David Brooks offers a metaphor for college graduation as a transition from traveling station to station to navigating a borderless sea. The same can be said for making the transition from employee to entrepreneur. […]
Two folks in different Mastermind groups added newborns to their households in the last few months experiencing all of the joys and anxieties and frustrations and insights they bring. I thought it would be fun to compare a startup’s first product with a couple’s first child. […]
In February 2010 Derek Sivers gave a great talk on “How to Start a Movement” that offered some important tips for leaders and but offered the surprising conclusion that concluded that the most important and underappreciated key to a successful movement was the follower’s courage to follow and ability to [...]
This August 2018 newsletter is an update on what we’ve been up to, reflections on lessons learned, some adjustments at the half for 2018, and other plans for the near term. […]
The October 2018 Great Demo! Workshop at Embassy Suites by Hilton in Milpitas that past attendees have stayed at and enjoyed. A list of other nearby hotels. […]
A Bootstrappers Breakfast is “counter-cultural” to the VC ecosystem focus at many events for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Here are seven ways that we take a very different approach to facilitating events for entrepreneurs compared to most others in Silicon Valley. […]
Scott Swaaley is on a mission with MakeSafe Tools to improve workplace safety. He has a unique skill set and a range of experiences that have allowed him to not only identify the need for a new category of low cost power tool safety devices but develop them and bring [...]
In college a good friend put up an old New Hampshire license plate on his dorm room wall, he liked the state motto: “Live Free or Die.” […]
David Telleen Lawton will offer a detailed briefing on the nuts and bolts of Customer Discovery Meetings from a sales perspective at Lean Culture on Tue-Jun-26-2018. […]
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 [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. […]
CJ Cornell identified 7 pieces of commonly offered but lousy advice for entrepreneurs in “Great, Lousy Advice for Entrepreneurs.” Here is my take. […]
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. […]