Category: Get Early Stage Funding

Empowering European entrepreneurs by accelerating sales, marketing, funding and business development for startups.

VCs are from Mars, Entrepreneurs are from Venus

John Gray’s book Men are from Mars has the subtitle ”The Classic Guide to Understanding the Opposite Sex”.  To some entrepreneurs, Venture Capitalists might as well be the opposite sex. Many entrepreneurs don’t really understand them very well. In a good blog post by ex-VC and VentureBeat writer Tom Tzach,...

How Can Entrepreneurs Keep Faith?

Something that all entrepreneurs will face sooner or later are setbacks, delays and rejection.  It goes with the territory, yet one of the hardest things is keeping faith and energy in your project, regardless what comes your way. How do others do it? How do they keep their belief in...

The Most Common Mistakes that Startup Companies Make

There is an old saying that goes: Success is the result of Good Judgment Good Judgment is the result of Experience Experience is the result of Bad Judgment Have I learned anything after almost 20 years of doing startup companies? I try not to make the same mistakes more than...

“How much to buy your baby?”

All mothers think that their babies are beautiful. OK, if not really beautiful, then certainly much more special than all the others... There is something primal in humans that makes us seek to find endearing qualities in our offspring. How much would you be willing to sell your baby for?...

Picking the Winners

How do you pick future champions while they are still young and developing? How do you identify a talented team of entrepreneurs at an early stage? How do you measure the real potential of a startup business? (more…)

Worshiping Genius

“Italy worships Genius, but has not yet figured out how to create a culture of entrepreneurship”. This was an interesting statement made by the Executive Director of the Italian Angels for Growth, Lorenzo Fanchini at last week’s semi-final of the European Venture Contest (EEVC) held in Turin. Italy is a...

Pitch Your Baby

I have a friend who just had his first child. He’s over the moon about this baby and OK, all his friends are happy for him too, but he sends out constant emails with photos, short video clips, frequent little stories about first baby steps. There are facebook pages and...

The inner game of a successful entrepreneur

Being a successful entrepreneur is an inner game. It's all about how you manage your mind and your internal beliefs. In Timothy Gallwey's famous book The Inner Game of Tennis, he pointed out that tennis players are often totally obsessed with external things (the new tennis racket, the tennis shoes,...

Let the old trees die

While the global finance crisis might be showing some signs of improvement, the outlook for the entrepreneur is still bleak. Without easy access to capital, entrepreneurs cannot grow. A forest without new growth will age quickly just like an economy without new growth will fall. While governments around the world...

Winner of prestigious European Venture Award

Background Info: RPR Technologies has been an Xelerator client for the past 3 years. In 2006 Rick Salmon took over as CEO for RPR in order to help the founders get their patented prototype on the market. The first thing Xelerator did was to assemble a professional Board of Directors...