Good Decision, Bad Outcome
“Good decision, bad outcome” is a a reminder to judge the quality of a decision by your process and state of information at the time you decided.
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Rules of Thumb
Entrepreneurs Sign The Front Of A Paycheck
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.
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Knowledge That Is Not Written Down, Yet
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
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E-Mail Is Not a Conversation
E-mail is not a conversation. I have to remind myself of that from time to time. When emails are not leading to clarity, pick up the phone.
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Scope and Scale of Plans and Activities
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.
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Entrepreneurs Still Welcome: 700 Blog Posts In Four Years
A recap of the inaugural blog post for SKMurphy blog 4 years ago and a roundup of lessons learned writing 700 posts since.
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Mavericks, Iconoclasts, Dropouts and Misfits
“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
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The Future, Arriving Yesterday, Remains In Constant Motion
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.
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Gabriel Weinberg Interviews Me For His Traction Book
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 to collect lessons learned from a variety of perspectives. I was delighted when he approached me to take part
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Startup Advice in Three Word Doses
I curate startup advice in three word doses from Dharmesh Shah, Ed Weissman, the Cluetrain Manifesto, and a number of other sources.
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Debugging Teams/Meetings: Start With Goals & Roles
James Shonk advises that you should start your efforts toward debugging teams and meetings starts with and analysis of the goals and roles of each member or participant.
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Ed Weissman on B2B Opportunities for Startups
Ed Weissman offers three reason why business prefers to pay for software: employee focus, a commitment to service, co-evolution with their needs.
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Paul Saffo: Forecasting is “Strong Opinions, Weakly Held”
Paul Saffo defines “strong opinions, weakly held” as an effective mindset for foresight or making forecasts. This is a good approach for entrepreneurs.
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Pierre Khawand’s Results Curve
I like Pierre Khawande’s Results Curve model for managing interruptions and balancing focused work with time for collaboration.
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Deprecating Facebook 3: Marcelo Rinesi’s Perspective
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.
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Moving Cash Into & Out of Your Bootstrapped Startup
Here are five tips for moving cash into and out of your bootstrapped startup.
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Finding A Co-Founder
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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Treat Social Capital With the Same Care as Cash
Treat Social Capital With the Same Care as Cash
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The Half-Life of Wisdom
The half-life of information is six months. The half-life of wisdom is a lifetime. Plan accordingly. Many facts have a shorter half-life.
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Collecting Unpaid Bills
In 1995 I did some work for one of the early web startups in Palo Alto. They had delivered a number of database driven websites using a proprietary software technology that they had developed, and had sold the technology to several firms. But they had a problem collecting unpaid bills: they had not been paid
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