Entrepreneur Corner: Legal pitfalls and mistakes to learn from

Here’s the latest from VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner.

4 legal pitfalls startup owners must face – Legal barriers vary from company to company, depending on the industry they choose and how they operate, but for startup owners, there are some common headaches. Attorney Curtis Smolar looks at four of the most pressing.

The essential qualities of a great CEO – Jeanne M. Sullivan, General Partner at StarVest Partners, has met a lot of CEOS – and along the way she has noticed what separates the great ones from the merely ok. She runs down the five key aspects outstanding leaders share.

Title inflation returns with a vengeance – Titles are often meaningless, but employee (and employer) ego demands them. Early stage investor Brad Feld notes the number of adjectives appearing in front of titles is on the rise again – and suggests a simple way to determine if all of those overblown titles are actually covering the work that needs to be done at your company.

3 mistakes every entrepreneur can learn from – Screw-ups happen, but the smart entrepreneur learns from them – even catastrophic ones – and moves forward. Chad Little, founder and CEO of FetchBack, talks about three fatal errors he made with the fantasy sports site Sandbox.

Can you objectively compare ideas? – Determining whether your idea is a good one doesn’t require you to build out a complete site, says Idealab founder and CEO Bill Gross. Instead, a bare minimum experiment can show you whether it’s worth the investment of more time and money.