When someone finds out that I am an entrepreneurship professor, they tend to either ask me to listen to their startup pitch, or else they look at me quizzically and say: "But I thought entrepreneurship was all about improvisation. How can you teach entrepreneurship?" As a result, I have heard a lot of startup pitches (last year was blockchain; this year was CBD) but I also have thought about how to answer the bigger question: what can we teach founders to make their startups more successful? Fortunately, the last decade has given me a lot of valuable lessons I can share, and these lessons come from two different sources.