In the past year, our business has seen over 11,000 applications for finance through our business finance marketplace. These businesses range in size from no revenue through to hundreds of millions of dollars.

The majority of our declined applications come from early-stage startups. Naturally, we want to keep these businesses in our ecosystem so when they become eligible for funding — we’re there to help them grow. The problem is almost none of them ever get past the startup stage.

I decided to find out why.

This post summarizes my investigation into 1,294 failed startups surveyed from June 2020 to…

Have you ever wanted to bet on a person? You meet someone, through school or university, and you just think to yourself; Man, whatever that guy does, he’s going to knock it out the park.

You just know that whatever they are working on is going to be a success. Maybe they’ve got a special Midas-touch, or maybe it’s a specific work-ethic. BitClout gives you a way to bet on that person’s success (reputation, actually), without their permission.

Here’s a hypothetical example.

You meet a young guy straight out of college — Max — who has it all going for him. He’s smart, good-looking…

It was pouring with rain this morning. The cold, wintery, soaking kind of rain.

I stepped outside, was instantly drenched, and my mind reverted to my warm duvet and comfortable bed.

Not today. I took a deep breath, put my headphones in, and committed to 500 meters. If I got to that mark and decided this really wasn’t worth it, I’d turn around, cut my losses and go back to bed for an extra 45 minutes of zzz’s.

As it always goes, once I was out there, I had fun. …

It’s taken me over three years to build layers of resilience and fitness into my body. My aerobic “engine” is well developed, and I can run at a relatively fast pace (6.4 min/mile) at a very comfortable aerobic-level heart rate (<140bpm).

That comes from layers and layers of consistent training built upon each other. It certainly was not the result of two or three big workouts, sparsely distributed.

Too often, we think the next big thing is just “one massive push” around the corner. In reality, nothing worth achieving is.

Consistency is a massive barrier to entry. Most people aren’t…

One of the most common misconceptions of becoming a good runner is that the only way to get better is to spend every single minute of training at your limits — huffing and puffing, legs burning.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The 80/20 principle applies: 80% of your training should be at or below your aerobic limit. For me, that’s less than 145bpm (I’m 25). I describe it as my ‘run all day’ pace.*

The other 20% of total time is used for extremely focused, high-quality workouts, disbursed throughout a typical training week so that there is enough…