🚀 How To Succeed as a Startup Founder

#16 The Monthly Startup Club Edge

November 07, 2025

IN THIS WEEK’S NEWSLETTER:

  • 🚀 How To Succeed as a Startup Founder

  • âś… 8 Principles to Win at the Game of Start-Ups

  • 🤧 Don’t Catch “Silicon Valley Disease”

  • đź‘Ž Why Most Startups Fail

  • 🔥 The AI Learning Mindset 

BONUS: Find this months Time to Sell Index (TTSI) at the bottom of this newsletter!

Listen to this newsletter👇

🚀 How To Succeed as a Startup Founder…

When I first heard Eric Malka’s story, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

He came to New York at seventeen with nothing and built The Art of Shaving, later acquired by a Fortune 25 company.

His lessons on mindset, grit, and scaling are worth every word.

Here’s Eric in his own words:

I was seventeen when I arrived in NYC’s Port Authority on a Greyhound bus from Montreal, as an undocumented immigrant with no money and no education.

Twenty-four years later, my company, The Art of Shaving, was acquired by a Fortune 25 corporation.

During my 40-year career, I’ve seen many smart, hardworking entrepreneurs start strong, only to stumble within the first five years.

The truth is, the odds of entrepreneurial success are brutally low. Talent and effort alone aren’t enough. What makes the difference is avoiding the pitfalls that many founders fall into.

That’s why I developed these 8 principles that took me from launching The Art of Shaving from kitchen table to strategic acquisition.

Principle #1: Mindset
Looking back, I realize our business success was in large part due to our mindset. Some aspects of that entrepreneurial mindset were forged through life experiences, while others were innate and sharpened over time.

  • No Plan B – We were all in. Failure wasn’t an option because we had nothing to fall back on.

  • Grit – Entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint.

  • Prudence – It’s about making smart decisions, learning from mistakes, and weighing risks carefully.

  • Action – When we sold our car to open a store in NYC, we didn’t overthink it. Action creates momentum.

When you combine grit, prudence, and action, you don’t just get progress, you create your own “luck.”

Principle #2: Execution is Everything
People often compliment me that The Art of Shaving was a brilliant idea. The truth? The idea was simple. The magic wasn’t in the idea, it was in our execution:

  • Luxurious store design

  • Premium natural shaving products

  • Elevated barber spa services

  • Prime retail locations

  • Well-run operations

Execution turned our idea into a household name. Most entrepreneurs get stuck in the idea phase. Don’t! Focus on whether you can execute it better than anyone else.

Principle #3: Think Big, Start Small
With just $12,000, I asked myself: What’s the smallest version of this business I can start? 

Our first little shop made $350K in its first year, profitably. Twelve years later, we were doing $30M annually.

That’s the power of thinking big while starting small. You test assumptions. You learn from mistakes. You recalibrate before scaling.

Principle #4: Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly™
Most startups fail because they scale too soon. Success comes from respecting each stage of growth.

It took nine years to hit $10M, then three years to reach $30M, and a few more to hit $100M.

Skipping stages can be fatal. Greatness takes time.

Principle #5: Scalability
A scalable business grows revenue faster than costs. But you’re not ready to scale until you have:

  • Product-Market Fit

  • Repeatable Customer Acquisition

  • Strong Unit Economics

  • Operational Systems

  • Leadership

  • Cash Flow

Entrepreneurs with the right mindset, who think big, start small, and execute with excellence, earn the chance to experience exponential growth.

Principle #6: Financial Discipline
Cash is oxygen. Without it, your business dies.

Myriam and I sold our car to open our first shop. That constraint forced us to track every expense, negotiate hard, and operate lean.

A financially disciplined founder must track:

  • Cash Flow (weekly)

  • Budget & Forecasts (monthly, quarterly, yearly)

  • Profit & Loss Statements (monthly, quarterly, yearly)

  • Key Predictive Indicators (sales, inventory, financial metrics)

Investors don’t back ideas, they back entrepreneurs who prove they can be good stewards of capital.

Principle #7: Innovate
Before investing a dime, ask:

What can we be the best in the world at?
What makes us uniquely different?

Innovation made The Art of Shaving the first men’s grooming retail chain with barber services and natural formulas. Innovation isn’t just product, it’s culture.

Principle #8: Branding
A brand is always a company, but a company isn’t always a brand.

When we sold TAOS in one of the toughest M&A years, 95% of our purchase price was brand equity.
That’s the power of selling a brand versus selling a company.

Build your brand, not just your business. That’s what investors truly value.

Eric’s story is one every founder should read twice, once for the inspiration, and again for the blueprint.

— Colin C. Campbell

P.S. our new music video is out!

Disclaimer: Startup Club and its AI resources are for informational purposes only and do not constitute legal advice. Consult a qualified lawyer for legal matters.

📢 Today’s Clubhouse!

Join us today at 2 PM ET on Clubhouse as we dive into 26 startup ideas that are poised for growth in 2026, perfect for founders looking to get a jump on the next wave.

  • Which industries are being quietly disrupted and why now is the time to act.

  • How to choose and validate an idea quickly with limited resources.

  • What metrics and signals indicate a 2026-ready idea, not just a trend.

âś… Don’t Catch “Silicon Valley Disease”

We live in a unicorn nation.

Many believe that less than a billion just doesn’t cut it anymore.

In my book Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat., I call this “Silicon Valley Disease.” (And if you’re looking for a “get rich quick” guide, mine’s not it.)

I’ve seen countless startups fail chasing the “big win” before building a solid foundation. They go for whales with a fishhook. Silicon Valley has created wealth, sure but for every success story, many more fail.

Let’s be clear: success doesn’t require a billion-dollar valuation.

Unicorns like Google, Facebook, and OpenAI are rare. Letting them define your path is unrealistic at best, dangerous at worst.

Watch Out for the Unicorn Trap

Every week there’s a new “unicorn,” and many founders make the mistake of thinking that’s the goal. They burn through investor cash, lose control, and often collapse.

Most unicorns take venture funding—which can quickly turn from blessing to trap. It’s often better to build a self-funded or customer-funded business that scales quietly and sustainably.

Retain control, protect your vision, and build on your terms.

Learn from the “Dead” Companies

For every unicorn, dozens of founders fail. I’ve lived it—going from a billion to nothing. One early venture had us on magazine covers before a botched exit wiped it all out.

Fame and fast money blind founders. Venture firms push for 10x growth at any cost, tossing discipline aside. Look at WeWork: $22 billion raised, now in Chapter 11. Don’t chase unicorns—learn from their mistakes.

Repeatable Beats Rare

I’m not Steve Jobs or Elon Musk—and I don’t want to be. Their success is rare. I’d rather have a repeatable system.

By avoiding “Silicon Valley Disease,” I’ve launched and scaled multiple businesses successfully. The wins and losses taught me how to build solid, repeatable success.

Why Most Startups Fail and How Serial Entrepreneurs Beat the Odds

Entrepreneurship is often seen as the great equalizer, the place where ambition and ideas create success.

The American dream.

But reality hits hard: over 90% of startups fail. 

Still, some founders seem to defy gravity. Serial entrepreneurs succeed more often not because they’re smarter or luckier but because they’ve learned the patterns. They’ve built a framework.

They know how to start, scale, exit, and repeat.

The Odds Are Brutal, Not Random

Harvard research shows founders who’ve succeeded before have far better odds of doing it again. Yet even experienced founders fail. The cause isn’t usually the idea—it’s execution, timing, and scalability. Too many chase shiny objects, mistake motion for progress, and skip the checkpoints that tell them when to pivot or stop.

Every Startup Needs a Story

Before hiring, pitching, or prototyping, you need a story. Your story gets people to believe. It connects your why to the market’s why now.

Investors buy stories before stock. Employees join stories before companies. Customers buy stories that make them feel.

When we launched .CLUB, it wasn’t about a domain—it was about belonging. When we built Paw.com, it was about love and comfort. A great story creates gravity. It pulls customers, teams, and capital toward you.

Pattern Recognition: The Serial Entrepreneur’s Edge

Serial entrepreneurs don’t avoid mistakes—they make them faster, study them, and turn lessons into systems. Over time, they spot patterns:

  • The Wave: Every startup rides a macro trend—too early and you drown, too late and the wave has crashed.

  • The Moat: A great product isn’t enough; you need defensibility—brand, patents, distribution, or network effects.

  • The Scale Test: If you can’t grow without costs ballooning, you’re on a treadmill, not a rocket ship.

Frameworks That Reduce Failure

Across my ventures, I’ve distilled a process:
Start with a story that solves a problem you love. Vet it ruthlessly.
Scale by adding zeros through systems, not just hustle.
Exit when timing meets opportunity, not fatigue.
Then repeat, armed with more data and fewer illusions.

Serial entrepreneurs are craftsmen of repetition. They don’t reinvent the wheel—they refine it.

The Psychology of Winning and Losing Often

Even the best hitters strike out most of the time. In business, nobody bats a thousand—but serial founders know how to fail.

They set milestones to limit losses, hire complementary teams, and tell stories that keep people inspired through chaos. Most importantly, they love the journey.

The entrepreneurs who thrive aren’t the lucky ones. They’re the storytellers who’ve learned to breathe underwater while everyone else is still gasping for air.

🔥 The AI Learning Mindset 

Change makes most people nervous.

Not me though, I thrive on it.

Corporate giants spend billions avoiding it.

Risk aversion is baked into their DNA.

I saw it during three years at the top of a Fortune 500 company.

That resistance creates an opening.

Enter the entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs move fast, solve problems and ride new waves to build wealth.

Look at crypto exchanges: none of the top platforms are banks and all of them are relatively recent startups after 2010…. Binance, MEXC, Gate, Bitget, Bybit, Upbit, OKX, HTX, Coinbase and Crypto.com.

Startups captured an entire market while Wall Street watched from the sidelines. AI is the next wave.

ChatGPT jumped from 1 million to 100 million weekly active users within two months of launch and hit 800 million by July 2025. Today 92 % of Fortune 500 companies use ChatGPT.

McKinsey says generative AI could add up to $4.4 trillion to the global economy every year.

That’s bigger than any previous tech shift. But who cares about these statistics?

The reality is that this massive change has created an opportunity for entrepreneurs who want to use AI to unleash creativity, productivity, and wealth.

The key to success: An AI learning mindset.

In Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat. we talk about a concept called “minor-majors.”

A minor amount of effort could have a major impact. And with AI that equation has 100X the impact. I’ve used AI to help create a hit video…check out the Made in America video which hit 100 000 views in 72 hours.

I created the song after entering in the lyrics and then had Google Veo3 create all of the videos. I have also become an expert in developing ads with AI and sending them to our agency.

The key to wealth creation today is focusing on how you can solve problems or seize opportunities by using AI.

It’s all about a mindset. Even in my personal life, I’ve now turned to it. I’ve asked an AI to diagnose a warning light on my boat.

I’ve generated songs and videos for family birthdays.

It nearly brought my 85 year old mother to tears when we played the song at her birthday party.

And you know what it was pretty catchy.

Entrepreneurs must also rethink how products get discovered. Instead of wading through Google ads, I asked an AI engine to recommend a 60-inch bathtub with the highest water capacity for one of our Airbnbs. It delivered three options instantly.

AI systems pull from trusted sources: Wikipedia, reputable news outlets, industry sites, market data aggregators, official company pages, academic papers, government portals, review sites, online forums and business databases.

Here is an old notion: Traditional PR matters again.

When we announced that Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat. won 31 awards, AI tools updated their answers within hours (see below).

Prior queries had been quoting an outdated press release from a competing book even though it was publicly available information that Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat. had won more awards than any other book.

The only explanation I can give is that AI’s are lazy.

We need to wake them up. Living in the future means surrounding yourself with AI.

I subscribe to dozens of AI platforms and read as much as I can.

I also play and create stuff to mess around, but also work hard to use AI to create wealth.

AI will never replace the entrepreneur, but they will amplify the ideas of those who move fast and embrace change. Change is inevitable.

The only question is whether you let it happen to you or lead it.

🚨 Podcasts

Colin shares how to spot million-dollar ideas hiding in plain sight and turn awareness into opportunity.

Colin explores how AI is reshaping entrepreneurship and why those who stay curious will win the next era of business. 

Don’t forget to share out this newsletter to get rewards!

📅 This Month’s Clubhouse Schedule!

Eric Malka, founder of The Art of Shaving, shares the principles that helped him build, scale, and sell a global brand from mindset to execution.

We’ll be talking about:

  • What are the core principles every founder should master before scaling?

  • How can entrepreneurs balance innovation with brand consistency?

  • What mindset separates long-term success from short-term wins?

Author and advisor Alexis Sikorsky, as we uncover what buyers really look for and how to navigate the world of private equity for your business.

We’ll be talking about:

  • What are the lesser-known traits private-equity buyers prioritize in a company?

  • How should founders position their business for a successful exit or investment?

  • What common mistakes can prevent a deal from happening—or erode value post-acquisition?

🚀 IPO Market Rebounds: Time to Sell Index Climbs to 24.5 from 6.8

Momentum returns to the IPO market!

Here’s what that means for startup exits and your next big move.

Is now the right time to sell your business?

The market’s recovery continues but without major change this month.

The TTSI remains at 24.5, unchanged from last month. IPO activity has stabilized, with forecasts still around 330 IPOs for 2025 up 47% from 2024, but far from peak conditions.

What This Means:

  • Momentum from earlier this year is holding

  • It’s still a buyer’s market

  • Smaller company valuations typically lag IPOs by 6–12 months

The Bottom Line

We’re no longer in a downturn but we’re not in a seller’s market yet.

Use this phase to strengthen your business, improve positioning, and get ready for the next upturn.

We’ll keep tracking the TTSI each month in Startup Club Edge to help you stay ahead when conditions shift.

🔥 Check Me Out on TikTok!

@startupclubhq

Delegation isn’t about offloading tasks; it’s about empowering others with responsibility. As entrepreneurs, we grow by focusing on the bi... See more

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And if you made it this far, thank you for reading.

I hope you enjoyed this edition of the StartUp.Club Newsletter.

— Colin C. Campbell

Entrepreneur Fact of the Month: 58% of small businesses in the U.S. are started with under $25,000, and 33 % begin with less than $5,000.