I tried early-stage venture capital a while back and I couldn’t get a feel for it. I didn’t see how people could identify successful companies that early. Honestly, I was skeptical that they could.

“You run a startup that helps people start startups? Ha! You know this is a bubble, right? How many ‘instagram for dogs’ can there be!?”

“It’s five years from now and the startup you’re pitching me failed. What happened?”

Some of the best advice I ever got was “build products you want to use and write content you want to read.”

With that in mind… let’s talk Bigfoot and the booming sex toy market!

The best New Years Resolution I’ve heard is from one of our founders. Each time she picks up her phone to check social media/news/texts in 2018, she’ll read her Kindle instead. She asked for book recs — a request I get a ton — so I made this list.

Nickelodeon GUTS was a truly great TV show. Airing in the mid-90s, it was basically a kids’ version of American Gladiators in which three lucky kids would compete in a series of physical events, earning points for each one they won.

When I interviewed Jess DiDonato for my startup accelerator Tacklebox, I saw another smart entrepreneur who’d identified a problem. I meet lots of those. But what I wasn’t able to foresee was just how easy she’d be able to make the early-stage startup experience look–to the point where she frustrated the hell out of the other founders.

Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to watch TV or play Nintendo on weekdays. This was a real problem, because of the handful of things that mattered to 8-year-old Brian, saving a fictional princess from an evil turtle named “Bowser” topped the list.

The best present I ever got was from my mom on my seventeenth birthday. It was a green, football-shaped dongle called the Sony eMarker. I’ve never met anyone who had one or even remembers it. I was beginning to think I’d dreamt it up until I found pictures of it on Google and a blog review from 2000.

My friend John is a good looking guy. Not over the top good looking, but solid. I’d give him an “8.”

Gravity, the self-described “weighted blanket for sleep, stress, and anxiety,” recently raised over $4.7 million on Kickstarter. Maybe the product’s developers meticulously orchestrated this awareness strategy, or maybe they just fell ass-backwards into it. It’s so well-done I’m inclined to believe it’s the former, but who knows?

The first interaction with a customer is hard, and sometimes pretty terrifying. You’ve got about six seconds to pique your customer’s interest, and to prove you understand something substantial about them. Six seconds to earn another six seconds, then another.

This is a story about Jon. It’s a bit long, but you’ll like it.

Jon is a talented entrepreneur who had a startup idea that everyone loved. Then he quit. And it was the best move he’s made as a founder.

Startups are counterintuitive. When I was working on my first startup, I looked at the competition and thought “I need to do everything they do better than they do it, I need to do do a few things they don’t do, and, for good measure, I need to walk my customer’s dog.”