What does it mean to be an entrepreneur? It's more than being a business owner; it's a perspective and a lifestyle. The road to entrepreneurship is often a treacherous one filled with unexpected detours, roadblocks and dead ends. There are lots of sleepless nights, plans that don’t work out, funding that doesn’t come through and customers that never materialize. It can be so challenging to launch a business that it may make you wonder why anyone willingly sets out on such a path. Despite all of these hardships, every year, thousands of entrepreneurs embark on this journey determined to bring their vision to fruition and fill a need they see in society.

Being your own boss, calling all the shots, hustling to hit your goals — for many people, entrepreneurship is the ultimate career goal. But as awesome as running your own business sounds, it's also incredibly difficult. How difficult is it? Why do 90% of startups fail?

Podcast with Elias Torres: Elevating Minority Founders When you paint a picture in your head of the American Dream, what do you see? For many of us, it involves the vision of being ‘self-made’ and designing our own destiny, no matter where we came from. For Elias Torres, the choice his mother made when she immigrated from Nicaragua to Tampa would prove to be a fortuitous one in helping him realize that dream. After his early start at IBM, Torres became committed to the vision of entrepreneurship. With Drift, his current company, he has proven time and again that Latino founders deserve a place amongst the world’s biggest capital projects.

The number of startups and entrepreneur investments has grown drastically amid the uncertainty of the past few years. Although acquiring funds for a business has never been easy, venture capitalists are now spending less time than ever looking at each pitch deck. Especially in an age when time is money, VCs aren't just saying no to a few opportunities here and there — they're saying no on a massive scale. One leading VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz, reveals just how difficult it is to hear "yes." According to an interview, the firm invests in just 0.7% of the startups its team investigates each year. Though the firm doesn't reveal all its selection secrets in the video, it does emphasize the importance of the pitch. #entrepreneurship #startups