Paul G. Silva

APRIL 29, 2025

This post concludes our series exploring lessons from Jim Collins’s book, BE 2.0 (Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0). The Complete Picture Emerges Throughout this series, we’ve examined individual elements that contribute to building an exceptional organization. But how do these pieces fit together? Is there a logical sequence or framework that connects them all?

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Paul G. Silva

JANUARY 28, 2025

This post is part of my ongoing series exploring lessons from Jim Collins’s book, BE 2.0 (Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0). Understanding Luck in Business Ever notice how some teams seem to “get lucky” more often than others? In BE 2.0, Jim Collins explains why: it’s not just about luckit’s about being ready for it and knowing what to do when it arrives.

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Paul G. Silva

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

This post is part of my ongoing series exploring lessons from Jim Collins’s book, BE 2.0 (Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0). Greatness Comes from Iteration, Not Perfection There’s a dangerous myth in business that success comes from getting it right the first time. But in BE 2.0 , Jim Collins emphasizes that great outcomes don’t emerge from perfect initial ideasthey come from relentless iteration and adaptation.

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Paul G. Silva

JANUARY 21, 2025

This post is part of my ongoing series exploring lessons from Jim Collins’s book, BE 2.0 (Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0). Check out the previous posts on leadership values and getting the right people. What is Vision? What makes some organizations last while others fade away? Jim Collins found a surprising answer: a clear, compelling vision. Think of vision as your organization’s North Star it guides your team, especially when times get tough.

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Paul G. Silva

JANUARY 9, 2025

Innovative ideas often falter, not because they lack merit but because their adoption stalls. While tools like the Business Model Canvas or Lean Canvas help define business models, they fall short of addressing the challenges of adoption. Enter the Adoption Roadmap , a tool designed to bridge this gap. It provides leaders with a practical, step-by-step guide to drive adoption at every stage of their innovations lifecyclefrom pilot to expansion.

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Paul G. Silva

MARCH 6, 2025

Have you ever wished you could pick the brains of Seth Godin, Jim Collins, and Eric Ries (or whoever are your intellectual heroes) whenever you face a business challenge? What if you could assemble your dream team of advisors and consult them anytime, day or night, without scheduling conflicts or hefty consulting fees? This isn’t a fantasy. Using ChatGPT, you can create a virtual board of advisors that brings the wisdom and perspectives of your chosen mentors to your fingertips.

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Paul G. Silva

MARCH 21, 2025

When I updated my profile with PixelStartups, so many of you reached out. The love and support meant a lotthank you. PixelStartups is a recently re-activated division of PixelEdge, and Im now focused thereback in my happy place, working with early-stage founders. WAAAAAHOOOOOOO!!! Were building PixelStartups for a specific kind of entrepreneurpeople who: Are mid-career professionals with deep industry expertise See a real market gap worth solving but can’t code Are ready to invest time and

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Paul G. Silva

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

Practice Your Pitch and Save Your Social Capital Entrepreneurs benefit tremendously from practicing their pitch and Q&A. The more practice they get, the better they become at understanding common questions, responding clearly and concisely, and handling the emotions of tough questions. However, mentors have limited time, and many do not ask the hardest questions or provide enough critical feedback.

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Paul G. Silva

JUNE 12, 2024

We are standing on the edge of a profound shift in the world of angel investing. For years, the process of raising funds from multiple angel investor groups—known as “syndication”—has been mired in friction. The visionary minds at the Angel Capital Association (ACA), the global beacon for angel investors, have spent over a decade sculpting best practices.

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Paul G. Silva

FEBRUARY 6, 2024

This article originally appeared on the PixelEdge Blog. “[The PixelEdge] workshop and canvasses provided an easy structured framework to work through our evaluation and customer discovery process. The ideas … have been very exciting to me and my team.” Client Business Information Director Problem A leading data aggregator for an entertainment sector came to PixelEdge to help maximize one of their offerings.

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Paul G. Silva

DECEMBER 15, 2023

Greg Satell was interviewed on the You Are Not So Smart podcast (excellent, highly recommended) about his book Cascades. Cascades explains Greg’s observations on what it takes for innovation of all kinds (political movements, cultural change, startups, re-orgs, etc.) to achieve lasting impact. Here are the key takeaways that I believe relate to startup / intrepreneurial innovators. 5 Reasons People Will Oppose You We innovators already believe.

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Paul G. Silva

JUNE 14, 2023

From 2003-2022 the River Valley Investors operated as a traditional angel group, investing in nearly 100 startups. For posterity, here are some of the more recent investments… 2022 Hubly Surgical Hubly Surgical has an advanced drill, complete with auto-stop and visual feedback, to make medical drilling safe across underserved settings. They’re first starting with the high-complication, hand-cranked, most common neurosurgery: bedside craniotomy.

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Paul G. Silva

DECEMBER 12, 2022

[This is part of a series on the KISS Canvas ]. Struggling to map your business model because you have lots of stakeholders / customer segments? The Keep It Super Simple (KISS) Canvas takes your complex, multi-sided business model and turns it into an easy-to-understand story. Each row answers a key question about a stakeholder. Each column represents a stakeholder: payers, users, channel partners, employees, etc.

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Paul G. Silva

OCTOBER 6, 2022

A central tenet of the Lean Startup is “pivot, persevere, or perish.” On June 1st, after five years of perseverance and pivoting, my partners and I wound down Launch413. With six months now past, it feels right to share what we’ve learned. For those unfamiliar with it, Launch413 was a Post Accelerator that helped startup CEOs scale for sustained success by providing coaches with deep domain expertise.

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Paul G. Silva

SEPTEMBER 15, 2022

The angel groups of New England and New York joined forces to help startups get funded. Initial results: 2x as many startups are being seen by 2x as many investors, in 1/10th the time. Entrepreneur Pain Points. You would think that the marginal effort to raise money from a second angel group is much lower. Won’t the second group take all the hard work you did from the first group and only need to ask a few more questions?

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Paul G. Silva

JUNE 28, 2022

About The Workshop. Startups don’t die from laziness. They die from working really hard… on the wrong things. You’ve launched your venture… now what? The financial lives of your team depends on you. When do you raise money? From who? On what terms? Is it time to hire or keep your burn low? Should you pivot to a new market or stay the course? The pressure to make the right decisions is intense.

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Paul G. Silva

MAY 12, 2022

Leaders of global corporations are under intense pressure to grow their valuation by hitting aggressive revenue, margin, and EBITDA targets. Acquirers pay a valuation premium on recurring, high-margin, and high-growth product revenue. However, the metrics most companies use (ROI) fail to capture the impact on valuation, causing leaders to make choices that slow their valuation growth.

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Paul G. Silva

JULY 23, 2021

I’ve been a fan for years, and now Launch413 and I have the honor of being on the Angel Invest Boston podcast. Listen to hear how Launch413 helps startup CEO’s beat the odds and attain sustained success. LinkedIn post w/ mini-video | main interview page.

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Paul G. Silva

JUNE 3, 2021

[This is part of a series on the KISS Canvas ]. Why. 30-page business plans are great for established businesses and terrible for startups that need to iterate quickly. 15+ years ago the Business Model Canvas (BMC) changed everything by giving us a 1-pager (or 4×3 foot poster) to help you quickly document and test the key hypothesis behind your business model.

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Paul G. Silva

MAY 18, 2021

Caya and his team at Slidebean kindly interviewed me about often-invisible deal-killer for startup raising money: the investment-culture differences between varying groups of investors. Did you know if you are using a SAFE note that 2/3rds of angels in New England angel groups will categorically decline you? Learn more about this and about how to suss out the cultural norms of your investment community.

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Paul G. Silva

JANUARY 25, 2021

One year ago the angel group I have the honor to lead pivoted to a substantially different model. Like all pivots, it wasn’t easy. In fact, it was scary as hell. But thanks to the incredible involvement of our members and our assistant manager Ethan Ferris, 2020 was our best year ever. Membership tripled , pulling in people from a much larger geography than conceivable before.

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Paul G. Silva

SEPTEMBER 17, 2020

For 14 years I’ve led the River Valley Investors angel investor network. A year ago the group was on death’s door. Membership was down to the lowest levels since I’d taken over leadership from our founder and my mentor, Joseph Steig. And none of us knew that COVID was just around the corner. If RVI failed then our region would have lots its only active angel group – a huge potential blow to local startups.

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Paul G. Silva

AUGUST 13, 2020

One of my favorite jokes goes something like this: Whenever a new position opens up, and I have to sort through a stack of resumes, the first thing I do is take half of them at random and throw them away. I don’t want unlucky people working in this department. As with many good jokes, it’s funny because it has a nugget of truth to it. Anyone who’s run an accelerator, a grant program, reviewed book/screenplay manuscripts, or been in charge of hiring has an impossible challenge:

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Paul G. Silva

MAY 29, 2020

Why. Entrepreneurs and investors used to rely on strictly qualitative/gut methods of assessing progress and deciding what their next steps should be. In 2014 the great Steve Blank gave the startup world its first widely-respected quantitative assessment system: the Investment Readiness Level (IRL). A few years later Village Capital took the IRL to the next level, creating the Venture Investment and ReAdiness Level (VIRAL).

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Paul G. Silva

MAY 24, 2020

[This is part of a series on the KISS Canvas ]. Why. 30-page business plans are great for established businesses and terrible for startups that need to iterate quickly. 15 years ago the Business Model Canvas (BMC) changed everything by giving us a 1-pager (or 4×3 foot poster) to help you quickly document and test the key hypothesis behind your business model.

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Paul G. Silva

MAY 7, 2020

The entrepreneurship faculty of Western New England University kindly inducted me as an honorary member of Sigma Nu Tau , the only academic honor society dedicated to entrepreneurship. My sincere thanks to WNE, and especially Mary Schoonmaker.

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Paul G. Silva

APRIL 7, 2020

If your startup/organization/team struggles with ideation (the process of coming up with ideas), you fall into one of two camps: Those who struggle to come up with any ideas. Those who come up with plenty of ideas but struggle to identify which ones are worth pursuing. What follows is a step-by-step guide for solving both problems. The Short Version.

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Paul G. Silva

MARCH 27, 2020

This is the checklist / boil down of the techniques listed in the pior 3 posts in the “Startup Pitching” series. After you complete a draft of your pitch, go over this list to make sure you’ve applied as many of the techniques as possible. Beginner (101). One rehearsed presenter – Pick one person to deliver your presentation, don’t tag team your pitches.

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Paul G. Silva

MARCH 26, 2020

This is the 3rd post in the “Startup Pitching” series. In this post we’ll go over advanced-level (301) techniques. 1. The one (maybe two) number rule. Most people can’t hold multiple numbers in their head. You can put as many numbers on a slide as you like, but people won’t process them. In fact, if you show too many numbers they’ll almost certainly process the numbers incorrectly!

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Paul G. Silva

MARCH 26, 2020

This is the 2nd post in the “Startup Pitching” series. In this post we’ll go over intermediate-level (201) techniques. 1. Front load credibility. Investors are cynical. They have to be because about half of all angel/VC investments lose every penny invested. Any claim you make is therefore treated with suspicion. But… if you place some major credibility-enhancing facts into your second or third slide, the audience spends most of the presentation positively inclined to you

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Paul G. Silva

MARCH 26, 2020

As a mentor once told me… It doesn’t matter if you have the best opportunity in the world, if you can’t communicate it you’re dead. This is obvious. Yet… I’ve seen thousands of presentations and the vast majority of them were confusing as heck. Those presenters almost always failed to get whatever they wanted from the audience.

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Paul G. Silva

MARCH 19, 2020

The River Valley Investors angel group just ran our first virtual meeting today. In case anything we learned can be valuable, below is a copy of a blog post we just published on our blog showing what we did to make it work. I know several other groups already ran virtual, so I’d love to hear any other best practices people have patched together.

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Paul G. Silva

MARCH 17, 2020

Startups need capital to launch and grow. What many entrepreneurs don’t know is that startup capital comes in many different flavors. Each flavor has its own pros and cons and is appropriate for different situations. To be successful in fundraising an entrepreneur needs to understand what flavor(s) are a fit for them at each stage of their venture’s maturation.

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Paul G. Silva

MARCH 7, 2020

For all my friends who kindly track the progress of my ventures, I have a short update :). Launch413 (the post-accelerator) – We’ve invested in 13 companies in just under 3 years, expanded our team of kick-ass Venture Advisors, and are starting to see some real results from our top companies. It is still early days, but the model seems to be scaling and our ability to deliver impact is growing.

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Paul G. Silva

JULY 11, 2018

Due diligence (AKA “doing your homework” on a startup to see if investing is the right call) should clearly take time… but how much? Marianne Hudson, executive director of the Angel Capital Association (the trade association for angel investors in the US) wrote an article on this topic. Her full article (with her permission) appears further below.

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Paul G. Silva

JULY 16, 2018

When I talk about politics I am filled with sadness and a sense of near powerlessness to make the world a better place. But when I talk to entrepreneurs, I am filled with hope. Where most of us see problems, they imagine solutions… and solutions that scale. Here are just some of the companies blowing me away, all local/ VVM companies making the world a better place!

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Paul G. Silva

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

There is no lack of coverage of when Private Equity is done wrong. John Oliver, by himself, has numerous well-regarded pieces on the topic. This is not dissimilar to when bad venture capitalists or angel investors tarnish the reputations of investors in general. And this reporting is important. We should know about bad actors, how to avoid them, and call shame on them!

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