The following post was inspired by a breakfast conversation I recently had with a successful entrepreneur:

If there's a single thing you should take away from business school, it is to ignore sunk costs If your company is going nowhere, cut your losses and move on.

There are three things that could happen to your company: 1) It can succeed by going IPO, getting acquired, or by making a modest profit. 2) It can fail. 3) It could go nowhere. The absolute worst thing that can happen to for it to go nowhere. Few thoughts:

Firstly, it's widely agreed that entrepreneurship is best while young. You're the most ripe for doing business from the second you finish school up until your mid-late 30s because you have less to lose. At a younger age, you're more connected to what's going on in the industries you're associated with. If you start a company in your early 20s and the company drags on for more than a few years, you're wasting precious time. If you don't see lots and lots of growth or if your company's not bringing in cash, cut your losses within a few months of starting the company and move on to the next opportunity.

If your company lacks a business model, yet it continues to grow, you should have the option to sell out. Matter of fact, you should probably think long and hard about selling such a business after two to three years of working on it. If you had a serious business model that proved to be effective, this would be different. Given that the company is (supposedly) growing, you'll probably be getting acquisition offers left and right. What's important is that you always have the option to sell. The discussion of selling a company will vary from person to person. There is no correct way to do this, because while some entrepreneurs prefer to exit early, others prefer to create businesses for the long term.

Remember when Mark Zuckerberg was offered billions by Yahoo to sell Facebook? Many of us critiqued him for not selling, because the future of Facebook was unknown. Most of us would kill to sell our company for even a few million! But his reasons for not selling probably weren't monetary related. If Zuck had $2B VS $20B, the course of his life wouldn't change all that much. He wants to build a true business for the long run, and selling out to yahoo would be premature. As long as Facebook continues to grow, he has the option to exit.

For other companies that either aren't growing or aren't finding a way to exit, cut your losses sooner rather than later. If you start a company and within three months, you realize that you don't click with your co-founder, get out. He or she is wasting your irreplaceable time and energy.

Even if you know that it's time to get out, it can be incredibly difficult to sell. After all, you've been growing your business as if you were raising a child. Sending your child to college is always difficult -- sending your child to college years before the average child goes is even more difficult. I see selling businesses in a very similar light. It's different from person to person, and when the time is right, you'll know when to exit.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early collegeBard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

Interacting with people and building relationships makes me tick. Running a company requires great communication skills and requires that the partners are able to make amazing connections with people they need to meet. I've found myself meeting shy tech engineers at random events, and those are the ones very likely to fail. On the other hand, I've met so many non-geeky San Francisco engineers who need to get out of the office and socialize. Who said nerd stereotypes had to be true?

Brings me to my next point... I was looking for a technical co-founder for my company, and I met some really nerdy guys in the process. They might have been amazing coders, but their lame personalities drove me insane. I finally found this guy, Alex. He's probably reading this blog post, but whatever: On our first meeting, I could tell that we'd click. He was by no means a stereotypical nerd. If the guy enjoys going out and having fun sometimes, he meets my social criteria for a co-founder.

All of the co-founders represent the company, and when it comes time to making business deals and raising venture capital, it really helps to be sociable. I can't see anything more embarrassing than having to bring my super nerdy, boring, shy co-founder to a lunch with the people who can make and break our company.

Fact is, you'll be spending a good part of your work life and possibly personal life with this co-founder. It's a marriage, and once you propose and s/he agrees, you're committed until the very end. How it ends depends heavily on the relationship. The end may be an acquisition by Google for a bagillion dollars or just a divorce that was inevitable.

So what should I say to the geeks who are reading this? Hmm... get yourself a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.

A friend of mine and fellow JessicaMah.com reader sent me a question the other day - he and pretty much most adults I sit down for coffee with always come to asking me about my post college plans. What do I plan on doing once I'm out of college? Of course, I answer by saying that I'd like to continue being an entrepreneur. Well, I'm sort of doing it already and I know it's what drives me.

Then there's the question of what I plan to do after Google acquires my company for a bagillion dollars? Well, even now... I don't need to work if I didn't want to. I could just sit on my ass all day and not care about the world, but why would I want to do that? I'm an entrepreneur, and for me, it's about the drive. There's just an amazing feeling that goes along with seeing nothing turn into something. Seeing a company exit achieves a few tiny things for me:

1) It proves to my peers, my partners, and my parents that I'm capable of doing business. (aka, doing something meaningful with my life)

2) It satisfies my over enlarged ego.

3) My children will have trust funds waiting for them. (no, I don't believe in that stuff. Let those kids earn their keep)

And once I have all of the above satisfied, I'll probably want more. It's just human nature for me at least to have a goal in mind. If I don't have a goal and a reach goal to reach, there's no point in living. There's so much personal variation to this. For many, multi million dollar exits may lead an entrepreneur to taking time off and just relaxing on the beach. There's absolutely no problem with that. Unlike others, I don't think that type of mentality makes someone a *fake* entrepreneur. They simply have different life goals, and what suits them should be accepted.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor.