The Consumer Price Index rose just 0.1% for the month after declining 0.4% in June, bringing the annual rate down slightly from 3.5% to 3.4%. Core CPI rose 0.2% and declined on an annual basis from 2.6% to 2.5%. Yet inflation is not one number, and anyone looking only at 3.4% is missing what is taking place underneath the surface. The first layer is energy, and this is where the headline number becomes extremely misleading. Energy prices declined another 1.5% in July after collapsing 5.7% in June, which restrained the overall CPI considerably. Gasoline fell 2.9% for the month, but…
Author: Staff Writer
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways $700 vs $9,000 isn’t a scam — it’s three different products. Match the tier to your market, or you’ll pay $800 for a problem that needs $4,000 of work. Budget from customer value, not package price. If the math doesn’t justify the retainer several times over, the scope (or the channel) is wrong. Every discovery call I run reaches the same two questions. The first is “will this work?” The second is “what should SEO cost?” Founders ask the second one nervously, because they’ve usually collected three proposals that quote…
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Buyers make many of their most important decisions long before they speak with a salesperson. Buyers apply five tests throughout the buying journey: the problem test, the expertise test, the fit test, the solution test and the risk test. Only after buyers have worked through all five tests do they typically develop enough conviction to move forward. A few months ago, I was speaking with the CEO of a growing SaaS company. His sales team was missing quota, while qualified lead volume was up, and leadership had reached a familiar…
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways After watching a once-thriving business lose momentum as markets changed, I learned a hard truth: Company value is based on a buyer’s confidence in the future, not a founder’s belief in what’s possible. The best time to sell is often when you don’t want to — because that’s usually when your company is worth the most. There are moments in every entrepreneur’s life that seem permanent while you’re living them. You convince yourself you’ve finally crossed some invisible finish line — that all the years of uncertainty, sleepless nights and…
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways Start with what you know about yourself. Identifying your innate tendencies early on is essential because when running a business gets stressful, you want to understand your default settings. Once you identify which traits come naturally to you, you can start to brush up on the ones that may be more awkward-feeling. If you run your business for a long time, things are going to change. What should remain fixed throughout is your values. When I launched Jotform in 2006, I had never worked as the head of a company.…
Key Takeaways LinkedIn has fought low-quality content for years, including scam job postings. AI has made moderating content far harder to manage. AI detection firms estimate that a substantial share of LinkedIn posts and comments now involve AI, though LinkedIn disputed their results. LinkedIn knows it has an AI problem. Last month, the professional networking platform started giving users a way to flag posts and comments they believe were created by AI, using a “seems like AI slop” reporting button, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. The move aims to slow the flood of AI-created content. LinkedIn isn’t alone. Most…
Key Takeaways Patil co-founded Function to provide a comprehensive preventive health solution. She and her co-founders convinced investors of a long-term vision, in part powered by AI. Now, Function is in its second act, she says — and is valued at $2.5 billion. This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with Pranitha Patil, co-founder and chief business officer of preventive health membership platform Function, now valued at $2.5 billion. Function, co-founded by Jonathan Swerdlin (CEO), Dr. Mark Hyman (chief medical officer), Seth Weisfeld (chief design officer) and Dan Swerdlin (general counsel), provides access to more than 160 lab tests,…
Forty thousand dollars is a lot to wait on when you’re running a small restaurant. But that’s exactly what happened to Joy Kim, who spent eight months chasing down money Uber Eats owed her. Kim, who owns Kyoto Teriyaki on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, had been waiting since November 2025 for the company to pay out nearly 1,500 orders, according to Fox 13 Seattle. She called support, sent emails, updated her bank information. Nothing worked. It wasn’t until Fox 13 Seattle began inquiring about the missing funds that Uber Eats moved. Uber Eats said the delay came down to identity verification…
I never considered myself an academic economist. I was a trader. That distinction has led me around the world with a front-row seat all because the floating exchange rate was born on August 15th, 1971 and even then it was supposed to be just temporary. Foreign Exchange futures just began trading in 1972. That only emerged when it was becoming obvious that what was intended to be temporary was becoming permanent. Consequently, none of this was ever taugt in school. When the first bank failure took place in 1974, Franklin National Bank, I knew a senior man in the bank…
You may have seen signs for kratom at your local convenience store or gas station. The Southeast Asian tree leaf, marketed as a natural remedy for pain, fatigue and sleep, has become a multibillion-dollar industry. But a growing number of states want to ban it, according to the Wall Street Journal. Reports to U.S. poison-control centers involving kratom have surged roughly 12-fold over the past decade, and the CDC recorded more than 5,200 fatal overdoses between 2020 and 2024 in which kratom was detected. Connecticut, Tennessee, Louisiana and Kansas have enacted full bans, with Nassau County, N.Y., and Los Angeles…