In the same way that we must share cherries with robins if we want them to nest in our neighborhood, we can only capture a part of the value that our software creates for our customers.

Suhail Doshi, founder of Mixpanel, shared a candid assessment of mistakes he made in the first 18 months of the six startups he has founded in “The first 18 months of starting a company: it’s life or death.” Here are 7 key pieces of advice that highlight mistakes first founders typically make.

Neuromancer, William Gibson’s  first novel, was published in 1984. It helped to establish the cyberpunk genre of science fiction: a dark future where computing, communication, and artificial intelligence technologies were dominant, complemented by significant medical advances, large inhabited satellites in Earth orbit, and considerable drug use. I recently re-read it and was struck by how things have turned out differently.

“The First Robin” is a Safed the Sage story by William Eleazar Barton collected in “The Wit And Wisdom Of Safed The Sage” (1919). I use it as a point of departure for how to determine if your startup’s  initial journey through Winter is coming to an end.

Attention-selling business models have incentives for fostering unhealthy addictive behavior. They are refining online interactions into the equivalent of digital heroin: experiences that are highly pleasurable, highly addictive, and in the long run seriously harmful. My goal is to offer several perspectives on certain business models that encourage a “race to the bottom” and provide some suggestions for how to correct or at least manage the problem.

David L. Akin is the Director, SpaceSystems Laboratory at the University of Maryland. He is also the author of “Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design.” He lists more than 40 laws: I selected ten when I blogged about “Applying Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design To Startups” here are six more that I thought were directly applicable to software entrepreneurship, but the whole list is very funny and worth reading.

Some reflections on change, renewal, and transformation after watching a short video of the demolition of the house I grew up in. We think of our buildings as permanent, as much as we think of ourselves as permanent, but things change.

Highlights from a Wed-Nov-29-2017 panel of sales experts on how effective discovery conversations lead to more effective demos: Richard Smith of Refract, Peter Cohan of Second Derivative and author of “Great Demo,” Brian Geery of SalesNv and author of “How to Demonstrate Software So People Buy It,” and Warren Gouws of SumTotal Systems.

Mark Graban gave a great talk at last year’s Lean Startup Week on how to avoid wasting your time–and your team’s time–looking for meaning in normal fluctuation. Here are some highlights.

Sean Murphy, a consultant with SKMurphy, Inc. has joined the LeanStack Mentor community of practice and will use the LeanStack toolkit as appropriate when working with bootstrapping startups.

A summary of my talk at Women in Consulting lunch meeting today on “Startups: What’s Hot / What’s Not (2018).” Includes slides and links to sources.

Qualitative research that allows firms to understand unmet and emerging needs is now the bottleneck for the specification, development, and delivery of significant new products. This is the result of substantial investment in the last two decades in tools for software development, quantitative evaluative research, marketing and sales. This has fundamental implications for how product development, sales, and support operations need to be organized and to collaborate.

This is a first pass at development dependency “pinwheel” model for intrapreneurs fostering new capability development and executives adjusting a product roadmap for development risk.

This blog post is an overview of a series of blog posts on “The Shape of Firms to Come.” It’s an attempt to outline what I believe are key values that businesses will embrace to endure over the next 25 years.

Quotes for entrepreneurs collected from a variety of sources in January 2018, tweeted first on @skmurphy about once a day where you can get them hot off the mojo wire. At the end of each month I curate them in a blog post that adds commentary and may contain a longer passage from the same source for context. Please enter your E-mail address if you would like to have new blog posts sent to you.

Safia Abdalla (@captainsafia) wrote a list of 24 “Things I Learned in 2017.” Here are ten that really resonated with me.

I recently sat down with Pete Tormey, a startup attorney in Silicon Valley, to discuss how to keep harmony among founders in a startup.

“What Have You Learned In 2017 That You Will Apply in 2018?” is our topic for the
Fri-Dec-29-2017 Bootstrapper Breakfast/® in Mountain View.

Peter Drucker has suggested that businesses organize their abandonment of business and practices that they never would have started doing if they knew when they start what they know now. This is my effort at 2018 renunciations for SKMurphy, Inc and in my personal life.

Here is a list of the most popular SKMurphy blog posts Oct-2006 through Sep-2017 based on page view counts from Google analytics data. I have broken out the Lean Startup Conference roundups for clarity.