Entrepreneur Magazine March/April 2023

EVERY FEW MONTHS, my wife and I have the same battle with our son. There are tears. There’s despair. But recently, in the midst of one such skirmish, something occurred to me: Entrepreneurs often have this same battle… only, we have it with ourselves! And yet, it’s entirely avoidable—or, at the very least, it’s possible to move past it without tears—because there’s a solution at hand. My son won’t listen to me about this, but I hope you will. Here’s how it goes down with my son. His name is Fenn, he is 7 years old, and like all kids his age, he goes through shoes quickly. His shoes either become too small or too stinky, and it’s time for them to go. That’s when the problem starts. Fenn likes his old shoes because…

Naveen Jain had a crazy idea: Could he prevent and reverse chronic diseases? Why was this crazy? To start, Jain is not a doctor. He’s an accomplished technologist whose first company, InfoSpace, became one of North America’s largest tech companies in the 1990s, and who then went on to found or spearhead many others, including a space company called Moon Express. But Jain wasn’t intimidated to enter healthcare; he believes that outsiders produce the best ideas. And this was his big idea: What if he could sequence people’s RNA—a nucleic acid similar to DNA, but that changes over a person’s lifetime—to learn what their bodies need to be healthy? “I asked every expert, and the answer was yes,” Jain says. “But they’d start laughing, because they said no one has ever…

1/Vision is the answer to your mission. “Having a vision is the why behind the mission. Our mission is to empower confident reproductive and vaginal health decisions at home. Why? Because we want to be the place women turn during their most vulnerable health moments. That vision hasn’t changed, but how we get there changes nearly every week. For example, we started as a strictly DTC business, but as we learned more about what our customer needs, we started selling on places like Gopuff and Amazon.” —JAMIE NORWOOD, cofounder and co-CEO, Stix 2/A vision can broaden over time. “I think of a company’s vision as their North Star for the next three to five years. Harry’s first vision, when we were only a brand of razors sold online, was: Build a global omnichannel grooming…

Can I make smarter decisions? Lead more effectively? Be more innovative? Entrepreneurs struggle to find clarity on big questions like these—because, as you know, they’re busy charging through unmapped territory and figuring things out on the run. You’d think Nikhita Singh would have a high-tech solution to this. The company she cofounded in 2018, Artificial, uses sophisticated AI and robotics to help laboratories digitize and automate their research. But when she wants to think big, she goes decidedly low-tech: She starts drawing. As often as once a month, she holes up for an hour or two with a pen and notebook and doodles what’s on her mind, often adding words to the visuals. “If you type notes, everything gets equal weight, and it’s laborious to go back and read,” says Singh, who previously…

I’m not used to failing—but a few years ago in Miami, I was gripping my blanket in a hotel, staring at the ceiling, and wondering if a major decision I’d made was blowing up in my face. Until then, I was used to hitting A-plus. I’d gotten an MBA from Stanford and a J.D. from Yale, worked five years on Wall Street as a corporate attorney, and was president of A-Rod’s production company. Then I agreed to cofound a cosmetics brand called DIBS with the influencer Courtney Shields, thinking I’d have a lot to teach her about business. Instead, I learned that Courtney had a lot to teach me. In Miami, for example? I was there to sell one of our new products at the glitzy Miami Swim Week. I’d made a huge…

There is no perfect name. That’s the first thing that Ragen Alexander tells his clients. He’s worked with Amazon, Meta, Verizon, MetLife, Forever 21, Honda, and many other major brands, and he’s often in the position of delivering the tough news that no name can accomplish everything. “You can’t have something that’s super concise and telegraphic and feels really familiar and comfortable while also representing out-of-the-box thinking and innovation,” he says. “Each name comes with its own set of pros and cons, so it’s really about determining the greatest opportunity for you.” Also, naming trends come and go. For a while, everyone wanted short and literal names. Or one-word names with missing vowels. Or names with the word “my” in them. But with language, there are so many other possibilities. Here,…