Last night I watched Morning Glory, a cute movie about a plucky, underdog tv producer who makes her dreams come true. All in all, it is not a terrible metaphor for innovating new products. She succeeds by applying creative thinking, willingness to take risks, good management, metrics-driven feedback loops, and sheer hard work. However, she doesn’t step up her game …
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. …
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 …
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 few lessons I’ve learned over …
$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 think the company could have …
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 explain to others in clear …
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 key. obviously being aligned is …
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 some great no’s in a …
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 be a boss, a peer, …
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 it is to make BIG …
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