Living in Anticipation With Schrodinger’s Leads
It can take a while to determine what to ask in an opening conversation and which leads constitute opportunities. You have to follow up.
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5 Scaling Up Stage
Engineering Your Sales Process Workshop Feb-8 Early Bird Closes This Weekend
Just a heads up that the early bird rates for our next “Engineering Your Sales Process®” Workshop close Sun-Jan-28. This is the same workshop that Scott Sambucci and Sean Murphy offered at the Lean Startup Conference in December 2012 but we are limiting the attendance to 12 entrepreneurs to allow it to be even more
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Impatience For Success Works Against Learning
Most successful products start in a niche and expand via a sequence of larger adjacent niches. Impatience for success works against learning.
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You Tried: It’s OK To Make a Change
“In restless dreams I walked alone, Narrow streets of cobblestone.” Simon and Garfunkel, “The Sounds of Silence” Nothing new ever works, but doing the same thing over and over again without variation or detecting and correcting mistakes is insanity (or at least bureaucracy). So many startup overnight success stories that stress the importance of passion
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Case Study: eMOBUS Experience With SKMurphy
This is a case Study of SKMurphy’s advisory support for eMOBUS. It includes a detailed write-up by Moe Arnaiz, CEO of eMOBUS.
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The Unfortunate Return of the Mainframe IT Mindset
PC’s and workstations allowed each knowledge worker to upgrade at their own pace. SaaS is witnessing a return to the Mainframe IT Mindset: sysadmins only support one system and upgrade at their convenience.
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Three Tips from Sid Faulkner For Preparing To Sell Your Startup
Sid Faulkner, CFO of Ciranova gave a talk today on “Navigating the Treacherous Path of Mergers and Acquisitions” at an event at Abbot Stringham and Lynch. Mr. Faulkner was Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Oak Technology, Inc. where he led the 1995 initial and secondary public stock offerings, established an active program of
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Four Excerpts from the Valve Employee Handbook That Belong In Yours
A link to the Valve Employee Handbook made it to front page of Hacker News recently and I can see why, it makes for very interesting reading.
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Startup Stages Overview Video
This is Sean Murphy for SKMurphy, Inc. I want to talk to you about our startup stages model and understanding that risk reducing milestones that separate each stage. We break the startup journey into five stages. In each stage you will explore different options and converge on a key risk reducing milestone. Starting from idea
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Zoom In For Traction, Zoom Out For Impact
Your startup is a work in progress. When most entrepreneurs evaluate where they are it’s difficult not to include the promising future they foresee naturally ensuing from current efforts (or on bad days the certain doom no matter what they do). If you are not getting traction, if you don’t have the ability to reliably
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Learning From Netflix: Lenny Greenberg’s Response
Lenny Greenberg, Founder and CTO of Assistyx, e-mailed me a long and thoughtful response to my “Learning from Netflix” post. In fact it was is good that I am publishing it with his permission. There are a lot of lessons we can learn from this: It was smart for Netflix to look at their streaming
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Successful Entrepreneurship Is Ongoing Self-Improvement
Three variations on the idea that “successful entrepreneurship is an ongoing self-improvement” project, program, or process.
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Refine and Curate Your Thoughts as FAQs, Articles, and Talks
Refine and curate your thoughts by reworking the first draft of your answers in an email or in response to a question from a customer or an audience member at a talk.
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It’s Not Bootstrapped vs. VC
From Hillel Cooperman‘s “Bootstrapped vs. VC Funded–Who is Likely to Make the Most Money?” I bet that founders of bootstraps end up earning more money over the long haul out of their businesses than founders of venture-backed firms. The rare IPO may spike the numbers in the other direction, but I’d love to see the
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Tom Van Vleck’s “3 Questions” Complement Root Cause Analysis
Tom Van Vleck has a great collection of software engineering stories on his site. One particularly good article is “Three Questions For Each Bug That You Find” which offers the following key observation: The key idea behind these questions is that every bug is a symptom of an underlying process. You have to treat the
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Larry Lang on Managing Incentives
[Note this post was written in 2011]. The recent troubles at Cisco have prompted a lot of commentary on the Cisco alumni e-mail list. One of the more thoughtful analyses was posted by Larry Lang (@llang629), who spent more than a decade at Cisco in a variety of positions. His last was as VP and
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Managing Email Conversations With Customers
A guest post by Edith Harbaugh that offers a number of practical tips and suggestions for managing email conversations with customers.
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New Capabilities We Plan To Develop in 2011
To ensure that conversations and requests for help were productive, Anthony Scampavia kept a question at the top of his whiteboard in his various offices at Cisco for more than a dozen years: What is the problem you are trying to solve? Here are three problems we have identified and capabilities we plan to develop
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Four Movies To Renew Your Gumption
Here are four movies that I watch when I need to refill my gumption or recover my sisu: The Verdict, Apollo 13, The Dish, and The World’s Fastest Indian.
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Distant Early Warning Signs of Market Disruption
Disruption is caused by the new business models an innovation enables. A disruptive innovation can be hard to spot because competitors can offer a different value proposition, not necessarily a better one.
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