As some of my ventures have grown and required the need for advertising and marketing expenditures I quickly realized that advertising inventory is regularly negotiable. Even big companies like Google Adwords and Overture regularly offer coupons for new customers. A quick search will turn them up. Other small networks allow you to sign up and [...]

A great trick I uncovered this summer is ‘deferred compensation’. Say I have a great new idea for a business that is going to change the world. Whenever I tell someone about the idea they get really excited and want to know how to help. However, I do not have all the skill sets to [...]

One evening I had the privilege of having dinner with David Friend, a serial tech entrepreneur, and currently the CEO and founder of Carbonite (a new back up solution that keeps all your personal data safe). He had a very interesting perspective on business plans. He had never made a business plan for any of [...]

I was walking around my house yesterday and had a flash of inspiration. It may be nothing or it could be a new award winning economic model. The goal of economics is to take complicated situations in our society and break them down into simple frameworks. For instance, you know intuitively (and they teach in [...]

I am very excited to be one of the contributors to the bootstrapping column of Mindpetals. Bootstrapping is not a buzzword, individual technique, or get rich quick scheme. It is a philosophy of entrepreneurship. Bootstrapping is the truest form of entrepreneurship, doing more with less is the central tenet. Why is this important? When someone [...]