Startup Studio

17/09/2025

What you say first is a leading indicator of your mindset, maturity, and priorities. It reveals where you’ll soar (or stumble) long before the market ever answers. From mentoring hundreds of founders, I’ve noticed eight “tells” that show up in Startups again and again:

1️⃣ Leading with Lean Startup jargon
Language isn’t ex*****on.

2️⃣ Opening with patents
Early obsession with patents screams “corporate mindset.”

3️⃣ Showing your solution first
If you need a demo for me to get it, you may not have a business.

4️⃣ Starting with Why
Conviction is powerful but without market clarity it risks sounding like faith over traction.

5️⃣ Digging into personal experience
If the story is all you’ve got, investors wonder if you can actually deliver.

6️⃣ Asking a question for affirmation
Questions reveal insecurity if not paired with evidence.

7️⃣ Requiring NDAs or secrecy
NDAs early on convey paranoia, not confidence.

8️⃣ Starting with the problem
Good but if you misjudge the problem’s relevance, you’ve lost the room before you’ve begun.

💡 The fix? Do the opposite:
Replace jargon with proof of learning.
Lead patents with traction.
Let them ask for the demo.
Pair vision with data.
Scale your story beyond yourself.
Bring metrics, not polls.
Share openly, build fast.
State the problem, then close the loop with your solution.

With the fall season of cohorts starting, I’m reminded that most founders will be asking of advisors why there is so much emphasis on practicing the elevator pitch.

15/09/2025

The summit feels like the victory, but founders know the real test is the descent. Recovery isn’t collapse; it’s rhythm, resilience, and sharpening the saw so the next climb is possible. Too many confuse motion for momentum, and burnout is the cost. Here’s why mastering recovery is as vital as the sprint itself.

Founders love the sprint. I do.

11/09/2025

Between mind and money, which one matters more when starting a business?

Money runs out. Mindset regenerates.
Capital buys tools. Conviction builds companies.

Investors often say, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” But founders know it works the other way around: “I’ll see it when I believe it.”

Seems obvious to me and so I put together some deeper thought that might help founders find the right investors. Venture Capital follows belief.

What Startup Investors Do Differently

08/09/2025

Cities don’t fail startup events because founders don’t care.
They lose them because no one ever saw the invitation. I'm talking to essentially all here because I hear of events more often after the fact than when you want us to know.

Let's fix this. Newsletters land in “Promotions.” Facebook throttles reach. LinkedIn buries half your posts. Your carefully funded pitch night or accelerator session feels empty, not because the community isn’t there, but because your distribution does NOT work the way it used to.

For community builders, city leaders, and economic development teams, this is the rub: if you aren’t everywhere, you’re nowhere.

What it takes now:

✅ Anchor hub – Every event needs one authoritative listing: your city’s innovation site, a Founder Institute page, or a chamber registration form. All other links point there.

✅ Multi-platform mirroring – Eventbrite, Meetup, Luma, Facebook Events, LinkedIn Events. Not optional. They are the Google of local discovery. If you’re only posting on one, you’re invisible to half your community.

✅ Direct invitations – LinkedIn and Facebook both let you invite connections or group members directly. Few municipalities use this. It works because it feels like a personal ask, not a broadcast.

✅ Social strategy – One post is a billboard in the desert. Cities should plan multi-week campaigns: tag partners, tag mentors, tag sponsoring organizations. Ask staff and stakeholders to comment in the first hour—algorithms notice.

✅ Email = reinforcement – Not your lifeline. Assume most never see it. Use email to point people back to the hub and to join your Groups or Pages.

✅ Omnichannel as infrastructure – The student finds events on Meetup, the professional on LinkedIn, the family on Facebook, the journalist on X. A healthy ecosystem meets all of them where they already are.

Think this way: Events are infrastructure. They’re where trust forms, investors meet founders, and sponsors validate your city’s ecosystem. If you want to be the city known for startups, it’s not enough to build the program. You must build the distribution muscle, so people show up.

MORE ABOUT HOW, HERE:

Stop Hoping, Start Distributing

02/09/2025

Bootstrapping isn’t “pure.” Raising capital isn’t “selling out.”
Both are math problems. Fail to do the math, and you’ll fail the business.

Too often, entrepreneurs treat the “bootstrap vs raise” question like a badge of honor. The gurus say: do it yourself, never take money. Nice sentiment, until your competitor raises $10M, hires 50 salespeople, and eats your lunch. Being lean is noble. Being undercapitalized is fatal.

Let's dig into the myths and realities:

🔹 Bootstrapping: It’s still capital, just yours (or your customers’). Works if your costs are low, growth is predictable, and scale isn’t the moat. Otherwise? Slow bleed.

🔹 External Capital – Same math, different players.
* Banks: Want repayment + interest. Fail and you’re toast.
* Government/Grants: Free money with strings. Good early, painful later.
* Partners: Money plus emotions. Can you survive year three still friends?
* Investors: Not buying your demo. Buying a 20x return. That’s the job.

🔹Startups vs Businesses - Stop confusing them.
VC isn’t for your bakery. It’s for the AI that makes cashiers obsolete. Businesses create steady returns. Startups change the rules. Different game, different math.

**Bootstrap or raise?**

👉 Does your venture need outside capital, and can it deliver the expected return?
* If yes, raise.
* If no, bootstrap.
* If you don’t know, you’re not ready.

Harsh? Maybe. But the real mistake is treating this as ideology instead of strategy; both paths kill you if you choose wrong.

💡 Stop deciding to bootstrap because you prefer it. Stop expecting VC because you need it. Asking “should I raise or bootstrap?” start asking, “what capital structure gives my business the oxygen it needs while delivering the return my stakeholders expect?” And stop waiting to talk to investors until you “need” them, relationships start now, not later.

https://paulobrien.substack.com/p/bootstrap-or-raise-capital

25/08/2025

Most founders think innovation is about vision and grit. It isn’t. Quantum Leap had it figured out back in 1989.

Sam Beckett is the CEO – leaping into chaos, determined to fix what’s broken.

Al Calavicci is the CTO – translating data and turning problems into solvable steps.

And Ziggy, the AI supercomputer, is the CMO – running the odds, knowing the market, pointing the way.

That’s the minimum viable innovation team: vision, problem-solving, and market intelligence. Leave one out and you’re not innovating, you’re gambling.

This “startup triad” shows up everywhere: Doctor Who (Doctor, companion, TARDIS), Star Trek (Kirk, Spock, McCoy). Culture keeps telling us the same story because it’s the only model that works.

I unpacked this more fully here:

Why Every Startup Needs Its CEO, CTO, and CMO

19/08/2025

It’s not your idea that fails.
It’s you; or more precisely, how you and your team handle uncertainty.

Research keeps proving what most founders learn the hard way: psychology is the strongest predictor of startup success.

Founders who score high on resilience, novelty-seeking, and self-efficacy survive longer.

Teams with complementary personalities grow faster than teams full of identical “visionaries.”

The cracks that kill most startups aren’t in the product or pitch deck; they’re in the founder’s wiring under stress.

The Entrepreneur DNA Assessment (built by Founder Institute, validated on 100,000+ founders worldwide) measures 25 dimensions proven to matter in startups: things like adaptability, persuasiveness, grit, creativity, and decision-making speed.

Are you a Visionary Innovator who thrives in chaos but needs an ex*****on partner?

A Pragmatic Optimizer who scales systems but needs a risk-taker beside you?

A Social Mobilizer who rallies people but needs technical depth on the team?

Not knowing this is neglect.

You’ll know where you thrive and where you’re blind.

You’ll build teams that complement you instead of mirror you.

You’ll stop wasting time trying to “be everything” and start focusing where you add the most value.

In a world where 90% of startups fail, skipping this step is like skipping the MVP. It’s the difference between building deliberately and gambling blindly.

👉 Take the assessment. Use the data. Build a team that tilts the odds in your favor.

Entrepreneurial DNA: The Science in Startup Success

06/08/2025

Startups don’t fail because of product.
They fail because no one believes the story they’re telling.

If you're not earning trust, you're not growing. It's that simple.

Whether you're a founder pitching investors or a city trying to attract innovation, your challenge isn’t sales, it’s narrative credibility.

Here’s how to fix it, using the ACES, a framework every startup and ecosystem should be using to understand how belief is built:

👉 Awareness – Are people aware of you in a way that’s relevant?
Not just noise or social posts, do you stand for something timely, urgent, and meaningful? Most founders die in this stage. Cities too. They’re “on the map,” but no one knows why they matter.

👉 Consideration – Can people clearly understand what you do, why it matters, and why it’s worth prioritizing now?
Is your value proposition clear enough that someone would fight for budget to work with you? If not, you’re not getting past the first meeting.

👉 Engagement – Are they allocating attention, time, and resources toward you?
If not, they don’t trust you yet. Engagement is how belief materializes before a sale. If your startup or program isn’t getting real involvement, you skipped steps one or two.

👉 Sales – Only now have you earned the right to close, convert, or expand.
But if this is where you’re starting, if your pitch deck or city initiative begins with "let us tell you what we offer" you’ve already lost the deal.

This is the mistake everyone is making:
Startups treat sales like a funnel.
Cities treat awareness like a brand campaign.
Governments treat sales as success.

It’s a credibility architecture. And skipping any step is why your growth stalls.

✅ Start with relevance, not reach.
✅ Craft stories that make your audience feel understood.
✅ Diagnose where belief breaks down, not just where the sale fails.
✅ Design your growth strategy to build trust, not just traffic.

Whether you’re building a startup or a startup economy, the question isn’t how do we grow?
It’s: Where do people stop believing us and why?

Most of you don’t fail because they lack a great product, brilliant founders, or access to capital. You fail because you haven’t worked out how to tell your story.

30/07/2025

Every founder thinks they’re growing.
Almost none are.

I’ve never seen a startup pitch that actually understands growth. And I’ve seen a lot of pitch decks.

You’ll show me the hockey stick. The S-curve. Maybe a TAM-SAM-SOM pyramid. But ask you to prove how you get from here to there? Crickets. Fluff. Buzzwords. Hope.

This isn’t just a founder problem, it’s systemic.

Startup advisors keep teaching bad models.
* Investors chase vanity metrics.
* Governments subsidize headcount like it’s proof of success.

We’re failing. And we’re failing because nobody actually understands growth.

Startups don’t grow by scaling. They grow by proving.

By building a repeatable system that turns value into revenue before they run out of cash, time, or trust.

But the advice out there? It’s built for traditional business, for marketers who know how, not for venture-backed innovation and not to guide most of you who don't even know what to do.

So, throw out every framework you’ve ever been given:

The Lean Canvas? Incomplete.
Product-Market Fit? Happens after sustainability, not before.
GTM Slide? Almost always nonsense. If it’s generic, it’s useless.
“Early stage”? What does that even mean?

We need a stage-driven model of growth rooted in revenue, risk, and reality. Not vibes. Not jargon. Not “traction” that can’t be traced.

Instead, think Revenue-centric and charted growth in seven distinct stages, each with a specific objective and real graduation criteria, this hits what you all need: real growth, validation, and revenue.

Stages:

1. Existential – No one cares yet. Define your hypothesis.
2. Discovery – Prove it works. Just once.
3. Adoption – Build consistency and start selling without brute force.
4. Sustainability – Real revenue. Predictable profit. Fundable and sellable.
5. Scalability – Chaos with control. Now we grow.
6. Saturation – You own the market. Stay relevant.
7. Event – The wild card: crisis, exit, disruption. Can you adapt?

Forget the hockey stick. Think flywheel.
This model isn’t just prettier, it’s functional.
It changes how founders grow and how investors assess.

🎥 Because here's the uncomfortable truth we'll make into a movie:

A) Startups that don’t understand growth should not be funded.

B) Policies that don’t distinguish high-growth ventures from small businesses shouldn’t be written.

C) Advisors who don’t know these stages should not be talking 😅

If you’re a founder chasing scale before proving sustainability, you’re just burning cash.

👉 Founders: What stage are you really in?
👉 Advisors: Can your curriculum define this path?
👉 Investors: Are you funding startups… or guessing?

Read this:

Startups don’t grow like businesses. Not in the traditional sense.

23/07/2025

The GTM Slide Is Killing Your Pitch
Every founder does this.
Almost none of you know what the hell it’s for.

The Go To Market (GTM) slide is the single most misunderstood, misused, and mangled part of the startup pitch deck. Most GTM slides today are a smattering of hopeful buzzwords ("social media," "partnerships," "influencers") pretending to be a plan.

If your GTM slide could fit any other startup, it fits none.

That slide should prove you know your market:
Where they are
What they respond to
What it costs to reach them
How you’re scaling that acquisition

Instead, we get what?
A list of tactics with no funnel. No customer behavior insights. No CAC math. No narrative. Just a bingo card of BS.

Want to stand out? Stop listing channel names. Describe customer actions. Example:

❌ "Social Media"

✅ "We convert from Reddit threads discussing this problem. Our founder is active in 3 top communities, has mapped 14 threads with >100 comments, and first customers came from those."

That’s GTM.

Most of your slides are a fantasy. And worse, they reveal you don’t understand how people buy.

🔥 The fix?
Interview 100+ people. Reverse-engineer your competitors’ demand gen. Spend $500 testing. Build one repeatable motion. Narrate the customer journey. And then (only then) build the damn slide.

Your GTM isn't what you intend to try.
It's what you know works. Because you've already done it.
📉 Keep pitching what you don't know and you’ll keep getting ghosted.
📈 Build your GTM like a CMO and you’ll close like one.

👇 Founders, pass it on. Tag someone. Share this.
Because ALL of you screw it up.

The Go To Market Slide (GTM), is the most misunderstood, misused, and mangled slide in the entire startup pitch deck. It’s like the appendix of a pitch; everyone includes it, nobody knows exactly why, and when it bursts, the whole body of your presentation goes septic.

07/07/2025

This has been sitting with me a while and it's time to be harsh, because startup development organizations and advisors clearly aren't helping founders:

Your Startup Pitch Sounds Like a Middle School Science Fair Project. And that’s why no one gives a damn.

You’ve got your problem. You've got your solution. You've got a chart, maybe even a demo.

Cool. So do 10,000 other founders. And yet, you still don’t know why no one’s buying, no one’s investing, and no one’s sharing.

Here’s the harsh truth:
👉 You’re pitching the existence of a solution, not the reason the problem still exists.
👉 You're selling a feature, not a fundamental fix.
👉 You're trying to “differentiate” without ever proving you understand what makes the problem persistent.

No one cares that you solved the problem. We care about why it still exists.

Uber solved ride-sharing. Salesforce solved CRM. So, if you’re building the same thing, but “better,” explain why they didn’t (or couldn’t).

Middle schooler, you're solving global warming by removing plastic from the ocean? Awesome. Why hasn't it been done before??

Because if you can’t do that, you're not pitching a startup. You’re pitching a feature request that people will ignore, can clone, or will be killed.

I wrote this because I’m exhausted watching great founders sabotage themselves with cookie-cutter, feel-good pitch decks that tell me absolutely nothing about why they’ll win.

Stop pitching your startup like it’s a 7th-grade science fair project.
read this before you pitch again:

Why no one cares about your startup

03/07/2025

You’re Not Running a Business. You’re Creating the Future. And the System Still Doesn’t Get It.

Every time a media outlet “discovers” that startup founders might be psychologically different, the real story isn’t the headline — it’s the fact that we’re still pretending this is news.

This week, The Economist asked, “Are startup founders different?”

Yes, they’re different. They have to be.

And ignoring that difference breaks everything.

It misaligns advice, capital, policy, education — even who gets hired.

Founders operate in chaos. They create value where none exists. They think in uncertainty, not plans. And when coached like small business owners and funded like managers, they are misled.

We’ve known for decades that startups require unusual minds: obsessive, open, disagreeable, delusional (in a good way). Venture capitalists know this. Founder-market fit isn’t hype; it’s the entire thesis.

But government grants, bank loans, MBA programs, and media still treat entrepreneurship as a monolith. One-size-fits-none.

What happens when you apply the wrong model?

* You give stabilizing advice to volatile companies.

* You fund scalable ideas with small-business tools.

* You teach rule-breaking creators how to manage, not how to build.

* You lose the very people wired to change the world.

This isn’t semantics, it’s structural failure.

If we’re serious about innovation, stop forcing founders into systems designed for managers. Stop pretending volatility is failure. Start designing for the people who don’t fit, because that’s where the breakthroughs come from.

It’s always amusing when mainstream media stumbles into a conversation the rest of us have been having for, oh, I don’t know… decades?