Finance

In any business, one of the most challenging aspects is hiring the right people at the right time.  I recently spoke at a virtual conference for female entrepreneurs where I shared some of my lessons learned building ThirdLove into one of the largest online retailers of bras and underwear in America.  What I told them was this: your first few …

Many schools generally start in the middle of August. Like it or not, parents count on schools to provide not only an education but childcare. As many people learned when schools and daycares closed in the spring, it’s tough to work from home and watch and educate children all at the same time. And a lot more people found out …

Financial health is a lot like maintaining a certain body weight. You can make $100,000 a year and live paycheck to paycheck. Or make $40,000 a year and consistently put money into savings. As with calories consumed and calories burned, financial stability eventually comes down to the difference in how much you earn and how much you spend. Even so, broader guidelines are …

Mark Zuckerberg credits Steve Jobs with mentoring him through the intense pressure to sell Facebook in its early days. Bill Gates calls Warren Buffett his mentor. Eric Schmidt provided “adult supervision” for Larry Page and Sergey Brin during Google’s early years.  If even these icons need mentors, having an experienced sounding board to bounce problems and ideas off of is even …

The biggest tech news this week is the antitrust hearing before Congress that involved the CEOs of four of the largest tech companies in the world, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon. I’m generally not someone who thinks these hearings do much to advance the cause of, well, anything beyond scoring political points.  To that end, the format left plenty to …

In addition to a human tragedy of epic proportions, Covid-19 has proven to be a a huge business challenge and — for some — a growth accelerant. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has written many times — such as in this 2016 shareholder letter — the outcome all depends on how you orient yourself to what he mildly calls external trends. In …

There are plenty of skills entrepreneurs need to be successful, but in an interview from more than a decade ago, Bill Gates suggested that sales skills may be the most important differentiator between success and failure. Speaking at the 2007 Salon des Entrepreneurs conference in France, the Microsoft co-founder said that “every entrepreneur needs to be a mix of different skills.” …

If there’s one thing about work that the coronavirus hasn’t changed it’s that drinking coffee is an inextricable element of most everybody’s workday, at least in the USA. And that’s a good thing, because the science says that coffee is a super-food. Drinking two to four 8-ounce cups of coffee each day decreases your risk of contracting Type 2 diabetes …

Most companies waste hundreds of thousands of dollars and man hours on unnecessary or ill-conceived market research. I know whereof I speak because for six years, I worked in a marketing group inside the software division of a huge high tech firm. Our group spent around $2 million a year on market research in today’s dollars: a combination of custom …

The surprise album drop isn’t new. On a random Thursday in December 2013, Beyonce announced on Instagram that her self-titled album was available on iTunes. For big names — and few are bigger than Beyonce — that strategy can work. Her album hit #1 on the Billboard charts the next week. Bonus tracks are also not new. Often they only appear …