Since Steve Blank publicized the findings of the startup genome project, I have seen references to the study in multiple places. The one thing that drives me nuts is the recurring phrase, “startups that did A raised Bx more money”, like this is such a great thing. I would love for our ecosystem to purge the notion that how much …
Getting in the Way in a Good Way
As a general rule, I believe that you want to get users to the “goods” quickly and easily, reducing friction wherever possible. However, sometimes this can go too far, and sacrifice the needs of the business. I thought I would share an example from Aprizi where we did exactly that. First, for context: Aprizi was a personalized discovery engine for …
When UI Innovation Isn’t Progress
As a visual person, I have always fantasized about being part, even a small part, of the creation of a major UI innovation on par with what Apple/PARC did for the modern desktop. I have learned some lessons the hard way about how skeptical one must be with UI “innovations”. I fell for 3D twice in my career – once …
Waiting for Perfection
My former colleague Jerry Paffendorf, who is off re-inventing Detroit, shared a great clip of Pixar’s Ed Catmull talking at Stanford, via Protoshare’s blog. At around the 6 min mark, Catmull is discussing Pixar’s constant “peer sharing” process: “In the process of making the film, we reviewed the material every day. Now this is counter-intuitive for a lot of people. …
$9.4M? And Aprizi’s First Pivot
When Liz and I first started Aprizi, it was very different in concept from where we eventually ended up. I had become fascinated with Mint and Gist, and people’s willingness to share rich data in exchange for the right value proposition. I started thinking about other places where valuable data existed, but was relatively hard to get to. This led …
When you can’t get that A round
The startup ecosystem is currently at the “thousand flowers blooming” stage. The number of large second-stage angel or VC-led A rounds will not be able to keep up with the number of new companies. Consequently, there are going to be a lot of frustrated and disappointed entrepreneurs out there. But just because you struggle to raise money does not mean …
Is there a quality chasm in fashion startups?
There are a number of startups in the broader “fashion” category getting funded with versions of a subscription model. At first glance, these things seem pretty cool — pay an affordable, regular amount and you get sent something nice each month, ideally somewhat personalized to your tastes. Send it back if you hate it! A consistent trend is also to …
Scott Francis on financing a young services business
Scott Francis, a fellow Trilogy alumn who has a business process consulting business in Austin, recently wrote his thoughts on Mark Suster’s excellent post “What Should You Do With Your Crappy Little Services Business?” — you can see Scott’s post here. Scott touches on a few good ways services firms can benefit from building products. But I wanted to particularly …
The Tech Crunch
CNN recently wrote an article on NYC startups and I laughed when Nosh Petigara from 10gen (MongoDb) said, “we don’t have trouble hiring engineers.” When you are a 10gen, Hunch, bit.ly — i.e. when you have a strong technical lead (your anchor) already and an interesting technical problem, good computer scientists want to work for you. Unfortunately, quite a few …
One Lesson From Each
The other week I spoke and mentored at The Lean Startup Machine in New York, which was a ton of fun for everyone involved. I had a young entrepreneur come up and ask me an interesting question: “What was the #1 lesson from each of the companies you have been involved with?” It is always hard to pick just one, …