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Pitching to investors in a short time frame—especially in a condensed 4-minute format—is one of the toughest challenges an early-stage founder faces. You have to introduce a complex problem, explain your unique solution, highlight your market, and convince investors that you have the right team to pull it off. In a recent Pitch Competition hosted by Sbur, a group of experienced investor judges shared critical feedback and constructive insights on what elevates a startup pitch

What truly sways a venture capital firm’s decision to back a startup? In a recent conversation on the Sbur Decision Lab series, hosted by Tony Zhang, we sat down with Jeffrey Smith, an experienced operator, CEO, and investor at SIP Capital. SIP Capital is a venture firm focused on investing in US-based, IP-intensive companies that align structurally with the needs of the Japanese economy—particularly in AI-adjacent infrastructure, semiconductors, and long-duration energy stor

Building a startup in the era of artificial intelligence presents unprecedented opportunities, alongside a rapidly shifting landscape of risks. For founders looking to scale digital health solutions, understanding how early-stage venture capital investors evaluate opportunities is critical to securing funding and finding long-term success. In a recent interview at the Sbur Decision Lab, Tony Zhang sat down with Peter Hu, an investor on the digital health team at Morningside V

The path of an entrepreneur is often romanticized with Silicon Valley tales of rapid funding and instant stardom. But the ground reality is a grueling mix of constant performance pressure, heavy uncertainties, and emotional roller coasters. In a recent episode of the Sbur Decision Lab, host Matt Phillips sat down with Rose Huang, the founder and CEO of Accelidea. Accelidea is an AI-powered platform transforming the MedTech space by shortening the standard four-year timeline f

Navigating the internal dynamics of a startup while simultaneously building a disruptive product is one of the hardest balancing acts in entrepreneurship. In a recent episode of Sbur Decision Lab, host Tony Zhang sat down with Mariana and Ivo, the husband-and-wife co-founding team behind NautIQ Technologies. NautIQ is a marine technology startup leveraging physical AI and robotics to automate boat maintenance—specifically targeting the hazardous, manual labor involved in hull

Most founders treat this as a staffing decision. It isn't. It's a transfer-of-knowledge decision — the question of whether what happens in your head during a sales conversation can be extracted, documented, and handed to someone else without breaking. That's why first sales hires fail so often. Founders hire to relieve pressure (too many calls, not enough hours) rather than to transfer a process. When there's no process to transfer, the hire either reinvents one badly or quie

Stepping into the world of entrepreneurship is rarely a straight line. It requires navigating terrifying risks, overcoming industry-wide blind spots, and having the conviction to solve a problem that hits close to home. In a recent episode of Sbur Decision Lab, host Tony Zhang sat down with Projit Aon, the co-founder and CEO of Nucleus RX. Projit shared his compelling journey from leaving a stable, two-decade-long corporate career to developing a patented, connected pill disp

A founder's guide to the instrument that now dominates pre-seed fundraising — and the traps hiding inside it. You just got a term sheet. It's two pages, no interest rate, no maturity date, and your lawyer says "don't worry, it's just a SAFE, everyone uses one." Six months later you're staring at a cap table that doesn't look anything like what you thought you signed up for, wondering how a "simple" document produced such a complicated outcome. That confusion is the norm, not

The Decision Founders Are Actually Making Building an advisory board is a trust-allocation problem under information asymmetry. You're granting someone structured access to your strategic thinking — your unresolved risks, your blind spots, your cap table — often before you have enough evidence to know whether their judgment holds up under pressure. The real decision is who gets to influence you — and what that costs. This is harder than it sounds for three reasons. First, it'

The commercial airline experience is deteriorating at an alarming pace, leaving a growing segment of travelers deeply frustrated with unpredictable and unreliable options. Meanwhile, regional private aircraft operators are burdened with underutilized capacity, often absorbing the heavy costs of flying empty legs because they lack visibility into market demand. In a recent episode of the Sbur Decision Lab, host Tony Zhang sat down with Mike Mitchell, the founder of BasiFly, to

The decision: Keep iterating on the product, or shift resources into scaling distribution. This is one of the highest-stakes calls a founder makes. Scale too early, and the company burns capital, hires ahead of demand, and locks in a go-to-market motion that doesn't actually work — often fatally. Wait too long, and competitors capture the market the founder was building for, while the team loses momentum chasing a "perfect" product that was already good enough. The difficulty

The Decision Beneath the Decision "Should we pivot?" is not really the question founders are asking. The real question is: how much weight should current evidence carry against the plan we already committed to? This is difficult for a structural reason, not a personal one. Founders operate with incomplete information, under time pressure, while personally invested in the outcome. The same trait that makes someone capable of starting a company — conviction in the face of doubt

As an entrepreneur, one of the biggest dilemmas you face is how to completely disrupt a massive market without causing chaos for your customers. In our latest interview at Sbur Decision Lab, Matt Phillips sat down with Yani Deros, CEO and co-founder of CIRQ+, to discuss how his nimble team is doing exactly that in the massive hospitality sector. CIRQ+ has developed an innovative energy management operating system that acts as wireless middleware between utilities and hotel gu

Online reviews are a fundamental pillar of modern commerce. Statistically, 98% of people read reviews before making a purchase decision. Yet, the systems we rely on to guide our decisions are fundamentally obsolete, built more than two decades ago before smartphones, social media, or generative AI existed. Today, less than 2% of consumers actually leave reviews, and of those, over one-third are entirely fake, bought, or artificially generated. In a recent episode of Sbur Deci

Every great startup begins with a moment of sharp clarity—a realization that a widespread problem lacks an accessible, scalable solution. In a recent feature on the Sbur Decision Lab, Pramit Maakoday, co-founder of Relax Infinity, discusses how his team is addressing the global mental health crisis by merging time-tested Eastern wellness practices with modern Western science. For fellow founders navigating the early stages of building a company, the pitch and interview offer

The Decision Behind the Decision Most founders think of fundraising as a capital problem: how much money, at what valuation, from whom. But the investor decision is really a governance and constraint decision disguised as a financing decision. Every investor who joins your cap table acquires some combination of information rights, board influence, follow-on expectations, and reputational association with your company — for the next seven to ten years, regardless of how the bu

Every entrepreneur knows that building a startup from scratch is a series of relentless choices. Some decisions are minor tweaks, while others can entirely shift the trajectory of your company. In a recent interview at the Sbur Decision Lab, Puck Fernsten sat down with Carter Powell and Juad, the co-founders of FlowMo—an AI operating layer for direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses—to discuss their path through bootstrapping, pivoting, and scaling. For founders attempting to nav

As an entrepreneur, the path to building a successful company is rarely a straight line. Every day brings a barrage of choices, industry buzz, and internal dilemmas. In the latest feature from the Sbur Decision Lab, host Puck Fernsten sits down with Joel Francois, the CEO and founder of Helios Health, to unpack the realities of startup growth, the art of the pivot, and the power of alignment. Helios Health leverages psychometrics and AI to align clinicians with healthcare spe

Here's an uncomfortable truth: most founders don't get burned by a bad valuation. They get burned by a clause they never really understood, buried on page 14 of a document they skimmed the night before closing. This can happen first in the Seed and Series A round, setting the tone for later rounds. A company can raise millions, grow for years, and eventually sell for a number that sounds like a win — and the founders still walk away with almost nothing. Not because anyone

Building a startup is rarely about taking the easy path. It is about defying conventional wisdom to build something optimized for tomorrow, rather than just settling for what works today. In a recent episode of the Sbur Decision Lab, Matt Phillips sat down with Elliot Greenblat—an MIT PhD and solo founder with 20 years of AI experience—to discuss his new venture, subindex.ai. Subindex AI is a platform designed to accurately generate, validate, and maintain large-scale researc