Author: wildgreenquest@gmail.com

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Funding doesn’t guarantee progress. Cash raises the stakes of every decision, and founders who go quiet after a raise lose the support that could help them use it well. Build guidance into your routine. Choose investors you can work with, and schedule regular check-ins before you need them so honest conversations happen early, not in a crisis. A founder I backed once raised capital, set the vision and then disappeared.There were no updates, no emails and no sign of what was happening inside the company. Months went by. Then one…

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Having a put-together, clean, organized brick-and-mortar location and a user-friendly website are both paramount to the customer journey. When there’s a problem with a product or a customer service experience, unpack the entire situation or product life cycle and uncover where friction could be hiding rather than assuming where it exists. Businesses can create a seamless customer experience in multiple ways. Sometimes it’s through culturally relevant campaigns that resonate with customers in a fresh way, and other times, it’s through amplifying the world-class, repeatable customer service that earns recognition and…

In the latest Long Read on the Outside Podcast, reporter Ben Ayers recounts the deadly avalanche on Broad Peak that killed ten climbers, and the dangerous recovery mission to bring their bodies home.Published October 3, 2026 05:18AMOn July 30, a massive avalanche rumbled down the slopes of 26,414-foot Broad Peak in Pakistan, blanketing the mountain’s flanks in a cloud of snow and debris. The avalanche couldn’t have happened at a worse time. It hit just as ten climbers from multiple expeditions were slowly ascending to Camp III at  23,290 feet. Among the ten were veteran Sherpa guides, international climbing clients,…

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Buying a smarter tool doesn’t automatically make you better at your job, no matter how good the tool is. A governance policy is just words on a page if nobody in the room is willing to push back on what the machine spits out. The more AI starts doing your writing, your analysis, your first draft of everything, the more it matters whether you’d actually notice when it’s wrong. Businesses are investing heavily in artificial intelligence: new platforms, new agents, new automations, new promises of productivity. But there is a…

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Entrepreneurs spend most of their time planning for growth, but durable businesses are built to absorb external changes — tariffs, regulation, taxes and technology shifts. Companies that have optimized every dollar, person or process around current operating models can struggle with change. Efficiency is valuable, but eliminating every form of excess capacity can eliminate optionality. The goal is optionality, not excessive caution. Businesses should take calculated risks while planning contingencies so they have choices when assumptions prove wrong. The primary focus of entrepreneurs is thinking about how their business can…

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Multilingual markets contain users whose needs are poorly served by English-first AI products. Capturing this opportunity requires treating localized AI as a core engineering and product discipline. Audit your token economics to protect your margins, verify the legal and technical quality of regional datasets and design interfaces around how target users actually communicate. An English-only architecture may prevent an otherwise strong AI company from reaching users who prefer to speak, search and transact in other languages. Many AI startups launch first in English because the models, benchmarks, developer tools and…

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways See how a solo founder can hand recurring research, content and follow-up to a dot, OpenAI’s new always-on AI agent inside ChatGPT, while keeping the decisions that matter. Talk a job through with your dot on a voice call, then let it keep working after you hang up. Explore seven practical business uses for these agents, from spotting missed invoices to planning your day and reviewing marketing results. OpenAI’s dots, the always-on AI agents now built into ChatGPT, arrive just as many solo founders are hitting the limits of chat-based…

Eight years ago, 13-year-old Alina Morse sat in Entrepreneur’s New York City office, experiencing what she called “a fairy tale for a girl from a small town in Michigan.” She was, and still is, the youngest founder to make the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine. But Alina had plenty of experience in the spotlight before then, and has continued to make headlines eight years later with her brand Zolli Candy and its complementary 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the Million Smiles Initiative. Now she’s a senior at Michigan State University, choosing college because she says her love for learning and natural curiosity don’t take…

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Growth and ownership aren’t the same thing, and trying to personally run everything your business touches can bankrupt the parts that actually matter, one distraction at a time. The instinct to build and operate everything in-house often masks a business that’s spreading its best people too thin across things they don’t actually do best. A simple audit of what you own versus what you personally operate usually reveals one or two things you should hand off, long before the numbers would ever force the decision. By the early 2000s, LEGO…

Key Takeaways Jessica Liao Mayers launched Slate Swim in 2015 with $300, a sewing machine and made-to-order products. Slate’s minimalist, seamless swimwear stood out because Mayers resisted chasing trends. Mayers bootstrapped the company, putting revenue back into production, inventory, branding and operations rather than taking outside capital. She created a product that filled a gap in an industry — and scaled it to a seven-figure business.  That’s the trajectory Jessica Liao Mayers took over the course of 11 years. Mayers grew up outside Dallas in a family of medical professionals. Fashion was not an obvious career choice. Still, a high school…