Over the past few days, a lot of people have asked: "Why doesn't Indinero.com follow the freemium model?" I wrote about my understanding of freemium a few months ago here on my blog, but ultimately chose not to go that route for several reasons:

1) When users pay, they're more serious about using your product. Instead of just going in to take a look, they'll take a more proactive stance on applying your product to everyday life. As a paying customer, they're also more likely to offer you valuable feedback that will change the way they use your product.

2) The cost per user is high - it costs us money to download data from bank accounts and credit cards. Charging our users immediately addresses this problem.

3) When you charge money upfront, people are more likely to convert and pay for your service. We talked to a few companies that switched from "no credit card upfront" to requiring that you enter your credit card from day 1. They recommend that we charge upfront to increase our conversion rate.

4) We're not sure if freemium is the right way to go. By charging money now, we can always implement a free plan later. If we started off as being a free service, it would turn people off if we ultimately changed our minds and went back to the premium-only model.

5) When raising angel/VC money, it helps to say that our company is earning money. Not having a freemium model got us closer to being able to make that claim. :)

But to be clear, these are just our preliminary thoughts. We may eventually have a freemium offering, but we'll be focused on building our paying user base for the time being. Many businesses prosper on the freemium model, and we're just not convinced that it's fit for what Indinero wants to achieve.

Over the past year, I've learned a lot about successful leaders and entrepreneurs. The remarkably successful ones aren't working 247 on their businesses because they were smart enough to recruit a brilliant team for both their personal and business lives. A fellow TEDster I met this weekend told me about ways he manages his life -- he recruits experts in all fields of knowledge to assist him with his financial life, his children, his home, his vacations, his appointments, his company's technology, his company's marketing, etc… To guide his decisions in life and business, he has what he calls a "board of life." In other words, a group of remarkable individuals who feel personally invested into his future.

Firstly, no entrepreneur should be expected to know everything about business, but s/he should be able to know enough in order to recruit help from remarkable individuals in their respective fields. And if the individual is anything short of remarkable, look for someone else. Remarkable entrepreneurs don't need to be baby geniuses, but they need to be able to network with the individuals who will influence their businesses for the better. If the entrepreneur manages to hire and manage a remarkable team, s/he will have more time to devote to a personal life.

While I ran my first (failed) company, I managed to do just that. I recruited incredibly smart techies to help manage all of the issues related to my dedicated server clients while I enjoyed time on the beaches of Puerto Rico. My team didn’t exist to assist ME -- their purpose was to serve the company, and my existence was to make sure that their ideals remained that way.

This unnamed TEDster proposed the idea of having a "board of life," which caters more to the individual entrepreneurs. This board should consist of accomplished entrepreneurs and experts who feel personally invested in one's future. They'll get you the connections you need, offer you limitless personal support, and encourage you to do amazing things. In a way, I see members on my board of life as being my aunts and uncles. While it takes time to build a relationship with them, you almost have an inherent instinct from the moment you meet them as to whether or not you can provide meaning to each other. They literally feel like family in that both you and your "mentor" would go out of the way to do anything for each other. I call them "mentors" because they're far more than mentors. The TEDster I met with made clear the distinction: while mentors are there to give you sound advice, members on your board of life have a family-like relationship to you.

The ideas of recruiting a dream team can also be applied to managing one's personal life. My parents employ multiple people fulltime to manage our family's finances, home, appointments, travel, etc… In fact, I'm the only person in my family who hasn't yet taken advantage of the ideas that I'm proposing to you as I write this. Why? Because I enjoy making my own appointments. I enjoy comparing the prices between a Jetblue and a Virgin flight. I prefer to email my blog readers than to have my publicist send generic replies. I still utilize my mom's accountant and secretary, but only because it makes more practical sense for me to do so. When it comes to emailing people and managing my own schedule, nobody can do it better than me.

In the end, you need to come to terms with the fact that you're not superman. You don't know everything and you don't have the experiences and perspectives of everyone on this planet. You're hopefully smart enough to realize this -- recruit the necessary help in whatever part of life you need. By surrounding yourself with accomplished people in their respective fields, you're more likely to see your own success.

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.

I'm not sure if I believe in the saying, "all things happen for a reason." It seems as if people tend to say that in order to justify for a loss. However, it IS possible to justify for a loss by doing something about it. The time that you would have spent working on your now failed company can instead be used to learn about business, which in the long run will help you with a bigger and better company. While this seems to fit into the saying "all things happen for a reason," wouldn't that be somewhat misleading?

Instead, how about we think about a recent loss as a reason to do something else meaningful? Let's take Al Gore for example -- he lost the race to the White House. He could have sat like a couch potato doing nothing, but instead, he found himself a cause to invest himself into. If anything, his mental well being depended on his ability to find a cause for him to dive into. In this case, the better saying is, "losing the presidential race made Al Gore a better person because he did something that he couldn't otherwise do as the President." Without the burden of political bureaucracy, Al Gore has the capability to take on global warming in ways no President ever could. His failure didn't so much happen for a reason -- he instead took advantage of his failure because he didn't have a choice.

I'm against the idea of thinking of life as being self-guiding because it doesn't motivate individuals to take advantage of their loss. Instead, it provides temporary pain relief. If my mom died tomorrow from heart disease, I wouldn't say "all things happen for a reason." That would be careless and if anything, premature for me to say. Instead, I would probably invest myself into helping others with heart disease. I would invest my time, money, and maybe even my entrepreneurial ventures towards that cause. And only through the means of doing something would I be able to say "my mom's disease made the world a better place." It's a terrible thought for me to bring up, but it shows the mentality of taking a misfortune and having it act as a guiding force in one's life.

To be quite honest, my last company wasn't originally guided by my quest for leadership. I wasn't hungry for money. There was a cause in my personal life I felt committed to, and the profits of running a company could contribute to that. I decided to run a company because I felt that it would yield me the most return in the shortest amount of time. I decided to run a company because I felt driven by the idea of creating something out of nothing. They were simply means to achieve a goal, but without an end result in mind.

So the company I was working on died. As I've mentioned many times before, it was forced into selling because my team and I were limited on cash. To adults, I call it failure. To kids, it can be seen as an "ambitious effort." The company died, but I didn't think it was appropriate to label this failure as something that happened because "all things happen for a reason." That'd be stupid and un-jessica-mah-like. However, in the following few months, I was able to land myself in college. I devoted all of my time towards finding a way to skip two years of meaningless high school, which I wouldn't have been able to do while running a company. I took advantage of what otherwise would be opportunity cost. I devoted myself towards getting me into college because without that cause to strive towards, I wouldn't be able to cope.

In hindsight, it would be safe to say that if I hadn't sold out, I'd be stuck in high school. However, that was never my intention. My intention was to do whatever I possibly could while ignoring previous failures. With the examples I've listed above, maybe the concept of previous failure makes more sense. Maybe there's a reason why those who've failed find new success in the future. Just try to apply the above examples to your personal life and it might just guide your future in ways you've never thought of before.

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.

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.