If you are eager to start a startup but not ready yet, there are a few steps you can take that will give your startup a head start, even if you still don’t have a startup idea.

With more Americans running one-person businesses than ever before, Silicon Valley is paying attention.

Howard is primarily focused on sourcing new investments and working with Morpheus portfolio companies. He currently serves on the Board of Tagnos and DarkLight. Howard was previously with Mission Ventures, a leading Southern California venture capital firm focused on software and semiconductor investments. Prior to Mission, he was with Salomon Smith Barney in their Technology Investment Banking Group where he was involved with public and private financings and M&A. Howard holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from UCLA and an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Leonard M. Lanzi has over 30 years of organization management and fund development experience. He has been serving as the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Venture Association since 2007. In his capacity at LAVA, Len works with the LAVA board of directors to direct the strategic plan and organize educational and informational programs within the venture funded startup ecosystem in the greater Los Angeles region.

Kelly is the Managing General Partner of Moonshots Capital - an early stage VC fund that invests in early stage technology companies and leans in heavily in veteran founded companies. He is a co-founder & Managing Partner at DuMont Project - a consultative agency that helps accelerate the growth of direct to consumer brands. Prior to DuMont Project he was the CEO of Fastpoint Games, a venture-backed leading developer of live data-driven games for the fortune 500 brand set.

Howie works to identify and evaluate promising early-stage technology and consumer centric companies. He conducts diligence on all potential investments as well as helps quarterback general operations and strategy for ABV. Howie delivers expertise in many facets of business while bringing a hard core entrepreneurial perspective. Howie was previously on the founding team of a Y-Combinator backed biotech startup called Immunity Project and is currently a mentor at 500 Startups and Runway Innovation Hub. He was a featured judge on Season 2 of Gimlet Media’s thepitch.vc podcast.

Yair Vardi is a founding partner of Fusion LA, the first accelerator for Israeli start-ups in Los Angeles. Fusion LA’s vision is to support a long-term bridge of innovation between the LA & Israeli tech ecosystems. Prior to co-founding Fusion LA, Vardi oversaw US-Israel technology and innovation partnerships at the Consulate General of Israel in Los Angeles.

I'm a serial entrepreneur and digital strategist with over 12 years experience building startups, running accelerators and consulting for fortune 500 companies and celebrities. As a trainer, I served as the co-director of a startup program that has helped over 100 startups go on to raise over 40M in funding and get into accelerators like Techstars, YCombinator and 500 Startups. I'm also a specialist in no-code and workflow automation. Lover of tacos, travel and the great outdoors!

Larissa was the first employee at Brex — the first of its kind credit card for startups. She was deeply involved in the early iterations of the company, working on everything from recruiting an international workforce to developing sales strategies, structuring and scaling the customer support team to expanding Brex to other early stage tech hubs outside of the Bay Area . She attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where she studied economics under the leadership of her thesis advisor and mentor to Sheryl Sandberg, Larry Summers. The daughter of a sugar mill supervisor, Larissa is the first person in her state to attend the university. At Harvard, she served as President of Eliot House and President of The Brazil Conference - where she interviewed and engaged with countless world leaders - including Warren Buffett.

Petra Griffith launched Wedbush Ventures to foster the next generation of technology companies solving big market problems. Having built many firsts - the first online printing software, first fitness wearable, first native ads - and ushered a bank into the age of technology, Petra understands the strategic and creative mindset necessary to narrow in on a product’s core features for successful market fit. Her past leadership to product, strategy, marketing, and operations teams at established and startup organizations like Netflix, Yahoo!, and 24 Hour Fitness makes Petra a coveted product strategy ally to entrepreneurs ready to scale innovation.

James is the Deputy Head and Start-up Coach for the F10 Incubator and Accelerator in Zurich. He also works as an investment analyst for the F10 Investment Ag Previously, James co-founded PBF Solutions, a fintech firm that helps financial services product providers to acquire and on-board new customers and raise savings and investments deposits. PBF helped raise over £4 billion for its clients and was acquired by Raisin GmbH in 2017. Prior to PBF James worked in the alternative investment space and financial consulting.

As the director of sales at Blueground, a global real estate tech company, and over 10 years spent in the technology space, I have had the opportunity to meet and work with thousands of sales professionals across all levels. From having hired close to 100 skilled account executives along the way, what I’ve noticed is that top sellers understand common themes and consistently draw upon those behaviors in the development of winning sales ecosystems.

Learn how to create a sales process for your team to use when converting any prospect from a lead to a customer.

The Best Time to Cold Call & More Data-Driven Sales Secrets

The 8 Steps of the Sales Process: What You Need to Know

Let's say your marketing team is crushing it. All the metrics they use to measure success are green. At the same time, your sales time is not feeling the effects of their efforts and are spending more time prospecting when they should be closing. What's going on here?

In 2012, Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas Toman penned an article for Harvard Business Review that explores the notion that most companies know their needs and are capable of determining solutions for themselves, thereby shaking up traditional sales strategies and methods...

For the last fifty years, every company would live or die by the strength of their sales funnel.

The three things that often break in companies scaling from Series A to B: Support roles for the sales org: sales operations and enablement; Hire the experience you need today; and Invest in an inbound engine.

Most retail brands have a sales cycle in place, but the events of 2020 have impacted the way the cycle works. Ensuring that prospects travel through the cycle to the point where they not only make purchases but become advocates for the brand has now become even more important.

It’s no secret that data is running the world. For most businesses, data is critical to growth and expansion, and today they have access to a robust amount of data. More companies are relying on data to help them identify challenges, make timely decisions and impact their bottom lines. From storing employees’ contact information to keeping track of inventory, data can be used in just about every aspect of a business.

No, it’s not another buzzword. A sales trigger event is crucial because it distinguishes hot leads from cold ones. It gives you the opportunity to maximize the effectiveness of your sales pitch and help you close a deal.

Scaling your sales strategy isn’t a straightforward process. It is, in fact, a challenge that many businesses face. Their customers are ready to buy, but the internal sales operation cannot scale quickly enough to reach them.

Sales reps likely had a specific block of time when they knew they could catch you at work, but now hardly anyone is sitting at their office desk. Prospects may work or live in different time zones, or be sitting on their couch rather than by their office phone. Where and when we work has drastically changed. Since the pandemic began, there has been a 25 percent increase in meetings before 9 a.m. and a 121 percent increase in meetings after 4 p.m.

COVID-19 drastically changed how non-essential businesses promote their products and services to their customers. Marketing strategies that may have been effective pre-COVID may no longer deliver the desired results now, especially as people’s habits for shopping and buying seemingly changed overnight.

The path to professional growth for startups is different than in established corporations. With limited employees, budgets and time, startups must prioritize where they invest those resources. While it is understandable for startups to be cautious where they spend in this stage, there is one internal investment that startups should never overlook when working toward growth: training and development programs.

Studies show that during the COVID-19 pandemic tech employees are working longer hours, skipping breaks and experiencing a general fatigue toward remote processes. Such exhaustive behaviors are problematic when considering the demand for tech workers has remained high throughout the crisis.

When Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced in May that employees would be able to work from home—or from wherever they’d like—indefinitely, it marked a major change in the tech industry. Soon, other Silicon Valley companies, including Square, Slack and Upwork, followed suit, announcing their own plans to shift to a remote model. And as COVID-19 continues to spike in California, more tech giants are likely to do the same.

There’s a persistent myth in the startup world that to build an innovative company you need a freewheeling culture that lets everybody do things their own way.

If I told you two years ago that you would hire graduates from the class of 2020 without meeting them in person and without them ever setting foot in your office, you would have been rightfully incredulous. But this scenario doesn’t sound nearly as far-fetched today.