A Storm Driven Sparrow
Two excerpts, one from H. Rider Haggard and one from Venerable Bede, that use a sparrow in flight as a metaphor for the evanescence of a man’s life.
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Michael Malone “Good Friday: A Day to Contemplate Your Life”
Some Good Friday thoughts by Michael Malone on success in Silicon Valley and the need to contemplate your life from time to time.
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The Technology is Nothing Without the Team
I remember once talking to my high-school physics teacher, who had been one of the leading teachers in our district for decades. “Don’t you get tired teaching physics?” I asked him one day. “I don’t teach physics,” he replied. “I teach students.” The same wisdom applies to securing financing for startups: investors don’t fund technologies,
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Worry About Scaling After You Find Your Niche
It’s very hard to forecast the rate of adoption of a genuinely new offering in an emerging market, one that is discontinuous with current practice. A focus on scaling is premature until you have proof of value and have found your niche.
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A Beta Customer Is Not A Tester Or A User But An Early Customer
“Beta customer” blurs beta tester, beta user, and early customer. If you sell to business, beta customers are early customers, not beta testers.
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Quotes For Entrepreneurs–March 2012
You can follow @skmurphy to get these hot off the mojo wire or wait until the end of the month when these quotes for entrepreneurs are collected on the blog. Enter your E-mail if you would like new blog posts to your inbox.
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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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Founder Story: Luc Burgun, EVE
This originally appeared in my “Entrepreneurial Engineer” column in EETimes as “No longer a startup, EVE aims for top tier of EDA players” on Mar-29-2011. I have added some additional hyperlinks in this version. Dr. Luc Burgun is co-founder and CEO of EVE. He has more than sixteen years of experience in EDA in both
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Structuring Business Relationships: Employees, Contractors, Alliances, Partners and Co-Owners
Relationships can be very instrumental in the success of a consulting practice. When building a practice, consultants need to build business relationships with a variety of potential partners. Understanding the power of these relationships — and establishing trust and confidence — is one of the keys to growing your business effectively. Sean Murphy is the
CTO Mastermind Open House
Saturday March 24, 9-11am Ground Floor Silicon Valley, located at 2030 Duane Avenue, Santa Clara, We are launching new Mastermind groups in response to several requests from entrepreneurs who wanted to form an advisory board of peers with a deeper understanding of each other’s businesses and shared accountability. Come to the meeting and see if
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Linkedin, Twitter, and GMail Need a Read Only Password
I have been exploring the use of several analysis applications that could access my LinkedIn account, my twitter account, and my GMAIL account. They want to help me leverage private information that requires my account password. So far so good, except that LinkedIn, Twitter, and Gmail don’t appear to have any provision for just granting
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Small Wins Enable Larger Wins
Early focus on a niche market (a small market) enables a startup to achieve “small wins” faster (and experience “small losses” instead of large ones). Over time these accumulate into larger wins.
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Honor Customer Commitments To Avoid Poisoning the Well
Honor Customer Commitments To Avoid Poisoning the Well “In a small way, every talent acquisition poisons the well for future, bootstrapped startups. It erodes the confidence of users and potential customers. People put their company blog on Posterous, they add their business to GoWalla, they gave AdGrok a few hours of their time, etcetera, etcetera.
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Self-Publishing Often Marks The First Generation of New Knowledge
The first observation of a new insight is often published in a lab notebook or personal journal or as notes from a meeting that captured an anecdote. Self-publishing often marks the first generation of new knowledge because “new” is often hard to comprehend and not accepted by the status quo or established publication channels. If
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Founder Story: Linc Jepson, 74ze
This originally appeared in my “Entrepreneurial Engineer” column in EETimes as “Linc Jepson’s 74ze leverages Russian and American engineering talent to persevere” on Jan-18-2011. I have added some additional hyperlinks in this version. Linc Jepson studied Electrical Engineering at Tufts and after he graduated with his BSEE he was drawn to Silicon Valley’s technology boom
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Bug Reports vs. Business Plans
“Unhappy users in our industry don’t continue to file bug reports; they start writing business plans.” Michael “Mac” McNamara talking about the EDA Industry I was reminded of this remark that Mac made at an SDForum event several years ago as I was reading the “Who Are User Entrepreneurs?” study which summarizes findings on innovation,
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A Picture Is Worth a Thousand CPU Hours
Last week was a thought provoking one for me with Big Data Camp on Mon February 27, a “Great Demo” workshop on February 29, and a tour of the Strata 2012 exhibit hall on March 1. I encountered either examples or stories of visualizations that required hundreds to thousands of CPU hours to create at
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Pretotyping – Techniques for Building the Right Product
Alberto Savoia defines pretotyping as determining that you are “building the right product before you invest in building your product right.” His book “Pretotype It” (Second Edition available as a Free PDF or on Kindle for $2.99) lists a set of seven techniques for pretotyping on pages 39-40. This post analyzes and elaborates on the techniques
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Building Codes For Software
Some comments on Rich Skrenta’s observation: “I think it’s still a long time before we’ll have building codes for software.”
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Sketching The Likeness Of An Imaginary Business
Startups originate in the mind of an entrepreneur, often as the result of observing something that seems odd, or is the result of juxtaposing two or three seeming unrelated or even incongruous ideas. The first challenge the entrepreneur faces turn his insight into something others can critique and improve upon: to show them sketches of
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