USC Incubator Description
Working with early-stage founders has been my focus for the past three years. After running a startup in New York, I started holding a roundtable series that grew into a bootcamp and then a funded accelerator program in Hong Kong. I’ve advised or had as clients that are startups from early-stage revenue to millions of […]
Judging the Judges
In the startup world, there are many occasions in which startups are judged and few (if any) occasions when the judges themselves are judged. I want to quote my friend and startup advisor Kevin Dewalt, who in a blog post wrote “We don’t need to be judges – the customers are the only judge that […]
Startup Sacrilege for the Underdog Entrepreneur
The book is now available here. What do you think of the cover art? Chapter outline Context: Fools Rush In; Why Read This; A Glance At the Seedy Underbelly. Sacrilege: Your Invisible Tribe; The Irrational Goal; Is There Enough Diversity In Tech?; Little Heroes; Investor Change; What You Can Control and Never Control; The Never Ending Accelerator Glut; Pitch Event Controversies; Idea Thieves. Action: Test Prep; Next-Gen Accelerators; […]
Rolling Up Hills or Climbing Up Steps
Sometimes startups think of progress as rolling up a hill. You start off with almost nothing: a first iteration with no users and of maybe questionable value. But you believe that you’re able to roll up that hill to grow. Sometimes, depending on what you are building, rolling up a hill cannot work. The hill, […]
Accelerators and their discontents
Breaking my own rule I wrote about a related issue a few weeks ago, but now find myself pulled back to this topic sooner than I thought. Yesterday, in a TechCrunch article called “The Startup Accelerator Trend Is Finally Slowing Down,” the author says that the overcrowded market for early-stage funding destines most accelerators to […]
How Lean Startup Optimizes For Annoyance
I’ve taught lean startup tools at a bootcamp, spoken about lean case studies in workshops, judged on application of lean techniques at competitions, and guided people to think through it all while I ran an accelerator. It’s not a perfect methodology. There’s lots of confusion about it. It doesn’t explain everything. And that’s just fine. But […]
Please stop trying to build another Y Combinator
There are lots of startup accelerators out there. I believe that most of them add value to the startups they work with, as measured against the equity and time they take. In spite of that, most accelerators will not last long-term and could be adding much more value. Here I want to support development of alternative […]
Eradicate the startup pitch event
I posted this recently on Medium. Reposting the link here to share the reasons why I think startup pitch events are awful. Hope you like it. Eradicate the startup pitch event.
What’s the best way for a startup to measure its progress?
Across public talks and internally in the accelerator I co-founded, I’ve taught and advised on metrics that matter for startups. I could add to the lengthy body of knowledge of startup metrics but there’s a qualitative metric that people don’t mention because it’s hard to measure and few see it in person. Startups in their […]
You’re So Vain
While we talk about lean startup and vanity metrics we also often send conflicting signals. Here are some examples that startup ecosystems create or enable. From what I’ve seen, vanity is the major culprit. The Events Problem Speaker Events. You don’t get any closer to your goal by going to hear a speaker, famous or […]
