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Continue reading →: The Online Sales Conversion Funnel: A 2026 Owner’s GuideMaster the metrics, the math, and the levers that turn ad spend into profit at every stage of your funnel. I co-founded Cloud Water Filters, a D2C smart-home water filtration company, so I live inside this exact funnel every week: paid traffic in one end, contribution margin out the other,…
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Continue reading →: Dot-Com Bubble vs AI Bubble: How 2026 Compares to 2000I’m not trying to sound the alarm bells for the sake of clicks, but the patterns I’m seeing between the dot-com bubble and potential AI bubble are too eerily similar to ignore. If you read tech and financial news and watch podcasts like me, you no doubt are hearing similar…
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Continue reading →: Mark Cuban Is Right: Employee Equity Pays Off in 2026Cuban wants every founder to give stock to every employee, and the math, the culture, and his own track record all say he is onto something. After being involved with dozens of startups, I can tell you the employee option pool on a cap table reveals more about a founder…
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Continue reading →: Small Business Profit Margins by Industry: 2026 BenchmarksYour industry sets your margin ceiling before you ever sell a thing; here is where that ceiling sits for 12+ business models. I’ve owned both ends of this table: an insurance marketplace that threw off software-style margins and a D2C water filtration company that fights for every point after freight…
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Continue reading →: The Bigger Your Company Gets, the Harder It Is to SellThe M&A data is blunt: deal volume lives at the bottom of the market, buyers vanish at the top, and size quietly destroys your exit options. In 2024, roughly 95% of all M&A transactions were valued under $1 billion, and the lower middle market alone accounts for an estimated 70%…
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Continue reading →: Prediction Markets 2026: How Sharps Turn Movies Into MoneyTraders are pulling six figures out of Rotten Tomatoes scores, award shows, and Fed meetings. Here is how the edge actually works, and what founders and angel investors can steal from it. I have made dozens of investments, and every one of them is a bet on a probability I…
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Continue reading →: The U.S. Podcast Market in 2026: Reach, Revenue, and PayPodcasts now reach 167 million Americans a month, ad dollars are closing in on $3 billion, and YouTube quietly became the medium’s biggest platform. Here’s the full picture. A record 58% of Americans age 12+ consumed a podcast in the past month. That’s 167 million people, up from 47% just…
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Continue reading →: Friends and Family Funding: How to Raise It Without RegretThe easiest capital to raise is also the most expensive to lose, and the difference comes down to how you structure it. Roughly 38% of startups get their first outside capital through friends and family funding, and for most small businesses under five years old, personal networks and personal savings…
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Continue reading →: The Uncomfortable Truth About Venture Capital FundingFewer than 1% of U.S. startups ever raise institutional venture capital, and the money is more concentrated than at any point in history. Here is what the data shows, and what to do instead. I have invested in more than 50 startups as an angel and venture partner, and I…
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Continue reading →: What 8.3 Billion People Actually Looks Like (And Where America Fits In)More often than I’d like to admit, I’ll think about something involving big numbers and find myself down a rabbit hole trying to make sense of it. When you hear “millions” and “billions” constantly, we tend to get conditioned without truly appreciating the scale. For example, did you know there…
