The most important first steps: Establish credibility, and prove that you can move fast.

He advocates for growing your business without investors.

More investors will qualify to make investments into startups, venture companies and funds and private offerings.

Perhaps even more dramatic than Apple’s rise to $2 trillion is how quickly it got there. In yet another sign that the global pandemic has prompted investors to bet even more heavily on Big Tech, Apple just became the first publicly traded U.S. company to achieve a market capitalization of $2 trillion. Read Full Story

Do this critical mental work before you step into the room to pitch investors.

Markets are crashing on coronavirus fears, but Robinhood users are unable to trade stocks due to another outage. Robinhood, the app-based trading platform popular with first-time investors, is currently suffering an outage resulting in users unable to make trades. Robinhood itself confirmed the outage in a tweet admitting “trading is currently down.” Read Full Story

The company’s huge market valuation may suggest that investors believe Apple will come out stronger post-coronavirus. The total value of Apple stock passed $1.5 trillion in trading on the NASDAQ Wednesday, smack in the middle of a global pandemic that’s affecting all of the company’s major markets. Read Full Story

Rally enables regular investors to buy and sell shares in high-end collectibles. Crafted from individually selected Nile crocodile scales in cream and gray, Hermès’s Himalaya Birkin is one of the world’s rarest handbags, fetching more than $100,000 at auction. Rally cofounder and CEO Chris Bruno wants you to own one—in part. Rally, which launched in 2017, acquires high-end collectibles—Birkins, Porsche convertibles, Rolex watches, even first-edition Harry Potter novels—and allows people to buy and sell shares in them via an app, as if the items were public stocks. Investors—including Rally, which invests up to 10% in each collectible—can make money by selling their shares as an item gains in value, or if the treasure is eventually sold for a profit. (Rally registers each item as a security.) The app’s average investor—there are currently 10,000 total—is 28 years old and owns shares in four different Rally-managed assets. The company has held offerings …

Today, we got our first look into how online sales at Amazon.com have benefited from the coronavirus pandemic and its economic consequences. Today, we got our first look into how the COVID-19 economy is impacting the world’s largest e-commerce platform, and I’ll spare you the dramatic windup: Yes, Amazon saw a huge increase in sales as brick-and-mortar competitors were forced to shut their doors and people became trapped in their houses with nowhere to go. Read Full Story

Understanding why a venture capitalist rejects your startup can help founders build better businesses. When I pitched my first startup to angel investors and VCs, I was often told they were concerned that I didn’t have a cofounder. This feedback drove me nuts, because it wasn’t for my lack of trying. I didn’t know many people who had the startup bug back then, and certainly fewer who could afford to work without pay. So I decided to forge ahead alone. Read Full Story