ones."

An intern at a Y Combinator startup, Sherjil Ozair, clarifies why he thinks Graham knocked down the investments to $80,000.

Simply put: $150,000 is too much money for the startups that fail, because it lets them try and pivot.

From Ozair on Quora:

The problem is that $150K is an awful lot of money. Among one group of startups, roughly 70% are bound to be failures. Now, even after startups have obviously failed, there is still some money left from the huge $150K pot, and since the co-founders are serial entrepreneurs, they might want to pivot, or start another startup, with the left-over money. Of course, if you just quit, then all the money goes back to the investors, but if you keep pivoting going from Social Network for Dogs to Rideshare for Elephants, you get to keep the money YC invested in the original startup.

So, by reducing the money to $80K, you roughly reduce the time the startup has to prove itself. They are not allowed to laze off, or keep pivoting. They only have one shot at it, and they got enough money for only one shot.

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