Building a great team is the lifeblood of any startup, and finding great talent is one of the hardest and costliest tasks any CEO will ever face.

Just as the music industry couldn't combat the financial impact of digital piracy, major corporations will have to rethink how to maintain margins when many of their most profitable items can be easily manufactured at home.

The Industrial Revolution was about making physical things. Many of the manufactured goods that were once tangible objects have now been reduced to bits and bytes of data.

Consumers value their personal time and are loyal to those companies that make their lives more productive. Brands gaining some of the biggest successes in social media are engaging with millions of consumers through value exchange.

While commercials interrupt consumers' enjoyment of a TV program, social media allows video to enter the conversation between friends in a non-intrusive way with an opt-in choice.

To effectively reach consumers in the new social environment, brand managers need to learn how to translate their budgets into the digital realm, which also means understanding the advantages that digital can provide over television advertising.

Television programming is the number one topic on Twitter, and dozens of start-ups in the social space are linking second-screen experiences. People no longer need to sit on the same couch to enjoy a show together.

Microsoft first entered the living room with Ultimate TV way back in 2000 - a year before Apple's first iPod was announced. Ultimate TV offered consumers a DVR and supporting online services, including 14 days of programming and the ability to record 35 hours of programming. Microsoft's reach was then thwarted when Echostar acquired DIRECTV.

As a serial investor who has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for startups, I know that the business plans coming out of incubators tend to be vetted and more thoroughly validated. The incubator's input into your business plan will make you look far more polished and experienced - even if you have never run a business before.

Targeted marketing delivers a lower customer acquisition cost and gets you to profitable growth faster. The goal is to quickly identify the costs associated with acquiring your most profitable segment of customers and the incremental value - if any - of going beyond your core.