The humble approach to product design

February 11, 2013

Great quote on the creation of gmail: Buchheit later called Gmail’s development process “the humble approach to product design.” “What’s the right attitude? Humility,” he wrote on his blog. “It doesn’t matter how smart and successful and qualified you are, you simply don’t know what you’re doing. The good news is that nobody else does, [...]

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Stop Pretending You’re Not a Tech Company

February 6, 2013

I keep on running into large companies who say they are not a technology company. All I want to do is shake them and say, “Don’t you get it? We’re all technology companies today.” But instead, software gets treated as “IT” and outsourced or managed as a utility. Too often, they don’t hire for creative [...]

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Pivots Steal Startups (Burning is So Much Better)

February 3, 2013

It feels like every week Techcrunch hosts an article that says “lean startup doesn’t work my my category.” I would remain blissfully ignorant of these pieces if not for the fact that they end up polluting my morning coffee, when I scan my twitter stream. The latest is Roman Stanek’s piece on enterprise software. “There [...]

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The Paradox of Patience

February 2, 2013

Lean is all about speeding up cycle times, reducing waste, compressing the hunt for product-market fit. So at face value it seems like it should be all about going fast fast fast. Ironically I find that lean often requires a great deal of patience, sometimes uncomfortably so. You need to give yourself time to gather [...]

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Extrapolating from Kids

January 19, 2013
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It can be amusing to watch adults try to peer into the world of youth and how they use technology. “What can we learn from these alien creatures?” While kids can indeed show future trends, you have to be really careful extrapolating behavior into the future. Examples of mistaken extrapolation: – “Kids love using Club [...]

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Einstein

January 1, 2013

I’m kicking off 2013 with a few quotes from, or commonly attributed to, Albert Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor [...]

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Ain’t nothing wrong with making your ugly site suck a little less

December 30, 2012

Via Josh Porter, I just read Aral Balkan’s rant about a recent article that made the rounds on hacker news called “How to Make Your Site Look Half-Decent in Half an Hour“. The thrust of Aral’s rant is “design is not veneer”. And yeah, I get it. My colleagues and readers here have heard me [...]

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It is easier for e-commerce to embrace content than vice versa

December 29, 2012

Erin Griffith’s article on content and commerce in PandoDaily got me thinking about the space, now that I’ve had a couple more years of observing players in the market. Some initial observations: Great e-commerce businesses are not affiliate businesses. Rather they have their own products to move (whether branded or third-party vendors). Commerce businesses want [...]

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A Great Example of Persistence

December 15, 2012

Yesterday I wrote about persistence. As fate would have it, I later caught up with an entrepreneur who was evidencing a great kind of persistence. His startup is an enterprise SaaS play, and he has an initial base of happy paying customers. So far the local VC community hasn’t fully realized his great potential, so [...]

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SSH keys and multiple heroku accounts

December 15, 2012

When you get stuck on tech ops problems, the web is your friend.  So I figured the least that I could do is contribute for the next person banging their head on this issue… I have multiple heroku accounts for personal and work.  Yesterday, I found that I could not push from git to heroku [...]

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