Silicon Valley: Not as Nuts as 99…Yet
Entrepreneurs prowl Silicon Valley for a Venture Capitalist to listen like a department store Santa to their list of needs and make their dreams come true.
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No More Than Four Items on Your To Do List
You can only have four top priorities at any one time according to Tom Peters. The Marines advise limiting your key objectives to no more than three in situations of uncertainty and high hazard. Limiting the “must do” section of your to do list to four items seems like a good idea for startups.
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Founder Story: Acquisition Integration at 60 days
We have been doing some joint projects with Ann Marcus recently, who is a real pleasure to work with, and a very effective interviewer. She sat down last month with the CEO of a recently acquired software firm, who has asked to remain anonymous due to the candor of his remarks. There are some real lessons here for any startup
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“Crucial Marketing Concepts for Consultants” @ PATCA May 10
I will be presenting a revised and improved version of the “12 Books for the Busy CEO” presentation on Thursday May 10 at 6pm at the PATCA monthly dinner at the Embassy Suites Santa Clara – Silicon Valley on 2885 Lakeside Drive in Santa Clara. I will cover a dozen books and offer a synthesis of the key marketing
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Is DodgeBall Duo’s Departure A Harbinger For JotSpot Wunderkinder?
Barbara Darrow (Unblog) April 16 entry was by Stacy Cowley “Dodgeball Founders Defect From, Take Shots At, Google” Google’s habit of acquiring promising startups and then disappearing them into the Googleplex Vortex is no secret — it left Blogger to languish for years, and closed Web 2.0 wunderkinds JotSpot (wikis) and Measure Map (blog traffic
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ASIC Design Starts Dropping: Implications for EDA
According to a recent analysis by Bryan Lewis and John Barber, ASIC Design Starts dropped by more than 50% between 2000 and 2008.
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Applying the “Agile Manifesto” to Software Startups
What follows are some quick thoughts on how to apply insights from the “Agile Manifesto” (see also Martin Fowler’s excellent essay on “The New Methodology” for a nice overview of what agile development entails) to early stage software startups. Value This More In Preference To Individuals And Interactions Processes And Tools Working Software Comprehensive Documentation Customer Collaboration Contract Negotiation
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SaaS Requires Excellent Support Not Upselling to Proliferate
Rich Mironov profiles Replicate Technology (a current client) in Service Revenue and Upsell Marketing” and mischaracterizes–in our opinion–their strategy as upselling or upsell marketing.
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CINA Blog Panel Wrap Up
Recap from a CINA panel on blogging Mar-15-2007 where I participated as a panelist. I cited Regis Mckenna’s “Real Time” and “The Cluetrain Manifesto.”
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Startup Epicenter Offers Intensive Workshops, Challenge & Festival
Startup Epicenter Offers Intensive Workshops and a Festival in March of 2007 with a line-up of VCs and experienced entrepreneurs as speakers.
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Getting Early Feedback
Getting early customer feedback is critical to fine tuning your product so that you can scale up. The temptation is to use a on-line survey tool to save your time, but I think for your early customers a questionnaire may only give you the answers that you are looking for, not the information that you need.
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Julian Fellowes on Persistence, Getting Started, and Logical Consequences
Commentary on Julian Fellowes answers to 3 interview questions about the need to get started, persist, and accept the logical consequences of your choices.
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Clark Dong: Software Startups Don’t Need VC’s To Start
Clark Dong gave an interesting demonstration of a new action item tracking tool for startups called TaskPick at last night’s SDForum Startup SIG. He came on after my show and tell on how and why we use Central Desktop in our practice. He was articulate and energetic and I was very impressed with his approach. His message below is
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9 From Greg Knauss’ “An Entirely Other Day”
Greg Knauss wrote “An Entirely Other Day” sporadically from 1994 to 2006 (with five year or so gap between 2001 and 2006 and who knows, he may start up again). It’s experiential blogging at its finest, with some sharp observations–some introspective–of work, marriage, children, illness, aging, and death.
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Kierkegaard on the Art of Helping Others to Understand
An excerpt from Soren Kierkegaard writing on helping others to understand. The key is to start from a deep understanding of the other person’s world view. This echoes Steven Covey’s fifth habit: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
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Ten Tips for Leveraging Blogs and Wikis in Your Consulting Practice
Is my topic this Thursday, February 15, at 7:00 PM, at the IEEE-CNSV meeting at KeyPoint Credit Union, 2805 Bowers Ave., Santa Clara, CA. The event is free. I will cover a number of practical suggestions for using blogs to promote a consulting practice and wikis to foster project team collaboration against a deadline. Blogs and
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Recipes For Longevity in “Mutual Improvement Clubs”
Mutual improvement clubs are an older version of a community of practice or a stakeholder meeting. Here are some recipes for keeping them going from William Feather and Ben Franklin.
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Greg Knauss on Bloggers: Experiential vs. Referential
Greg Knauss was a guest blogger on kottke last year and ended his two week stint with this observation on referential and experiential blogging: There are two kinds of bloggers, referential and experiential. […] The referential blogger uses the link as his fundamental unit of currency, building posts around ideas and experiences spawned elsewhere: Look at
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William Feather on “Perseverance Rewarded”
In “Perseverance Rewarded” William Feather offers some good advice for getting started. Many folks succeed because they don’t realize how hard it is to accomplish what they have set out to do (of course several orders of magnitude more fail).
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More from William Feather’s “The Business of Life”
Six quotes from William Feather’s “The Business of Life” offer practical business wisdom from a successful publisher.
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