Believe it or not, it's usually wise to walk investors through the risks involved in your startup. Investors know there's risk. If there wasn't, your valuation would be billions of dollars right now. And if you're vague about the risks you seem glib, or worse still, clueless.

Unrealistic budgets and miscalculating costs are the greatest risks to a growing company, especially startups.

There are, of course, risks. In fact, there are three distinct kinds of risk: the known ones which we can and shall prepare against; the known ones which we must trust to luck to avoid; and the entirely unknown.

Ahora, cuando me planteo invertir en una startup, estudio a conciencia los equipos fundadores

Startups demand comfort with chaos, uncertainty and change.

If your startup's potential market is huge, make very conservative assumptions when estimating its size. There is nothing investors like more than an obviously conservative estimate that still ends up being huge.

Now when I consider investing in a startup, I study the founding teams. Technical abilities and complementary skill sets matter, but how well the founders know each other and how well they work together matter just as much. Founders should share a prehistory before they start a company together — otherwise they’re just rolling dice.

A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.

There’s no investment where money works as hard as it does in a tech startup.

Driven founders, leveraged with code, capital, media, and intellect, sweating every dollar spent.

An enlightened society would educate investors, not restrict them.

Startups are different: too much budget is as harmful as too little — as countless dot-com failures can attest — and startups are extremely sensitive to midcourse budgetary changes.

Venture capitalists have a list of danger signs to watch out for. Near the top is the company run by techno-weenies who are obsessed with solving interesting technical problems, instead of making users happy.

A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

In the long run, though, the greatest IT risk facing most companies is more prosaic than a catastrophe. It is, simply, overspending. IT may be a commodity, and its costs may fall rapidly enough to ensure that any new capabilities are quickly shared, but the very fact that it is entwined with so many business functions means that it will continue to consume a large portion of corporate spending.