Last Fall, I was thinking about a few things: people are increasingly trying to do professional networking via Facebook, but support for such a task is awful my LinkedIn network does not really overlap with my Facebook network my FB network has tons of successful, smart people who know other successful, smart people if a friend of mine recommended someone …
Unspoken Truths: the game of industry research
I give both Mark Suster and Chris Dixon credit for pointing to elephants in the room (hot air balloons, etc) of our industry –- topics that most entrepreneurs feel they can’t talk about in public without risk of getting burned. Suster’s latest post on statistics and research firms is no exception. Go read it. When Jason Calacanis began his tirade …
Thoughts on TechCrunch & Silicon Valley’s Gender Problem
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 the unconscious, unexamined biases …
App(le) Clue(less)
The NY Times article today on Apple’s App Store shows that our favorite Cupertino company still hasn’t got a clue. “I absolutely think this is the future of great software development and distribution,” says Philip Schiller, head of worldwide product marketing at Apple. The future of software development? It is more like a throwback to the era of box shipping. …
What is your customer acquisition strategy? (startup marketing tactics)
“What is your growth strategy?” It is a classic question from VCs to early-stage consumer Internet companies, and one often difficult to answer at such an early point in a company’s life cycle because you have not yet seen which specific tactics work best. There is usually no silver bullet answer, just a lot of hard work ahead. This post, …
Publishing needs to learn from Music (but probably won’t)
I had an enjoyable lunch the other week with a former client in the book publishing industry. It got me thinking how publishing is tremendously lucky to have a lesson plan of what not to do laid out by the music industry. The question is whether they learn the lessons, or will they fall into the trap of DRM and …
Swan Song for IT?
Randall Stross over at the NYTimes recently wrote about Thomas Siebel’s contention that Information Technology’s “glory days are past — long past, having ended in 2000.” According to Siebel, from 1980 to 2000, “All you had to do was show up and not goof it up… All ships were rising.” That is, of course, an absurd statement. Those 20 years …