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 it is to make BIG …
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 you take the time to …
Motivation and Inspiration – Dan Pink’s TED Talk
Thanks to a tumble from Hiten Shah, I just watched and loved Dan Pink’s TED talk on incentive structures and performance. Dan makes a case that monetary performance-based incentives increase productivity for mechanical tasks, but not for complex creative ones. Instead, you need to focus on three things: autonomy mastery purpose This is exceptionally true in software startups. Yes, people …
Startups: hiring, careers, sales people
This week saw two interesting and related posts on startups and hiring/careers. Mark Suster wrote about who you should hire into your startup, and Chris Dixon wrote about the ideal startup career path. Mark’s message is to hire hungry, smart people who want to get to the next level in their career, not the ones who have already arrived. Chris …
Empower your experts
I love despair.com’s line “none of us is as dumb as all of us”. A big part of startup success is tied to the quality of people and how well they work together. That’s why I’m always sad when I see situations where a business has hired someone really good, and then refuses to empower them as an expert. Occasionally …