Cultivating Mindfulness
Cultivating mindfulness requires you to maintain situational awareness and realize when your reflexes may trigger a reaction that is not as thoughtful as the situation requires.
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Things I Have Learned From My Children
Things I have learned from my children: “fall down seven times, stand up eight”, athletic ability flows from practice, and patience.
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Startup Stages: Survive, Explore, Focus, Refine, Grow
SKMurphy’s Startup Stages: Idea, Open for Business, Early Customers, Finding Your Niche, and Scaling Up also map to Survive, Explore, Focus, Refine, and Grow.
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Matt Wensing On Making the Transition to Growth
Matt Wensing On Making the Transition to Growth Stormpulse has gone from an idea bootstrapped on founder savings and credit cards, to a project funded by friends and family rounds, to a small business strengthened by angel money, to a company that’s raised “meaningful” capital (our last round was just over $2 million). Here’s what
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Brad Pierce: Preserve Context in Writing to Manage Interruptions
Manage interruptions by writing down enough context to continue later: organized notes must detail status and next steps. Brad Pierce: Preserve Context in Writing to Manage Interruptions On longer time scales, when you must drop something for a while, it’s important, before doing so, to leave behind enough context for yourself to swap it back
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Tools for Buzzword Compliant Business Models
A collection of humorous tools that generate buzzword compliant business models.
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We Help Teams of Experts Find Leads and Close Deals
If you have demonstrated domain knowledge and expertise, a plan for having a significant impact on a customer problem, and are in the process of exploring the early market for your offering or trying to build on a handful of early customers, we can help find leads and close deals. The majority of our clients
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Tristan Kromer: You Can Tell a Good Advisor by Their Questions
Three interesting answers from Tristan Kromer’s interview with the folks at Startup Commons Startup Commons: What’s the best way to get started? Tristan Kromer: Find someone you really want to help. Someone in pain. That’s your vision. Helping someone and solving a real problem. Find team members with complementary skill sets who are able to challenge
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Neal Stephenson on Christianity, Grace, Sincerity, and Seeing Things as They Are
I have started to reserve Sundays to write on spirituality, charity, and a higher moral purpose to our life as entrepreneurs. I was struck by the quote that Stephenson puts in Juanita’s mouth in Snow Crash and have concluded that he is performing a similar ministry in his science fiction writing. There is a sense
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Q: We Already Have a Prototype, Can We Still Do Customer Development?
Product-market fit is not a ratchet: competitive response, new entrants, changes in technology and customer preference require ongoing customer development. You will need to continue to do customer development–and customer discovery for that matter–even after you have a first prototype, an MVP, early customers, and an established niche. Markets and competitors don’t stand still, no
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John Gardner: Leaders Detect and Act on the Weak Signals of the Future
John Gardner outlines how leaders detect and act on weak signals of the future by looking beyond the horizon and planning for renewal.
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Tony Schwartz: Notice the Good, Cultivate Good Habits, Slow Down, and Do the Right Thing
Tony Schwartz wrote a great post on “Turning 60: The Twelve Most Important Lessons I’ve Learned So Far.” Here are my top four from his list (original numbering preserved).
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Founder Story: Steve DiBartolomeo of Artwork Conversion Software
Steve DiBartolomeo is co-founder of Artwork Conversion Software, Inc., an EDA software firm headquartered in Santa Cruz CA with a development office in Manhattan Beach, CA. Founded in 1989, the company develops CAD translation programs, CAD viewers, plotting software and IC packaging software. Artwork has over 5000 customers worldwide including Alcatel, AMD, Applied Materials, Agere,
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Q: Pricing Professional Services
Q: I am starting a service business that will help clients with advertising and search engine marketing but I am not sure how to price my services. Do you have any suggestions for how to look at pricing professional services?
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Discovery Kanban Allows Firms to Balance Delivery and Discovery
I believe that Patrick Steyaert’s Discovery Kanban offers a critical perspective on how large organizations can cultivate lean innovation methods for product delivery beyond isolated spike efforts or innovation colonies.
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Kurt Vonnegut: Replace the Code of Hammurabi with the Sermon on the Mount
Excerpts from Kurt Vonnegut’s commencement speech at Agnes Scott College, May 5, 1999. He suggests we replace the Code of Hammurabi with forgiveness.
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A Simple Checklist for Introducing a Collaboration Application
We work with several teams who have launched or are launching an application that makes a team or group more productive. Here are a couple of suggestions for things to consider. Be compatible with the status quo if at all possible Collaboration or workflow applications that require at least two people to adopt in order
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Successful Bootstrappers Are Trustworthy Salespeople Committed to Customer Satisfaction
If you want to be a succeed as a bootstrapper, start with what you’ve got: you have an insight into an opportunity, a marketing edge, a particular problem where you’re going to bring distinctive value.
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Q: How To Speed Up Early Trials, Adoption, and Sales
Early trials allow you to tune your message, adjust your view and selection criteria for a target customer, and refine your feature set.
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We Help You Design Experiments That Move Your Business Forward
? While there are many challenges to master in building a new business, technology entrepreneurs have to balance three primary aspects: Team: can you assemble the talent required and keep them together and moving forward? Technology development: can you build a working product? Customer development: can you solve a problem that people will pay for?
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