“(Venture backed) Startups are all about math. Sooner founders realize that, the less emotional trauma & confusion they’ll experience.” - Om Malik (@om) Excel. Yes, you may scoff at it because it is a Microsoft product. Or you may thumb your nose at it because only accountants use it. Or heck, you may not see at all why it relates to a founder of a startup. But you’d be wrong. Don’t start a…
I’m 36. I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing (being an entrepreneur and starting a company I’m inspired by). I’m married to an incredible woman. I have a group of friends who keep me humble and laughing (great combination). I’m happy. However, I was asked a question by a friend of mine who said, “Who would you drop everything for to be their Assistant, their Chief of Staff, their EA?” I…
As I flipped through the apps on my iPhone the other day, I wondered “Why am I uninspired by my Apps? I’ve got the same ones on the homescreen for the past 6 months.” Now I’m not really a guy that goes to the AppStore to browse for new apps — mostly I discover through friends or through social media or a blog article. We all can admit discovery sucks for Apps and advertising sucks for App…
The following is the first in a series of posts about using customer discovery in your company. Over the past 9 months, I’ve had the opportunity to teach customer discovery nearly a dozen times to hundreds of students, I’ve had the opportunity to work with Steve Blank and Bob Dorf directly on building a customer discovery course/curriculum for Startup Weekend, and I’ve been using customer…
I’m right there with you. We all do it – well, except those genetic freaks who basically started doing crunches at birth to get their fourteen packs. But for the rest of us… we stand in front of the mirror and suck it in. It’s human nature. My guess is if lions or tigers or gorillas had guts, they’d probably suck theirs in. Turns out animals in the wild with guts get eaten by some other animal…
Over the past month, I’ve spent a ton of time with MBA students, recent grads considering their next job and folks a little bit into their career trying to find their path. What’s consistent across the board is that the happiest people are on their road towards their goal and those struggling are worried about what to do next that might one day help them reach that goal. So, which are you? Are you…
How do you decide what to focus on? How do you say no? How do you figure out where to spend your day? How do you deliver an amazing experience? These are questions that all entrepreneurs do (read: should) be thinking about. But not every company and entrepreneur are created equal. Constraints Last week I met with two entrepreneurs in the span of two hours – one was trying to solve a consumer…
Startup Weekend and Startup America are combining forces to create a platform for entrepreneurship. That’s f-ing awesome. More brains, more resources, and more support – all good. But does UP really matter for entrepreneurs? As an entrepreneur, I often have asked myself does it matter that there are conferences like TC Disrupt or Launch; does it matter their are coworking spaces like CoLoft or…
A friend of mine asked me last week, “So, what apps do you use?” It was a good question, so I whipped out my iPhone and started looking through. I was shocked to see I have 102 apps on my phone. Wow, that’s a lot of apps, I thought to myself. Then I started scrolling through and realized how many of them I hadn’t touched in… well, since I could last remember. Dead apps. Tombstones of a great app…
“The Valley is not just a place anymore, it’s a mind set, it’s a way of looking to things.” - Shervin Pishevar (@Shervin) As someone who has ‘lived’ in three different startup scenes in the past five years (Seattle, San Francisco Bay Area and now DC), I get asked a lot about what separates them all and whether people should just up and move to the Bay Area if they really want to win.…