Some interesting links we found across the web this week:

How to Recover Gracefully After Shutting Down Your Startup
We are all familiar with the saying: “failure is the mother of success.” Yet, when it comes to startups, there are ways to fail well by preserving the founder’s relationships and integrity and positioning oneself to bounce back. Tom Eisenmann, the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, shares his insights from interviewing dozens of founders of failed businesses in this article.

The Trillion-Dollar Opportunity in Supporting Female Entrepreneurs
It is not a secret, especially in Silicon Valley, that female entrepreneurs are quantitatively underrepresented in the startup world. This HBR article poses the question “how do we support female entrepreneurs?” and answers it by advocating a focus on a key factor in success that tends to be overlooked: access to networks.

Why You Shouldn’t Slash Prices in the Next Recession
During a recession, executives naturally assume that slashing prices and profit margins is the only way to keep their customers and market share while maximizing the use of the company’s assets even when demand decreases. Yet, this article from HBR poses that such perspective is short-sighted. Instead, it recommends four fronts every executive should consider in preparing for the next recession: (1) knowing the company’s place in the market and exactly what drives its profits, (2) adjusting prices based on segmented, value-based approach, (3) patching price leakage by ensuring that the company is not giving away more than it is contractually obligated to provide and (4) developing dynamic pricing where it makes sense. So, are you prepared for the next recession?

Understanding the Crowd SAFE
“Crowd SAFE,” created by Republic’s in-house legal team, functions like a regular SAFE, created by Y Combinator, but adapted specifically to work for investment campaigns accepting hundreds or even thousands of non-VC investors. Unlike the regular SAFE, Crowd SAFE allows every day people to invest in startups using one tailor-made instrument to a wide range of individuals, keeping in line with Regulation Crowdfunding enacted by the SEC in 2016. Template of Crowd SAFE can be found in this article by Medium.

For Startups, Press is Good, but Meeting Customers is Better
Whether we like it or not, we are all playing the reputation game. Rupert Younger, who counsels the world’s largest companies on reputation management, provides important advices for companies on how to actively manage their reputations. For startups, one of the key advices includes focusing on getting customers one by one by meeting with them or even hosting dinners with existing clients with the company’s leadership.