The guys at ChubbyBrain have graciously allowed Founder’s Block to repost this analysis, originally published Jan 11th, of the top 20 reasons why startups fail.
We’ve previously highlighted the top startup failure post-mortems (32 in total) written by a group of startup entrepreneurs gracious enough to share their lessons learned from failure. Many of you read those post-mortems and asked, what are the most common reasons why these startups failed? After a thorough analysis of those 32 start-up post-mortems, we compiled this list of the top 20 causes of startup …

As an entrepreneur, there’s a ton of critical stuff you don’t know. Whether it’s how to incorporate, how to reach your target customers, or how to build a scalable technology framework, we are all plagued by questions that we need to answer. While tapping our personal networks and shooting a question out on Quora may sometimes teach us what we need to know, these methods don’t always lead to answers. To address this, Founder’s Block is building the Experts Exchange, an organization of entrepreneurs who are willing to share their …

Continuous learning is important in any profession.  Being a startup founder, there is perhaps no better education than software development.  I think it’s important for more business founders to make the leap and start developing software skills. Two years ago I simply considered myself a “business founder” and now I consider myself a “technical founder”.  So the goal of this post is to help other business cofounders to make this transition.
Two and a half years ago, I was relying on outsourcing (tasks-everyday.com) to develop code.  Now, I do the “hard stuff” …

At a recent networking event aimed to help entrepreneurs find co-founders, a VC and an angel investor were on panel discussing why they usually avoid single founder companies. One common argument they brought up is that the burdens of building a startup are more easily shared between people. Venture Hacks famously proposes that startups with “the power of two” founders, preferably a “builder” and a “seller”, have the best shot at success. Another concern is that if you’re a single founder, it may be because you weren’t able to convince …

Update: Google just made a significant move toward the future of the semantic web.  We’re going to see an all-out war between Google and Facebook soon.
Technology moves at a sometimes dizzying speed; Moore’s Law demands it.  The pace of tech innovation is such that people often speculate on what The Next Big Thing will be.  While the serious predictions are probably best left to the futurists, I have a few thoughts on the matter:
Whatever TNBT is, I believe it will be some combination of mobile internet, Big Data, the cloud, and the semantic …

There are plenty of quality blogs by seasoned entrepreneurs, VCs, and startups that have already gained traction. We’d like to see more from folks who have just quit their jobs to pursue their passions or are embroiled in the super early stages of their ventures. We think that the companies that are just starting out are some of the most exciting and want to hear more of their stories.
FoundersBlock’s writers are all based in the NYC metropolitan area. Some of us have lived former lives before taking the plunge and …