One of the most common pieces of business advice is also one of the easiest to misuse: define your ideal customer. In theory, that sounds simple enough. In practice, entrepreneurs are often told to sit down and invent a fictional person. Give her a name. Give her an age. Decide what she earns, what she drives, where she shops, how many children she has, what television shows she watches, and what coffee she drinks. Then build your entire business around her. The problem is that she is not...

There is a dangerous moment in entrepreneurship that happens long before the business fails. It is the moment you become so convinced that your idea is right that you stop asking whether it is. This happens to smart people. It happens to experienced people. It happens to people who have spent years inside an industry and people who have never worked in that industry at all. It happens because business ideas are rarely just business ideas to the people who create them. They become personal....

Leaving military service can create an unusual question: What do I build now? For some veterans, entrepreneurship becomes part of the answer. Maybe you have an idea you carried with you for years. Maybe you discovered a problem through your military experience that you believe you can solve. Maybe traditional employment does not offer the autonomy, purpose, flexibility, or opportunity you are looking for. Or maybe you simply know that you are capable of building something, but you are not yet...