20 hot tips for young entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley mentors - CfE Accelerator

20 hot tips for young entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley mentors

On May 24-26, Traction Camp hosted by the Center for Entrepreneurship, where 20 founders of selected startups and best mentors from the Silicon Valley, Cyprus, Korea, Bulgaria, Lithuania, and others gathered.

Traction Camp launched in 2015 as a series of mini-accelerator events that bring together some of Silicon Valley’s best technology and business experts with the founders of the most promising startups in Europe. We want to share with you some important tips for young entrepreneurs from our mentor’s sessions.

Nick Bilogorskiy, CTO and Angel Investor, San Francisco, USA:

  1. The most important metric for a startup – revenue and how fast it’s growing
  2. Build a business, not just a startup
  3. Not all fires have to be put down, decide on most important things, let the rest burn or delegate
  4. Define the need, problem. Don’t go for just cool product, but go for smth people will die for, and get sustainable growth
  5. Hire the best. Sacrifice if you need to have the best professionals in your team.
  6. If you hire A players, they will hire A’s for you, but if you hire B’s, they will hire C’s for you
  7. The mission is the best motivator and inspiration, not the money
  8. Build connections, go places relevant people meet, go social. Pretend to be an extravert
  9. If you’re not growing 10-20% per month – close it
  10. Approach people with what you can do for them. Listen.

Yulia Zi, Amazon sales and marketing, ex-Petcube, San Francisco, USA

  1. Create your own brand style guide. It’s extremely important when you are launching a new startup.
  2. Your brand identity is a journey
  3. Register your logo as a trademark
  4. Build an effective brand promise
  5. Your brand is in every interaction with your customer
  6. Find a way to give back, deliver and Innovate
  7. Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room

Panis Pieri, Growth marketer, Blogger, Limassol, Cyprus

  1. If you are building a startup or business at any point you will need marketing to reach your clients.
  2. Start building a growth mindset, optimize, iterate and start testing everything to grow faster. To me its the one major ingredient that differentiates startups from normal businesses. Startups grow fast and they use growth hacks to do it with the least amount of resources possible.
  3. Build a community that cherishes your business values and incentivize them to promote you.