While exploring the idea for my new company, I taught a well-received online course at Oxford, OnDeck and via theHustle. This course is about one of the gnarliest challenges of business: generating and evaluating business ideas. I like to call it “The Art of Ideation.”

Ideation is not a straight-line path. In reality, “ideas can come from anywhere.” You never know when that light bulb moment will happen. I’ve divided the process into 5 concrete sections, but the lines between these sections are blurry and the path through them is nonlinear.

If you meet the timing and scalability requirements (see Part 1), you’ve done 80% of the work necessary to raise a round. Here’s what comes next.

Funding. Everyone wants it, but most fail to get it.

This is easily the most understood subject in the startup world—at Udemy, we made every mistake in the book. I’m writing this guide because in 2009, it would’ve saved me a lot of grief.

The most important thing about fundraising is realizing that 95% of the time, you are wrong about what you need, why you need it, and when you need it. (To be clear, when I talk about “fundraising,” I’m talking about raising risk capital from investors funding tech companies).

If you’re only interested in advice about HOW to fundraise and not WHETHER to fundraise, you’ll probably fail. That’s why Part 1 of this series is about Whether and When, and Part 2 is about How.

Traction, Traction, Traction.

Everyone tells you to get traction, but you feel like you need money in order to build the product to get traction. It’s the entrepreneur’s dilemma.

In a marketplace business like Udemy, this chicken-and-egg problem had to be solved multiple times. At first, we didn’t have instructors or students, so neither group could find value on our platform. In order for Udemy to work, we had to get both students and teachers to show up without the other party being on there.

Here’s what we did.

When a recession hits, it feels like the world is falling apart. That’s how I felt in 2008. I was a recent college graduate with few marketable skills I had never heard of Silicon Valley. I had no idea what a VC was. My mother had just lost her job, and I was pretty sure I was about to lose my own job as a first-year analyst at Accenture.

All of us first-year analysts were freaking the fuck out.

It wasn’t clear what Accenture was going to do. It hadn’t yet responded to the economic crisis, and we were just waiting for the hammer to drop.

I had no idea what would happen next, but the events of that recession changed my life forever.