Don’s Three Rules of Deal Making
Three rules of thumb on deal making I took away from a conversation with an electrical engineer and serial entrepreneur.
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Rules of Thumb
Hugh MacLeod’s Thoughts on Being an Entrepreneur 2
Hugh MacLeod, the matchbook cartoon artist, had a great post in January on “Random Thoughts on Being an Entrepreneur” that I am going to cherry pick for a few that I thought were excellent. I have preserved his original numbering (putting the thought in the cartoon at 0). 0. If you can express your soul,
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Oblique Strategies for Startups 1
Here are ten oblique strategies to help get you and your team unstuck. The first line is the oblique strategy with added for a startup.
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Five Things to Remember When Selling A New Product
As you develop your presentation–and more importantly refine it in response to feedback–here are five things to remember when selling a new product.
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3 Tips for Choosing a Logo
Text Treatments: text logos are simple, the company name is always right there. Most high tech logos are text treatments, they are clear and simple. With text logos you have instant impact, customers don’t need to decipher anything. Another benefit of text treatments are logo aspect ratio comes naturally with words. They always seem to
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Paul Saffo at Churchill Club Breakfast Tue Aug 28
The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present.” Paul Saffo Paul Saffo is speaking at a Churchill Club Breakfast on Tue Aug 28 7:30am to 9am at Fenwick ( 801 California Street, Mountain View, CA 94041) on
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Networking in Silicon Valley
Networking in Silicon Valley is not a spectator sport, it’s essential to helping your startup prosper. Networking is good questions, listening, and helping others. Carry more than your own card and connect folks who will benefit from talking to each other.
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W. J. King’s “Unwritten Laws of Business”
A summary of key business rules of thumb from W. J. King’s “The Unwritten Laws of Business” that are particularly applicable to startup entrepreneurs.
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Cultivating Calmness in a Crisis
To prepare for a contentious meeting I read Russell Ackoff‘s “The Art of Problem Solving,” over an early breakfast to cultivate calmness in a crisis.
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One Google Hiring Policy Startups Should Avoid
Don’t imitate Google: there are many criteria to consider in a hiring policy for a sales person, but college GPA has to be one of the least useful indicators of future success.
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Silicon Valley: Not as Nuts as 99…Yet
So we are starting to pump a little hot air back into the bubble every week now. The streets of Silicon Valley witness young entrepreneurs looking for department store Santas venture capitalists to listen to their list of needs and make their dreams come true. It’s “not as nuts as 99” but not as sane,
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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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Crossing the Chasm – Look for a Niche in a Lot of Pain
Ev Rogers’ seminal book, “Diffusion of Innovation” describes how people adopt innovations, e.g. new technology. He assumed a normal distribution of risk aversion. Geoffrey Moore’s insight was the chasm: the early majority is not influenced by early adopters, they want the comforts of an established market. Human nature is risk averse: most of us don’t like change. We
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3 Things I Learned at WIC Tech Talk
I enjoyed the latest WIC (Women In Consulting) South Bay lunch today. Denise Brosseau from Brosseau & Associates talked about tools that she or clients use to run their business. Her talk, “Play Like the Big Guys: How To Use New Web Tools To Easily Build Your Company” was full of ideas and useful tools.
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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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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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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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Pixar’s Ed Catmull Highlights Value of Post Mortems
The Annual Stanford Entrepreneurship Conference featured Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, as its keynote speaker. Ed gave a great presentation on lessons learned from structurally organizing a company for effective communication across its departments. In the beginning, Ed believed they had created a very strong culture at Pixar. They had paired up programmers
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Beyond Google: A9, Citeseer, and Krugle
I had lamented that I always Google too late, but lately I’ve been getting better. Here are some tools to use beyond Google and LinkedIn for searching for different kinds of specialized information. A9 let’s you search the contents of any books that Amazon carries, all of Amazon, and another 500+ specialized information sources. Citeseer,
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