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The ultra-premium shoe designer

Entrepreneurs think of themselves as "rule-breakers" but even seasoned business owners can find themselves falling under the spell of conventional wisdom. "It's not done that way" or "it's never been done that way" can be common fallbacks for anyone who comes up through an industry

This is the quiet before the storm. I just finished off a plate of chicken marsala in an Italian restaurant, enveloped in the gentle clinking of forks and knives on china, plaid tablecloths, and bottles of olive oil. It all feels so warm and civilized, except for the luggage cars racing past the window and flashing lights of airplanes reminding me I am no longer in New York.

I wrote a few months ago about how cloud companies are in a unique position to make partners of their competitors, a phenomenon I call the “Frenemy Model.” I’m still holding strong to this theory, even as there have been a number of massive developments in the industry since I wrote the first piece.

Not everyone lost out in the tech bubble. Here's how Kevin Ryan, a serial entrepreneur, actually cashed in on it. Kevin Ryan, the serial entrepreneur behind notable companies like Gilt Group and Business Insider, got involved in the Internet business in 1996 when he founded DoubleClick, a start-up that built ad management software for websites

Brand strategists Chris Bryant says the U.S.

%excerpt% View post: How I Did It: Hartley Peavey of Peavey Electronics

Five tips on beating out the competition and making your business stickier The ease with which Google+ is now competing with Facebook for mindshare has me thinking about barriers to entry. Warren Buffett famously invests in businesses with what he calls a protective "moat" around them, meaning that they have some protection from competition that allows them to control their pricing. Big companies lock out their competitors by out-slugging them in capital infrastructure investments (anyone care to compete against CN Rail)

Ben Chestnut, CEO of MailChimp, described in the last post how the freemium model has dramatically increased business for his company. Below, Ben describes his pricing model and the types of customers his company prefers. Curt-I reviewed your company’s pricing structure and think it’s really smart how you have tailored your pricing for each buyer persona, such as the customer with high volatility in the number of emails he’s going to send or the customer with a huge volume of subscribers

In Part 1 of this interview series, MailChimp ’s CEO Ben Chestnut discussed how going freemium led to creating a fund for integrators , resulting in creative new developments with their product.

Ben Chestnut is the CEO of MailChimp , a successful company that helps its customers design exceptional email campaigns. MailChimp has found great success by going freemium. Read on to learn how MailChimp funds creativity to help developers create interesting integrations with their product.

Wimdu offers a glimpse into its plans for giving nearly identical rent-your-room service Airbnb a run for its huge chunk of money. A dozen or so twentysomethings met for an apparent company outing on a recent Thursday evening in 90-plus degree heat at an outdoor spot in New York's East Village called B Bar. It's as much of a home to bridge-and-tunnel crowds as it is to first-year M&A bankers

Humans have played a role in large animal extinctions since time immemorial. The giant ground sloth of Texas

Dealing with low-priced competitors Dear Norm, My husband and I started a business that makes and installs customized sheds. Our plan was to offer better service and higher quality than our competitors.

Last week, self proclaimed "geek," Miss California, Alyssa Campanella made beauty pageant history ...by default . When the interviewer posed a Theory of Evolution question, she was one of only two delegates to use the scientific definition of the word "theory" in her response. The honey-drenched, colloquial, conjecture-based definition that the majority of her competitors clung to was, yes, diplomatic.