Three Tests For Goals
Yesterday’s post talked about traction as the ability to set and hit goals. Here are three tests for goals to determine if they well-formed for your startup team.
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Rules of Thumb
Three Things I’ve Learned About Networking
Networking is good questions, listening, and helping others. Carry more than your own card. Connect folks who will benefit from talking.
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Three Answers We Need Before We Will Use a New Productivity App
Three Answers We Need Before We Will Use a New Productivity App Do You Have a Pricing Model? We use many web applications to run our business and deliver services. Often our clients are also users of the application. If the application has a problem our clients hold us accountable. We need to see a
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Last Full Work Week of 2008: Tips for End of Year Planning
Five tips for end of year planning for startup entrepreneurs. As the year draws to a close dates in calendar are closer than they appear.
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Michael Arrington’s “Twice Shy” One Year Later
Last December Michael Arrington wrote “The Twice Shy Entrepreneur” lamenting that entrepreneurs like himself who had lived through the dotcom meltdown were more cautious. They were “once bitten, twice shy.”
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Late Night Comments and E-Mail
See www.xkcd.com/ for more comics. This scene plays out in one form or another several times a year.I have learned to: send the E-Mail just to myself and read it again in the morning. save the forum comment in a separate text file. save the blog post for review in the morning. Update Tue-Nov-5: Jim
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Offer Scope for Employees to Exercise Their Vital Powers
Some post-Thanksgiving musings on my belief that most people want to do a good job. As you grow your startup find ways for everyone involved to work hard, see an impact, and improve. “Ancient Greeks defined happiness as the exercise of vital powers, along lines of excellence, in a life affording them scope” Edith Hamilton
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Yatin Trivedi on the Value of Coopetition
A great write-up by Yatin Trivedi on the value of coopetition: the motivation for a partnership program in any company is to better serve the customers beyond one’s ability.
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Disruptive Tools Can Stall At Group Boundaries
Interesting web site demo at http://nextgenerationelectronicsdesign.com/ by the folks at Altium. Unlike any PCB demo I have ever seen and an interesting use of self-deprecating humor to talk about the challenges of linking FPGA, Board, and Mechanical design. Two time coded remarks at 2:25 “We did what any traditional EDA company would do, we denied
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Daniel Pink’s “Free Agent Nation” Worth Revisiting
In April of 2001, as the euphoria from 1999 started to fall to earth again (by October it would be accessible only by Deep Submersible Rescue Vehicle) Daniel Pink wrote “Land of the Free” in Fast Company that was a teaser for “Free Agent Nation” as a hardback in May of 2001 and paperback in
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Odd Jobs With an Even Temper
When you are very angry, think about how momentary a man’s life is. Marcus Aurelius I worked in the router software marketing group at Cisco in the early 90’s. I had left engineering and taken up residence in the marketing department. I was playing asteroid to a number of dinosaur protocols: we had realized that
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Negotiate the Level of Reference in Parallel with Price and Others Terms and Conditions
Having a public reference, testimonial, or case study is a significant risk reducing asset for a startup. It’s prudent to negotiate the level of reference in parallel with price.
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How I Avoid Sending Email I Regret
I have several rules of thumb I follow to avoid sending and email I regret. I don’t hit send after 8pm, or when I am angry, or when the other person is angry, or when a phone call is called for.
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Scott Sambucci on “An Entrepreneur’s Lessons Learned”
I met Scott Sambucci when I spoke at TVC in July of 2007 in Menlo Park as a part of their “Entering the Entrepreneurial World” seminar. He was kind enough to blog about his take away from the talk in “Definition: Entrepreneurship” where he concluded that even though it was a noun it should be
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Norm Brodsky’s Guidelines For Entrepreneurs
The October 2008 issue of Inc. magazine made it to the top of my reading pile today and I was delighted to read another great “Street Smarts” column by Norm Brodsky “Secrets of the $110 Million Dollar Man” which offers ten guidelines for starting a successful business.
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Three Tests For Negotiating A Software Deal
Negotiating a software deal, from either side of the table, can be different from many other negotiations that you enter into. I have been surprised over the years at how folks who are successful in other domains can fail one or more of the following tests as they negotiate a software deal. Have You Created
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Sleep is a Necessary Part of the Workday
In an article in Scientific American Mind called “Sleep on it, How Snoozing Makes You Smarter,” Robert Stickgold and Jeffrey Ellenbogen conclude that at least six hours of sleep per night is essential to cognitive function (hat tip to Hacker News) …while we sleep, our brain is anything but inactive. It is now clear that
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“Better” is the Enemy of “Good Enough”
Better is the enemy of good enough–This phrase is attributed to Sergey Gorshkov, the commander in chief of the Soviet Navy from 1956 to 1985, who managed it’s dramatic expansion during the Cold War. Perfectionists get this wrong, siding with “Better.” Entrepreneurs who prosper, for the most part, side with “Good Enough” and keep improving.
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Common Questions about Advisory Boards
Here are our answers to some frequently asked questions about advisory boards, our focus is more on bootstrapping startups so the answers are from that perspective.
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Productive Larks and Creative Owls
“Early as a lark” I find morning more productive, but working late as a “night owl” I am more creative: some thoughts on productivity and creativity.
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