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, …
Back to Big Raise, Big Spend?
Mark Suster has an important post on his blog today called “9 Women Can’t Make a Baby in a Month“. It may sound strange, but too much funding is just as dangerous if not more so than too little funding. Go read his post. I agree with so many of the things he warns against, and have unfortunately experienced quite …
Immigration Idiocy
Last night in the State of the Union address, Obama discussed our broken immigration policies, and how we train some of the brightest people in the world in our universities and then kick them out to compete against us. It almost happened with Aprizi. Liz, my co-founder, is Australian. She got her PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon. When …
MVP is a State of Mind, not a Version Number
I am not the heaviest of Quora users, but last week I saw three game designers I like and respect (Daniel James, Chris Carella, and Adrian Crook) answer the question, “How can we apply the idea of “minimum viable product” to online games? … What and where is the “minimum” of MVP reached for games?” Definitely check out their answers, …
2010 Musings
So much happened in 2010, and while I’ve been a bit too buried to write much lately, I wanted to take a step back and muse on a few topics. Aprizi 2010 was a year for a lot of learning, and execution, and evolution for Aprizi. Liz and I got the first alpha up in March and a couple of …
Selling your company – some core questions and answers
A friend’s startup was recently approached by an interested buyer, which spurred me to write up some thoughts on M&A in hopes that they could be useful to other entrepreneurs. For those that do not know my background, I have both sold a startup and managed multiple tech deals as an investment banker at Broadview (now Jefferies). Here is my …
How a blog can help you with customer development
There are many strategies for customer development, and here is another one: start a company blog focused on the problem you hope to solve and the people you hope to solve it for. In this context, your purpose with the blog is not to get vast amounts of traffic, but rather to help you connect with and learn from lots …
Focus. There is no but.
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 of focus (think extension of …