I locked myself in my hotel room, dressed in full suit and tie, and pulled out my laptop and presentation clicker. Heart racing, I opened Powerpoint and scanned through the slides. I had two hours to cut my investor pitch in half...
After drinking and partying my way through college, I took a job waiting tables at Damon’s Grill my first job out of college. The same restaurant for which I’d stood at the host stand in high school. Three and a half years, fifty...
It starts with a dream. And with the first whisps of the dream, the machine locks in and the outcome is set. You create details, the most minute details, which bring the dream to life. It becomes real. Only for you at first, but the minute...
I’ve been “crushing it” for almost as long as I’ve been running a startup. That’s not to say that things have always been up-and-to-the-right. We’ve had more than our share of WFIO moments along the way. But to...
The Lean Startup methodology has proven to be the most effective and efficient way to build a successful company. But if it’s your only North-star, you risk optimizing yourself into building a company your customers like, but about which...
I went to bed crying about business once, years ago, and I remember feeling like the whole thing was fucked. We were running out of cash, over 70 employees and their families were counting on me to find more cash, and even though the business was...
My failures have been the gifts that keep on giving. The time when my team almost mutinied. The time many of them did, leaving scathing reviews on Glassdoor. The time I went to jail. The time I got fired. This is not an exhaustive list...
At a Zoom happy hour last week, as is the case with most of my conversations these days, the topic of conversation turned to racism. I’ve had racism conversations with groups of all white men (my book club after reading White Fragility, the...
100 Ideas is an awesome platform created by Startgarden to launch early stage businesses. In it they seed 100 different fledgling businesses with $1k, add water and sunshine, wait a tick, and then invest $20k in the ten that show the most...
One of my favorite people in Grand Rapids is Amanda Chocko. I met Amanda when I was first starting VNN, way back in 2010, so she’s watched an awful lot of growing up on my part (mentally and emotionally; I’ve been...
I read this article in WIRED today, sent to me by the lovely and thoughtful Laura, and found much of it resonating. It’s becoming more and more common (thankfully) to discuss the use of this weird COVID time to reevaluate our lives. Many...
Meditation makes people better leaders, and when done consistently can be more effective than any knowledge on leadership one could acquire, or class on leading one could take. Hard stop. If you are in a leadership position, nearly all acquired...
Ryan H. Vaughn 2020. All rights reserved.