This Week’s Must-Read Articles for Entrepreneurs

Each week we scour the web for insightful articles to share with the Founder Institute network.

This week's top articles include tips for minimizing your risk, influencing others with your ideas, top leadership traits, and why the lean startup changes everything.

Check out our must read articles for the week of April 29 - May 4th:

Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything By Steve Blank

Launching a new enterprise—whether it’s a tech start-up, a small business, or an initiative within a large corporation—has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. According to the decades-old formula, you write a business plan, pitch it to investors, assemble a team, introduce a product, and start selling as hard as you can. And somewhere in this sequence of events, you’ll probably suffer a fatal setback. The odds are not with you: As new research by Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh shows, 75% of all start-ups fail.

	How to Influence People With Your Ideas By John Butman
Aspiring idea entrepreneurs are everywhere: in businesses, classrooms, and communities of all kinds, all over the world. Maybe you know one. Maybe you are one. But you don't have a massive influence-creation machine behind you (few people do) and you wonder how to get your idea heard above all the others competing for attention. How do you proceed?

9 Leadership Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs By Martin Zwilling

Very few people know their own leadership style — or strengths and weaknesses, for that matter. But that’s a mistake. From leading a company to hiring workers, you necessarily must know what you’re good at and what, if anything, you need help with to properly meet your company’s goals. I’d argue that your leadership-development efforts may be more valuable for achieving startup success than building business skills.

In Defense of Older Workers: There’s No Substitute for Experience And Maturity By Vivek Wadhwa

True, some older workers become complacent as they age. They become set in their ways, stop learning new technologies, and believe they are entitled to the high wages they earned at their peak. Their careers stagnate for a valid reason. But these are the exception rather than the rule. Whether it is in computer programming or entrepreneurship, older workers have many advantages—they still are the guru’s.

10 Key Risk Factors to Minimize for Startup Success By Martin Zwilling

You have probably heard plenty of times that being an entrepreneur is a risky business, and investors talk all the time about reducing the risk. Yet everyone seems to have their own view of key risk drivers for startups, and I’m no exception. I don’t agree, for example, that the first priority is to avoid startups with a high attrition rate, like trendy restaurants and entertainment. Here is my own priority list of key risk drivers that every entrepreneur and every investor should evaluate and minimize in starting a business:

	Ratio Thinking By Joel Gascoigne
Something I’ve found difficult to completely embrace, but which understanding has been super important, is the idea that there is a ratio for everything. I’ve started to call this Ratio Thinking, and I’ve found myself describing this to quite a number of people recently.