Month: May 2019

The 3 Types of Founder Roles

If you only listen to one thing from me, listen to this 👇 We must have absolute and total focus on one thing every day when running a startup I can’t stress the importance of this anymore. There are three roles to every business: 1) Working In the Business  2) Working On the Business  3) Working …

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Are You Waiting for Passion to Strike?

Most folks want to feel passion in their work, and don’t want to necessarily own or run a big business with thousands of employee headaches, board meetings, earnings calls and compliance requirements. They don’t want the endless hiring, the gut wrenching firing, the page after page HR compliance paperwork, or the “How the hell am …

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Founders Fumble - Reagan Pollack

The Founder’s Fumble

When I was 20, I launched my first Internet company out of my dorm room. The idea was simple – solve the pain for emerging, un-signed music artists struggling to get ahead in their careers in the music industry, by connecting them with record labels, managers, publishers, agents, venues and music studios on one platform. …

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The Top 10 Startup Flavors of Failure

PICK YOUR FLAVOR OF FAILURE:   A common fallacy among observers of entrepreneurship is that they believe that startup failure happens at the end — the culmination of a series of compounding bad decisions that leads to a singular outcome — namely dissolution. That’s not accurate. Failure happens at virtually every stage of a company, …

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Lessons in Entrepreneurship - Reagan Pollack

Ask yourself, why this particular startup, now?

In today’s highly competitive, and frankly oversaturated world, simply launching something new isn’t enough to secure your spot in the top of someone’s mind. As an entrepreneur, we need to get past our ability to launch a new product or service, and before we even begin, ask a simple question – why now? Every successful …

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Uber, Lyft & AirBnb – the Access Economy of the Future

Everything you want – just one click away The promise of Web 2.0 circa 2004-2007, characterized by a major structural shift from top-down content generation, to bottom-up content creation and dissemination across new platforms, gave rise to a new way of thinking about the creation and delivery method of valuable information and access. With social …

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Reagan Pollack

1 month ago

Reagan Pollack
In 2005 while attending Babson College business school, I set out to launch my first internet startup. The vision was to build a platform (back then it was called a web portal) that would connect the music industry and expedite artist discovery (A&R), facilitate new business deals, and bridge the fragmented music business ecosystem. The goal was large, but in order to accomplish it, without prior experience nor significant connections, I broke the mission down into manageable tasks and chunks. This not only helped lay the foundation but also helped me to prioritize which elements would be needed first and subsequently.At graduation, I headed back to Silicon Valley and began my adventure full steam by opening an office, raising capital, and hiring my first ten team members. With a business plan in hand, I had a clear roadmap from an operational and financial perspective, and by spending significant time constructing the website wire-frames, it helped me to better stress test my assumptions with real-world pre-customer feedback. While most of the business plan didn’t materialize the way I had envisioned, it did help me greatly to strengthen my resolve for the vision and gain confidence that the end goal was material. I implore founders today to spend a few weeks writing down their vision and breaking into daily tasks, and the rank them in order of importance - ask yourself “if this comes first, does this unlock value next?” “If this comes next, does this expedite the next phase on my list?” The best (fastest to get to market and grow) entrepreneurs think in phases and are incredible at prioritizing tasks to reach the next tranche of milestones. Being in a startup can be dizzying - there a dozens of potential features to build, hundreds of people to pitch, and time is your enemy. Practicing prioritization - the ability to truly rank each activity by its weight (value) to drive actual traction - will ultimately position your business to win cost efficiently and market effectively. #nostartupleftbehind #entrepreneur #startups #entrepreneurship #founderstory ... See MoreSee Less
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