Editor’s Note: YoungEntrepreneur’s Ask the Expert column seeks to answer questions about everything from starting a business to growth strategies. To follow the column on Twitter — and ask a question — use hashtag #YEask, or leave a comment below. Your query may be the inspiration for a future column.
Dave Lerner is passionate about helping equip young entrepreneurs with the necessary tools to run a successful business. He’s a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, entrepreneurship blogger and the host of Venture Studio, an online video series where he interviews key players in the New York City start-up scene.
“I want young, talented people to get things right, and if you have a lot of training, and understanding, you have a really good chance of getting it right ” he says. “It makes me super happy when I can help entrepreneurs get out of the gate and succeed.”
Lerner is also an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School as well as the director of the Venture Lab at Columbia University Tech Ventures where he’s spun-out more than 70 tech startups over the last six years.
“When I graduated college in the late 1980s, there was no culture of entrepreneurship or mentorship — I had never even heard the word ‘entrepreneur’ before,” Lerner says. “Things have changed so much since then and now I’m one of the people on campus who’s really trying to help students launch their own business.”
His latest project is the Startup Genome, a crowdsourced online community that visually maps out local entrepreneurial ecosystems worldwide.
For this month only, Lerner is eager to tackle your burning-business questions each week. Feel free to ask small-business related questions, including queries about business ideas, finding funding, growing and working with partners. Follow him on twitter, @davidblerner.
Submit your questions in the comments section below and those with the most likes from other readers will be answered. On Twitter, use the hashtag #YEask. Please include your first and last name, your location (city and state) and the name of your business in your comment.
