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Most entrepreneurs are continually concerned about their finances. Their companies perhaps not yet profitable, they may have a fear of “running out of dry powder.” These entrepreneurs often have fallen in love with their company's technologies, products, and potential markets, but they require more resources. Invariably these emerging ventures shroud their fear of the grueling capital raising marathon by presenting voluminous business plans to potential investors. They often flaunt their “optimized business models.”” Investors, however, typically want to know why the potential investment is such a good deal. The entrepreneur often wants guidance regarding what to say to whom in a changing financing environment.

In this article, our “Practitioner's Corner” associate editor Joe Levangie collaborates with a long-time colleague Paul Broude to address how businesses should “make their capital-raising initiatives happen.” Levangie, a venture advisor and entrepreneur, first worked with Broude, a business and securities attorney, in 1985 when they went to London to pursue financing for an American startup. They successfully survived all-night drafting sessions, late-night clubbing by the company founder, and even skeet shooting and barbequing at the investment banker's country house to achieve the first “Greenfield” flotation by an American company on the Unlisted Securities Market of the London Stock Exchange. To ascertain how the entrepreneur can determine what financing options exist in today's investing climate, read on.

The goal of this research is to investigate the relationship between two different sets of practices, lean startup and business planning, and their relation to entrepreneurial performance.

The authors collected data from 120 entrepreneurs across the US about a variety of new venture formation activities within the categories of lean startup or business planning. They use hierarchical regression to examine the relationship between these activities and new venture performance using both a subjective and objective measure of performance.

The results show that talking to customers, collecting preorders and pivoting based on customer feedback are lean startup activities correlated with performance; writing a business plan is the sole business planning activity correlated with performance.

This research lays the foundation for understanding the components of both lean startup and business planning. Moreover, these results demonstrate that the separation of lean startup and business planning represents a false dichotomy.

These findings suggest that entrepreneurs should engage in some lean startup activities and still write a business plan.

This article offers the first quantitative, empirical comparison of lean startup activities and business planning. Furthermore, it provides support for the relationship between specific lean startup activities and firm performance.

As publishers and academia swiftly head towards e-textbooks, it is important to understand how students feel about using e-textbooks as a primary learning tool. This paper discusses results of a small-scale study looking into how a group of language learners view and use e-textbooks as learning tools in ESL classrooms. The paper concludes by offering teaching implications that could ease integrating e-textbooks in language classrooms in a more effective and efficient manner.