Advising Entrepreneurs
I spend a fair amount of time advising entrepreneurs, both informally when solicited and formally when I have been retained–and sometimes even when I have not been asked for advice. Here are some key principles I follow.
I spend a fair amount of time advising entrepreneurs, both informally when solicited and formally when I have been retained–and sometimes even when I have not been asked for advice. Here are some key principles I follow.
“A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something.” Wilson Mizner One of the more challenging aspects of entrepreneurship for engineers is the need to be able to engage in “small talk” and casual conversation with strangers. I have three suggestions that go to state of mind more than …
Three Tips for Small Talk and Casual Conversation Read More »
Some things change, others remain constant. It’s hard to see the patterns when you are enmeshed in them. You have to pause and reflect.
Entrepreneurs sign the front of a paycheck. They take prudent risks and create functional businesses that provide value to customers, employees, suppliers, investors, and partners.
There are categories of knowledge that are not written down, yet. They include observations that have not been curated but drive intuition-based decisions, first hand stories of events–successes and failures–that have not been filtered and sanitized but still offer insight and explanatory power. They are important because they are sources of competitive advantage. Knowledge That …
E-mail is not a conversation. I have to remind myself of that from time to time. When I am deadlocked with someone and tempted to send one more e-mail to clarify or I find myself getting angrier I have to remember to take a five minute walk around the building and pick up the phone. …
Inspired by Eames’ “Powers of Ten” I explore the scope and scale of plans and activities based on duration. I take a one hour duration as the starting point and look at a factor or 10,000 in each direction: from 1/300 of a second to 10,000 hours.
A recap of the inaugural blog post for SKMurphy blog 4 years ago and a roundup of lessons learned writing 700 posts since.
“The truth is, start-up-land is littered with mavericks, iconoclasts, dropouts, and misfits.” Sramana Mitra in “The Real VCs of Silicon Valley” Entrepreneurship is Involuntary I have come to the conclusion that most entrepreneurship is involuntary. Either someone is an entrepreneur from the time they are young, which was my personal experience, or they are thrust …
A review of Michael Malone’s “The Future Arrived Yesterday: the Protean Corporation.” Malone believes that successful companies of the future must find a way to continuously and rapidly change almost every one of their attributes but retain a core of values.
Gabriel Weinberg is a serial entrepreneur (latest startup: DuckDuckGo), a Hacker Angel, insightful blogger, and frequent contributor to Hacker News. He is writing a book on how startups get traction and interviewing folks like Patrick McKenzie, Jimmy Wales, and Paul English to collect lessons learned from a variety of perspectives. I was delighted when he …
Gabriel Weinberg Interviews Me For His Traction Book Read More »
I curate startup advice in three word doses from Dharmesh Shah, Ed Weissman, the Cluetrain Manifesto, and a number of other sources.
Startups have fewer meetings than larger companies but entrepreneurs still need to make those meetings effective, in fact there is less margin for unproductive meetings in a startup than there is in a larger firm. Here are two sources of good information on effective teams and how they meet: James Shonk’s “Working in Teams” is …
Debugging Teams/Meetings: Start With Goals & Roles Read More »
Ed Weissman offers three reason why business prefers to pay for software: employee focus, a commitment to service, co-evolution with their needs.
Paul Saffo defines “strong opinions, weakly held” as an effective mindset for foresight or making forecasts. This is a good approach for entrepreneurs.
Pierre Khawand has an intriguing E-book out “The Results Curve™: How to Manage Focused and Collaborative Time” that makes the following suggestions for increasing your personal effectiveness in the face of the plethora of sources for interruption and distraction we can leave ourselves vulnerable to if we are not careful. He has five key observations/suggestions …
This is the third in a series about my decision to move away from using Facebook. Deprecating Facebook means no longer trading hard won social knowledge for a trivially valuable way to communicate with people we already know.
Here are five tips for moving cash into and out of your bootstrapped startup.
This is based on both my direct experience and stories folks have shared at the Bootstrappers Breakfast® over the last few years about finding a co-founder.
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