The sense of freedom in a start-up (or incubation) environment is incredibly exciting. However, it is very easy to let this freedom lead you down the path of “what if”, distracting you from achieving success. You only have – at most – three years (many would argue two) to go from spending the “first opportunity dollar” to demonstrating commercial success. This leaves little room for distraction. Over many successes and failures, I found three things separated ventures that went on to commercial success from those that simply remained “interesting ideas.”

When a new, hot technology appears, it is easy to jump on the bandwagon and focus solely implementing it for your enterprise. However, if you do this you are likely to only do just that, deliver new technology. To use technology to create business value you have start by putting your finger on a problem to solve (then providing all that is needed – technology and otherwise) to solve this problem…

Many of us use Twitter, a free cloud-based service, to market ourselves and conduct one-to-one business development. Unfortunately, hackers brought Twitter down several times already this month with Denial-of-Service attacks. This begs the question, “when should we invest in obtaining our own clouds—vs. sharing free crowds with others?”…