Useless of Useful?

Learn from the best in LA

Sales at its essence is going beyond your comfort zone

One of the tried and true ways of getting business and creating real sustainable relationships.

1. Be comfortable with being uncomfortable

What are the different sales channels, how do we create them, and what is the payoff?

How to and the importance of organizing a sales call.

Consistent, effective activity with a purpose.

Setting up your calendar, properly, is the first step to success

What to do once you’re at the appointment

These are some suggested guidelines to make coffee meetings productive:

Couple Best Practices for Networking and Life

In the United States, 45% of businesses don’t make it past five years. 65% don’t make it past ten years. Yet everyone who ever starts a business backs themselves to beat the odds

Are you applying to jobs you're qualified for, but not hearing back from anyone? Do you feel like your friends are having an easier time in the job market than you are? If either of those questions applies to you, it's time to step back and develop a new game plan for your job searching. You may have grown up with some beliefs about finding the perfect job that may be outdated in this day and age. One of the biggest secrets to finding a job in 2020 is networking.

When I talk to women about restarting their careers after time focused on family, I emphasize the need for networking.

No matter what industry you're in, networking is critical to your success. The more people you know and form connections with, the more opportunities you will have in your career.

While the benefits of delegation may be clear, actually delegating is not always an easy thing to do.

What drives entrepreneurs to take the risks of starting new businesses? Motivations vary. However, money is rarely, if ever, the primary incentive.

Laurent is an Entrepreneur turned Venture Capitalist who works with start-up founders to successfully build scalable teams, strong company cultures and disruptive products. Laurent believes that there is a fundamental need for additional support in the early stage ecosystem in Los Angeles and other budding technology hubs around the US and globally. This desire to support these growing tech communities led him to his current role as the Lead Investor at Luma Launch, a pre-seed to seed corporate venture and accelerator. Luma Launch is focused on early-stage startups at the convergence of evolving technology and content markets, capitalizing on internal and external resources to create successful products.

Shawn is an experienced founder and entrepreneur focused on early stage growth. Shawn previously founded Solve (Y Combinator S17), notably growing the business from $0 to $70K MRR in 3 months, before selling it last December. He is currently an Entrepreneur in Residence at Guthy Renker and an advisor at several early stage startups. He loves discussing all things strategy and growth, particularly with regards to helping companies achieve and maintain profitability.

Miki Reynolds is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Grid110, an early stage startup accelerator and community development organization. She has 15 years of experience working in tech, ranging from digital marketing and creative services to software development and e-commerce.

YC CEO and Partner Michael Seibel shares his approach to building an MVP and getting your first users as a pre-launch startup.

How problems finding product market fit, listening to investors, copying startups around you, slow product development, and co-founder conflict kill startups.

When people ask me for tech career advice I find it helpful to lay out the three paths I’ve encountered most in my career: founder, executive, and employee. I’m leaving out investor because the best path to being an investor that I’ve seen starts with being successful (or failing) at one of these three first.

Konsus joined Y Combinator this spring in the W16 batch. We applied from Norway, where we had launched our company a few months earlier, and had good traction at 10% weekly growth.

We thought it might help us scale Y Combinator if we could distill the most generalizable parts of this advice into a sort of playbook we could give our companies. Then we thought we should just give it to everyone. This is meant for people new to the world of startups. Most of this will not be new to people who have read a lot of what YC partners have written—the goal is to get it into one place.

Mark is a Partner at the AET Fund, and early stage fund of Akatsuki Inc focused on the future of media and entertainment. Prior to AET Fund, Linao was a senior multi-disciplined engineer at aerospace and defense firm Raytheon. He has also worked at the Rubicon Project and Amazon. After that, Linao was an Associate at Technicolor Ventures eventually transitioning to Director of Corporate Development and Strategy at Technicolor.

Dean Kline is co-founder, fund manager and managing director for Penn Venture Partners, a venture capital firm. He is also a managing member of the fund’s general partner. In addition, Kline is a board director for several companies: Corporate University Xchange, the Harrisburg Senators, Journal Publications, Probity MT, and Thermacore.

Minnie is a long-time Silicon Valley product leader and operations executive with experience building and scaling impact through elegant technical solutions and great teams. She recently moved back to LA after 20+ years in the Bay Area and is excited to be a part of the growing tech ecosystem of Southern California. Minnie started her career as an early product manager at Google where she co-founded the Access team; a cross-functional product, policy, and engineering team that spun off Google Fiber. After 11+ years, she left Google to begin her own entrepreneurial journey as the co-founder and COO of Shift, an online marketplace for used cars. Minnie learned a lot of lessons hiring hundreds of employees and scaling a $100M+ business. In her spare time, she hosts the LA Venture podcast, volunteers for local government, surfs baby waves, and raises baby people.

People have differing views of whether entrepreneurs are born or made, but here are some tips to help you think like one.