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.

My young entrepreneur friend Mazy told me about a Facebook group where everybody was talking about what they would do if they knew they couldn't fail in life. In anything! Of course, the majority of the people in this group were raving about how awesome it would be not to fail, but my friends Matt and Mazy knew better: without the potential to fail, how could we motivate ourselves to do more with life? How could we feel satisfied with whatever we did? Sure, there's an exception when it comes to altruism, but with anything else in life, we would feel like empty souls.

Here's a quote from my other young entrepreneur friend, Matt:

Losing the ability to fail? I'd get depressed and eventually shrivel up and die. Failure is what makes everything worthwhile - what the hell is the point of life if there's no challenge?

I decline your offer of success.

And I also decline the offer of guaranteed success. If I knew that I'd succeed in business, I'd be settling for mediocrity. I could be super wealthy without spending any effort on my company, but I'd feel like a total shmuck. Without the chance of failure, you lose the motivation to work, you lose the desire to succeed (because you already know that you will,) and the concept of adventure is completely lost.

On the other hand, while it's good to be able to fail, it's a waste of energy to focus too much of your attention on the potential of failing. These things tend to be self-fulfilling prophesies.

If your company fails, (as the one I was just working on has) no big deal. You failed, but the company you work on that eventually succeeds will bring you much more of a reward. You would have earned it! The bottom line: The fear of failure is no reason not to try. Embrace the idea of failure, go into the real world, and do something amazing!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college.

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.

I've taken a look at many companies and called them lame, boring, or generic... only to find that years later, they've blown up to be the hottest companies on the block.

I didn't actually have the opportunity to invest into Google back in 1999 because I was only nine years old, but I've heard of so many people passing on the idea of either working for or investing into Google. Firstly, there's no possible way for people to completely know which companies are bound for success. Instead, it's much easier to tell which startups are destined for failure, mainly by looking at the management team.

I was reading a blog post by Ben McConell from Church of the Customer, and he was talking about the idea of predicting the outcome of something like the superbowl:

"It's impossible to know. Too many other variables are at play. It may be fun to talk about, but it's not very productive."

When I was asked to speak on the future of web at an upcoming conference, I immediately knew that I couldn't make a prediction about the future of web, let alone the future of a startup. Practically speaking, trying to predict the web is a philosophical sense seems to be unproductive, but knowing what WON'T happen in the future seems more worthwhile. (and much more entertaining!) You see this happen in all realms of business and life: as an investor, you decide which companies not to invest into. As an entrepreneur, you decide which ideas not to pursue. As an admissions officer at Harvard, you decide which students not to admit. As a student, you decide which classes not to take. The list goes on forever.

I have a friend who was classmates with Sergey and Larry back in the late 90's, and he heard about the opportunity to join the duo in a weird search indexing startup. Like most of his classmates, he took a pass. Many of you are probably thinking, "WHY WOULD YOU PASS ON SUCH AN AWESOME COMPANY?" Well, everybody has a startup! Everybody is doing their own thing, trying to attract other people. There was no way for the students to predict which startup was the one worth joining. Instead, they decide which ones not to join because it's a much easier task.

Bessemer Venture Partners, a well known venture capital firm, has a publicly displayed anti-portfolio. It lists all of the amazing companies that include the likes of eBay, Google, HP, and Apple that the venture firm decided NOT to invest in. This just comes to show that not even the best venture firms are always able to see future success.

Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps the nation's oldest venture capital firm, carrying on an unbroken practice of venture capital investing that stretches back to 1911. This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.

A venture firm that's able to showcase an anti-portfolio must be incredibly secure with itself. They get thousands of business plans per year and can only invest into a select few. If you don't get a pass, it doesn't mean failure. But if your team sucks (just as many of mine have in the past,) you're destined for failure before you even brainstorm your idea. Bessemer Venture Partners can't possibly look at each startup in heavy detail because it's unproductive. Just like college admission officers, they weed out the majority and focus on only the one's with most potential.

But bottom line? Success is unpredictable, but failure is much easier to spot. If you're in the position of making a choice, first focus on what not to choose.

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.