In February 2013, Evgeny Tchebotarev met with his four-person leadership team at 500px, an online photography community he had co-founded in 2009 with Oleg Gutsol, a longtime friend. They were in the middle of a fundraising campaign but hadn't found a single interested investor. Some of Tchebotarev's leaders felt that there was a change that [...]
In 2009, Simon Tomlinson and Stewart Wigg, the cofounders of Bluesun, a technology consulting business, came to a disturbing conclusion--they had created the wrong company. They had gone into business eight years prior with the dream to build a thriving market leader, but had ended up with a small lifestyle business. It was a conclusion [...]
In the winter of 2014, serial entrepreneur Albert Lai sat alone waiting for a friend at a restaurant down the street from his latest venture, Big Viking Games. On the table in front of him lay his iPhone. He had just drafted an email and was debating whether to press send--it was a message that [...]
"Your idea will never work." These words rang through Tami Zuckerman's head as she sat in her family's kitchen alone one day in the winter of 2012. At the time, she was a kindergarten teacher on pregnancy leave, who believed she had an idea for a new solution to a huge problem. Unfortunately, the person [...]
In October 2001, Sean McDade, the founder of PeopleMetrics, looked down at the document lying on his desk--a term sheet for a $250,000 investment in his startup. His employees had gone home for the day, and as he sat in his office alone, he considered how the funds could add five new employees to his [...]
This post, “The Secret Behind the Startup That Ballooned but Almost Popped” appeared first on Inc. In 2007, our friends at Northstar Balloons entered the balloon market space with the intention of giving the established players a serious poke. Working in Northstar's favor was the fact that its founder, Garry Kieves, had a history of [...]
This post, “The Founders Who Turned a Dud Into an Enterprise” appeared first on Inc. It was the spring of 2009, before we had even met Mike Silagadze. He was sitting in his apartment, waiting for his roommate and business partner, Mohsen Shahini, to show up. He had some devastating news to share about their startup, [...]
This post, “This Small Business Tripled Its Revenue” appeared first on Inc. In 2012, our friend Andrew Blickstein, owner of Home Run Media, a small TV advertising agency located in Chicago, stepped into the boardroom of a large prospective client with a new understanding of his business, one that he hoped would help him land [...]
This post, “This Entrepreneur Raised $70 Million” appeared first on Inc. In 2007, Allen Lau stepped into a coffee shop in his hometown of Toronto to meet with his business partner, Ivan Yuen. The topic of discussion that day: Decide what to do with Wattpad, their struggling business. When Lau sat down, he pushed his [...]
If you like to make your employees happy, you’re doing good stuff for your business. According to a recent Gallup study, organizations with high employee engagement enjoy 20% more productivity and 20% higher profitability. But making employees happy isn’t always easy. In fact, 7 out of 10 employees in North America aren’t engaged at work. [...]
