According to Fast Company magazine and a study by MIT, paying people to be creative or productive is often counter productive.

The MIT study offered three levels of monetary incentive correlating to the level of success. When the system was tested against menial, mechanical tasks the incentives worked exceptionally well.

However, once even even a slight amount of cognition was needed, the larger the reward the worse the participants performed. This has been tested over and over. The findings the same, every time.

Now the lesson here is not to stop rewarding creative tasks financially. The idea here is to inspire you to search outside your payroll and equity holders for creative input once in a while.

Your customers are not paid to be visionary.

Get input from them. 

Ask them early in the process though and pull together the contextual information to properly evaluate their input.

--

Where has your best creative input come from?

Have you ever seen a business pitch that was brilliant? Have you ever seen a business pitch that was incredibly interesting, creative and clever yet lacked something and left you wondering "... but why?"

All to often early stage entrepreneurs (I've definitely been guilty of this) make a crucial mistake. Entrepreneurs of all levels of experience forget once in a while, and forget to ask the market a simple set of questions.

• Is there a reason to create your product?
• Do people want your product?
• Is there a problem your product solves?

Don't go to market with a product without defining the problem you solve.

Think of it this way; why would you teach your pony to jump if nobody wants a jumping pony?

As a seed stage business, it is often tempting to raise money to give you business a kick start. More money means more options, right?

What experts such as Mark Suster believe, as well as myself, is that there is a fine line between enough capital and too much capital. Especially in the seed stage.

Think about it this way: Let's treat the capital as rocket fuel and your business as a rocket. 

If you add too much rocket fuel and light it up, it's going to move incredibly quickly in the direction it's aiming.

As a seed stage business you don't really know where to aim it. To use an analogy of Stuart Cook's: Your business is like a kid that doesn't know what they want to be when they grow up.

If you take large investment you will: 

• feel pressured
• lose options and agility
• end up with undervalued equity and over-dilution long-term

Not everyone needs seed capital.

Throughout the resources available to entrepreneurs, there is an underlying belief. Starting a business with co-founders improves your chances of success. This claim is almost invariably backed up by a statistic around the large percentage of fortune 100 companies being started by 4 or more persons.

I'm not here to debate whether starting a business with a co-founder is a good idea.

Personally, I think it depends on your working style. If having a business partner is likely to drive the growth of your business and motivate you and lead to a synergistic relationship, it's probably a wise choice. However, if you work well alone and a good at bringing in the key skill sets to drive your business' growth at the appropriate time, you may be better off alone.

What I'm here to say is that you should be VERY careful who you choose as your co-founders.

At the point of founding a company, the path for the life of the business is almost entirely decided. At this point, your share can be diluted more than at any other investment point.

As such you needs to choose very wisely the entrepreneur or entrepreneurial manager you bring on as a co-founder.

Think about these key areas:
- How much time do they have?
- How much experience do they have?
- How well do you work together?
- How much of an overlap in expertise is there?
- How much value do they bring to the table (objectively speaking)?
- Are they as passionate as you?
- Are your personalities complimentary?
- Are they in this for the long haul?

When it comes to founding the company, ensure you do it properly. Be sure to include 'divorce clauses' so that you have the right (and so do they) to regain equity if certain things happen.

These clauses prevent people from putting in little to no work and reaping an unfair reward. All within the bounds of the law.

Remember, choose your partners carefully!

The energy was down, patience was running out and after nearly 24 hours of speakers (including the amazing Tony Robbins) over two days. Everyone wanted to see Sir Richard Branson.

This wave was started by just a handful of people, good friends of mine.

Filmed from the floor by Bryce Summerell (unedited) from MeetBryce and ACES UTS