Our very special guest for this episode of "What Scares Startups" is Stewart Guenther. Stewart is the founder of vc-pert an advisory services firm, co-founder of The Venture Capital Roundtable, and venture partner of Viaduct Ventures. Stewart specializes in bridging Silicon Valley with early stage entrepreneurs, investors, corporations, and centers of innovation.  With this focus, Stewart is a mentor and coach for SME’s developing and scaling their innovation, and larger corporations seeking to engage, invest and incorporate innovation.

A serial entrepreneur by nature, Stewart brings a wealth of investor, corporate growth and international experience, working with firms ranging from multi-billion-dollar corporations to start-up companies. Stewart has successfully promoted companies, products, services and technologies globally from concept through maturity and exit.Stewart’s expertise includes early stage ventures in global economies, seed/venture financing and structures, M&A and Exit strategies and execution, financial and expansion modeling, community/relationship development, product launch/marketing, and various other start-up related fields.  Stewart engages with select international start-ups and corporations on business planning, international expansion and capital sourcing.

In part 1 of a two-part series with Stewart, we cover the whole gamut from the history of Silicon Valley as a hub of innovation, how fear can be a tremendous catalyzer and motivator but can also freeze you in place, The importance of common goals and unifying principles in terms of helping drive the psychology for change en masse, the parallels that exist between "moonshots" and the venture world, and we discuss the "ideal" CEO figure.

So much good stuff that we had to split our conversation with Stewart up, so tune into the first half of our amazing conversation with Stewart Guenther on "What Scares Startups" now!