Jordan Cooper, a bright NYC entrepreneur and investor, just wrote a post called “If you’re building for $1B, is “Focus” a Farce?” He writes: “I find myself wondering if changes in the product development lifecycle are not giving birth to a new type of non-bootstrapped operation/execution that is more forgiving of experimentation at the expense… Continue reading
Category management
9 Tips for Distributed Teams
The best way to build a startup is to have everyone in a single physical location, but that isn’t always possible. I’ve had to deal with virtual teams on multiple occasions, and my last employer, The Electric Sheep Company, took it to an extreme, with 75 people mostly scattered around the country. Here are a… Continue reading
$160 million in the bank
I was just catching up on the Chirp conference care of GigaOm when I stopped dead at this sentence, “With more than 100,000 applications created on its platform to date, it’s frankly amazing that Twitter hadn’t formalized its road map and addressed competition with developers before … [t]hough with $160 million in the bank you’d… Continue reading
The 4th State of Agile (and seeing Eric Ries in Sydney)
In mid-February I and the family flew down to Sydney to see my in-laws, and I was happy to overlap with Eric Ries at the Sydney Lean Startup Circle. Eric delivered a great talk, but I gave him a hard time afterward because he spent a chunk of time on continuous deployment. I consider that… Continue reading
Are you all on the same page? A 20 minute Test.
When you are in the weeds building, testing, and iterating, communication challenges can pop up. First, you want everyone on the same page as to how the “value proposition” has evolved, what needs to be validated next, and why. Second, when your business feels like a moving target, sometimes it can be awfully hard to… Continue reading
He should have fired my ass
Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital today posed the question of how a startup maintains speed once it hits adolescence. His conclusion is that “speed is really the result of a having the company aligned.” Howard Lindzon, the colorful CEO of Stocktwits, responded with the following comment: “we deal with this today. managing feature creep is… Continue reading
The Beautiful Sound of No
Hiten Shah tonight sent out an interesting tweet, “The more you know, the more you no.” Interestingly enough, Matt Henrick riffed back, “the less you know, the more you will try.” My brain went in a different direction: how experience teaches you what not to do. I thought it would be fun to talk about… Continue reading
What Gets Said vs What Gets Remembered
Matt Blumberg posted some great managerial advice today on the problem of “what gets said isn’t necessarily what gets heard.” I totally agree with his recommendations of “playback” and email follow-up. This advice also applies to upward or sideways management. This is for the “what gets said isn’t necessarily what gets remembered” problem. It can… Continue reading
Quarterly “Stop, Start, and Continue” Reviews
Last night, Matt Blumberg of Return Path discussed some of the pivots his business has taken on its journey at a Lean Startup Meetup in NYC. Matt has a first post up about it here, with the great quote: the larger your business is, and the more investors have a stake in it, the harder… Continue reading
Learning is about the translation, not the source
I was reading Fred Destin’s post on why entrepreneurs hate VCs, when a quote caught my eye: “Learning from mistakes is far less useful than emulating success.” It’s a message that 37Signals likes to harp on as well. I’d argue that you have an equal shot at learning from mistakes or successes, as long as… Continue reading