Founder Reports

Most people assume leadership is about staying decisive under pressure and having answers when your team needs them. Those things matter. But the leaders who build the most durable teams and the strongest organizations tend to focus somewhere else. They spend more time developing the people around them than proving their own competence. Their job is closer to building an environment where the right decisions can happen even when they’re not in the room.

Out of all the aspects of running a business, managing assets like laptops and hardware is far from the most glamorous. In many cases, it seems insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But as the business grows, the problem often shows up suddenly. Around your 30th to 50th hire, someone in finance will ask a simple question. “How many laptops do we actually own, and where are they?” That question will likely trigger a scramble.

Nearly two-thirds of American adults have had an idea for a business they never launched. More than 60% have seen someone else succeed with the idea they had first, and for nearly 1 in 4, that experience hurt. Those are some of the eye-opening results from Founder Reports’ survey of 1,014 U.S. adults about the business ideas they’ve had throughout their lives. The September 2026 study shed new light on Americans’ entrepreneurial aspirations, including feelings of regret and missed opportunities.

The economics of distributed work are hard to argue with. You skip the typical office costs, hire from anywhere, and give your team the flexibility workers want. But if you’ve been running a remote company for more than a year or two, you’ve probably noticed that relationships thin out, cross-team collaboration gets trickier, and the shared context is often lacking. That’s the problem offsites are meant to solve.

Almost everyone has a business idea at some point. Having one is common, but doing something with it is not. Most reporting on entrepreneurship focuses on the people who started something, or the people who say they want to someday. Very little has been said about the ideas people already had and let go, which make up the majority of the entrepreneurial experience.

Your email delivery service is one of those decisions that feels minor when you’re building but can become a disaster if you get it wrong. A verification code that arrives 5 minutes late loses the signup. Password reset emails that don’t arrive or get caught in a spam folder prevent users from logging in. We looked at the available services that handle email delivery with SaaS startups in mind.

Expanding your team beyond U.S. borders opens access to exceptional talent, but it also introduces complexity around compliance, payroll, and employment law. The right global hiring platform removes these barriers so you can focus on growth instead of paperwork. We’ve evaluated the leading platforms to help you find the best fit for your international hiring needs.

Job applications are piling up faster than recruiters can process them. LinkedIn reported that job applications increased by more than 45% year over year, creating unprecedented screening pressure for recruiters. In some markets, thousands of applications are submitted every minute. Meanwhile, hiring teams are still expected to move faster, improve candidate quality, and deliver a better experience without adding headcount. That’s why AI recruiting tools have moved from experimental to expected.

Many local business owners pour most of their marketing budget into Google Ads and Meta campaigns. And, of course, those channels can work. But there’s a growing disconnect between where the money goes and what customers actually trust. A June 2026 survey of 1,013 Americans by Hopkins Printing found that 46% trust print advertising more than digital advertising. Only 3% said the opposite.

Backlinks remain one of the most powerful ranking signals in organic search. A Backlinko analysis of 11.8 million Google search results found that the top-ranking page has 3.8x as many backlinks as pages in positions two through ten. That shows that getting links to your site is critical if you want to earn top rankings. The challenge is, link building can be extremely time-consuming, often making it impractical for small businesses to outrank bigger competitors.