On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black American male in Ferguson, Missouri, was shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer after reportedly assaulting the officer and attempting to steal his weapon, sparking protests and unrest in the city and across the US. In the wake of the tragic fatalities Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in Staten Island, attention turned to possible solutions.

There are multitude of reasons why a company might want to rebrand its corporate brand, a product, or a service. Often, companies rebrand to seize an opportunity or prevent threats in the future. At times, companies rebrand in reaction to events that are so significant that the existing brand must be changed. Merger and acquisitions, legal issues or competition are often reasons to rebrand.

For Taser, although they had also been selling body cameras since 2009, It was during that time in 2014 when Taser realized that they could do more than just Taser and have a broader appeal. In the years since, Taser (now Axon) has made huge strides in the body cameras and software market, propelling their image forward in the public eye, and their valuation up in the stock market.

Axon has undergone many structural changes in a relatively short period of time, including ditching the Taser name in April 2017 and re-branding as Axon Enterprise Inc. Most importantly, the rebranding signals a pivot for the business from selling weapons to selling a broad arrange of connected, smart devices 'to make the world a safer place'.

Long gone are the days when finance just reported numbers; in addition to its governance and oversight roles, the finance function increasingly provides operational and enterprise-wide support.

When the time comes that it’s essential to build a permanent and solid financial infrastructure, you want to build from the bottom up. We’ve entered an era where you can rent and not buy everything, and finance talent is no exception.

The increasing magnitude of financial complexity, employee count, revenue, and outside funding are the main drivers of the evolution of the financial infrastructure in the startup.

The most important consideration is to be thoughtful and have a good plan to grow the financial capabilities of your startup.

As a founder, you need to understand and be able to explain the quality of your company’s growth – including growth loops, the rate of customer acquisition, engagement, churn, and monetisation.

Understanding quantifiable measures (metrics) of performance, growth, and customer behaviour should be a priority for any startup founder and their team.

Under conditions of rapid growth, entrepreneurs face unusual paradoxes and challenges, and the management modes required by the companies change.

You can not improve something if it’s not measured. You should be able to translate or interpret everything financially, and the impact on cash flow should be figured out. Forecasts and business plans should be updated on a periodic basis.

So you’ve heard of bookkeeping and accounting, but what is financial planning and analysis (FP&A), and why is it important? This is the second article of a three-part article series on how to think about entrepreneurial finance. This article will provide you with the basics and principles of FP&A.

Accountants record the historical results, and then the FP&A professionals take this information and analyze it and explain the historical performance (the “A” in FP&A). Then they forecast future period results using the insights learned from the analysis (the “P” in FP&A).

The analysis part of FP&A is about understanding the financials of your business, both quantitatively and qualitatively – sometimes finance is not about money.

Entrepreneurs in high-growth companies distinguish themselves with leading entrepreneurial practices in marketing, finance, management, and planning. But often in a new and emerging company, the finance function is nothing more than a bookkeeper or an outsourced accounting firm, and this leads to situations like lack of real cash management.

Finance is one of the most basic skills that any business must embrace to be successful, yet, financial know-how, issues, and analysis are often the entrepreneur’s Achilles’ heels. This article is part of a series on how to think about entrepreneurial finance.

Once you’ve made the decision on the methods to be used, and before setting up your chart of accounts, you need to think about what’s important to your company.

There are also many tools that you might be able to integrate with your accounting system, the main thing is to figure out where the bottlenecks are in your financial and accounting systems.

At the core, the finance function is much more than just taking care of payroll or keeping track of the cash, it also does much more strategic things like determining the company’s unit economics, helping define and track the right KPIs to measure business progress, assess the company’s resources, and figure out how to create enough time to get from one key milestone to the next.

La comunicación gráfica ha sido parte de la humanidad desde el comienzo de los tiempos y su uso no deja de crecer. Las banderas nacionales, por ejemplo, se emplean desde hace siglos para simbolizar un país o nación, y están diseñadas para transmitir una gran cantidad de significado de manera rápida.

La 'aparición' de la web en los años 90 hizo posible el cruce de diferentes disciplinas de sistemas de información, tecnología y diseño. Y en los últimos años, hemos visto como la gama de dispositivos por los que se pueden ver las aplicaciones web ha proliferado de forma espectacular, permitiendo que el público en general tenga acceso a áreas de comunicación visual que antes sólo eran accesibles para los expertos.

Debido también a los avances tecnológicos de la última década, ha habido una explosión en la popularidad de la visualización de datos, permitiéndonos acceder a grandes cantidades de datos de forma rápida y que de otra manera no sería posible.

La renovada era de la información y el ritmo creciente de la sociedad nos lleva mas allá de lo táctil y lo bi-dimensional, para adentrarnos en un ámbito digital de espacio virtual e interactividad. Ahora todos tenemos acceso al conocimiento de manera fácil, eficiente y muy rápida.