Festival season has officially begun and I’m preparing for my biggest event of the year in May. I spent the last two weekends watching the Coachella livestream and found myself intrigued by what separates the more experienced artists from the others. 

The best performers are very clear about who th...

Read part 1 here.

Let’s discuss the good and bad of raising money for your business. I can only base this on my experiences and observations, every case is individual and there are always exceptions. But from years of advising founders through fundraising I have learned to distinguish between healt...

One of the most common conversations I have with early stage founders is about raising money from investors. There’s a lot to unpack, so I’m splitting this into two parts. Part 1 is about my personal experience and what I learned. Part 2 will focus on when raising money actually makes sense.

Fresh ...

Through decades of work with small businesses I’ve noticed two distinct patterns with entrepreneurs that appear over and over. The first approach I see is founders who identify a problem then create a unique solution that serves a specific audience. The second approach I see is founders who create a...

On this journey of Creatorship, I’m always searching for the fuel I need to keep going. The people closest to me, my wife, family, and friends, provide constant support and encouragement, especially in times of uncertainty. I’ve also found camaraderie with others who stepped away from a traditional ...

Lately I’ve been wondering if the term “entrepreneurship” properly describes this journey I’m on.

I spent many years working in the trenches building companies, advising founders, and helping CEOs think through growth and fundraising. When I started Creators Creed, I assumed I could translate that ...

In the last journal, I wrote about my relationship with boredom and how I’ve come to understand it differently. For most of my life, I didn’t believe there was room for idle time because there was always something I should be doing. Even when I began to value it, I treated boredom as a luxury that h...

I grew up in Texas, where summers were hot, humid, and relentless. Once school let out, summer break meant three months of unstructured and unsupervised days, spent mostly indoors to escape the heat. My parents worked all day and couldn’t afford camps or daycare, so my older brother and I were left ...

As we close out the year, I’ve been thinking about the pressure to measure progress in tidy increments. One year to the next, one quarter to another. As if growth were supposed to be linear and compounding, like interest in a bank account. That might be the game in corporate environments, where numb...

A couple of months ago I pitched a concept for a major opportunity. I knew it was a long shot, but that didn’t stop me from pouring myself into it. The proposal reflected where I am creatively right now—sharp, confident, and fully committed. Winning the pitch didn’t feel like a vague possibility. I ...

I am a student of entrepreneurship. For many years I studied the founders I thought I was supposed to become. The icons, disruptors, the ones who built billion-dollar companies by outworking, outsmarting, and outlasting everyone around them. I read their biographies, studied their habits, and copied...

Many years ago, in what feels like a completely different life, I worked in medical sales. My friends had launched a startup while I was in business school, and it felt like the perfect chance to apply everything I was learning in real time.

It was old-school, traditional sales. No email campaigns,...