Thoughts on TechCrunch & Silicon Valley’s Gender Problem

February 7, 2010

In the leadup to Vivek Wadhwa’s TechCrunch article today on Silicon Valley’s gender problem, I saw him twittering with my friend and former colleague Susan Wu (now CEO of Ohai) about the topic. Susan wrote:
“There’s implict & explicit gender discrimination. It’s the implicit, subconscious, unstudied stuff that is the most difficult to overcome.“  and “it’s [...]

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Targeting Matters!

February 6, 2010
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The other day, Cindy Alvarez (product manager at KISSmetrics and author of a great blog), wrote a post called “Anybody, As Long As It’s Not You” , saying:
“Who should give you feedback on your early-stage product mockups/demo? Anybody, as long as it’s not you. OK, sure, there’s probably an “ideal” audience to show your product [...]

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Can business schools teach entrepreneurship?

February 1, 2010

I can’t help but weigh in on the “MBA – startup” meme going around.  First, context on my background: I chose not get an MBA. Before my current startup, I worked for 4 VC-backed companies (founded by others) in various sales/marketing/bizdev roles, and bootstrapped and sold 1 company of my own.  I did feel a [...]

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Thoughts on Product-Market Fit

January 30, 2010
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Here are a few thoughts on product-market fit that came up when I was chatting this evening with Brant Cooper of Market by Numbers.

Revenue & Testing
To me, “lean startup” and “product-market fit” boil down to rigorously and continuously testing your assumptions as early as possible, and holding off heavy investments in scalability and growth until [...]

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Two zinger quotes

January 28, 2010

Ran across these two quotes today that brought a smile:
“By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked.” — Steve Blank, Speed and Tempo
“the running joke [on raising VC] [...]

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When it comes to startups, products and services don’t mix

January 26, 2010
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This post is about dancing with the devil (i.e. consulting) as you pursue your dreams and try to pay the bills.  I believe that it is near impossible to build a successful software product while maintaining a services business. (UPDATE: I should clarify that I am talking about the period *before* you have a successful [...]

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Tale of Two Twitters: Information vs Social

January 23, 2010
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I was reading Dave Hornik’s latest post over at VentureBlog and stopped at this sentence: “To P&G, Twitter is a great broadcast medium — it is best for one to many communications that are short bursts of timely information.”
I’ve heard others call Twitter an “information network, not a social network” and gather that Twitter itself [...]

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Customer Development Update (and why I’m sticking with 1-on-1 talks)

January 20, 2010
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Conversations with prospective customers is an unending process. Here is a quick update (first post) on some of those efforts with Aprizi:
First, conversations have gotten a lot more concrete as we’ve honed our thoughts. We started out talking about people’s challenges and a wide array of features. The first wave of discussions [...]

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Great startup lawyers

January 18, 2010
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My reaction to the recent Venture Hacks post on lawyers was that we need to help entrepreneurs find good attorneys!  They are out there — I am certainly happy with my current attorney, Brian Hutchings at Gunderson, and when I was selling the first company I founded, my attorney at Fenwick was indispensable.
So today I [...]

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Angels: Development or Momentum?

January 15, 2010

Aprizi is not in a mad rush to raise a seed round, but it is something we want to do and I have been thinking about when to start expanding the conversation beyond a few folks who already know me.  An interesting question arose last night when I mentioned to another entrepreneur that I was [...]

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