Startup Weekend To Dos

This weekend there will be more than the usual number of #lean hashtags on Twitter. Startup Weekend is holding its 54-hour events around the world, including in Hong Kong. I recently gave a pre-Startup Weekend talk on “Lean Startup in 54 Minutes” and I thought I’d share the major parts of the talk here. This […]

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Launching AcceleratorHK

Today is the first day of AcceleratorHK, Hong Kong’s first startup accelerator. I’m happy to be the Director of the program. The process of getting this off the ground was straightforward but took a while: – Lots of discussions with people in HK’s tech community, starting December 2011 – Lots of discussions with other accelerator […]

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No Dave, No Matter

Dave McClure is on a tour of Asia that includes Beijing, Seoul, Taipei and Singapore but not Hong Kong. I’m already hearing people say that this is more evidence Hong Kong is not on the tech map yet. Some also want to bring people like McClure to Hong Kong — as if their visits would […]

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Can You Do An MVP For Your Life?

I had to come to Hong Kong to go to my first Barcamp. The timing was perfect — I arrived less than a week before to run Startup Bootcamp so it was a perfect time to meet more people. And everyone in the bootcamp attended for at least part of the day. After attending a […]

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Fear, Waiting and LaGuardia

If there was ever a situation in which ride sharing apps would be used, it was at LaGuardia Airport, 12:30am after the airport had been closed for a storm. When I arrived, delayed for several hours with many other flights, I found a taxi line that was like nothing I had ever seen. In fact, […]

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Simplicity

I saw two useful and simple new services yesterday: Delight.io (by Thomas Pun, who I know) and PopTip.com (from a new TechStars grad). Delight.io allows developers to add a line of code to their iOS app in order to see how users interact with the apps. PopTip allows any Twitter user to run a poll […]

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Too experienced to learn

Is it possible to be too experienced to learn? I think it is. A historian told me about an example from US new recruits in WWII and how marksmanship ability varied among them. Supposedly, recruits from the US countryside performed worse than those from the city. This seems counter-intuitive. After all, men who grew up […]

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More MBAs More Problems

A lot has been said about MBA programs’ lack of preparation for entrepreneurial work. I’m even going as far as to say that these programs can unintentionally mislead students by rewarding the wrong things. (I’m allowed to make these comments because I have an MBA and ran a startup.) Here are a few examples from […]

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How to observe your way to insight

When we were starting out in my last startup, even before we had heard of customer development, we had a method for learning from users. It wasn’t great but it was better than what a lot of startups were doing. This is what we did (after we had exhausted our friends as beta testers): – […]

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What I Learned From Running Startups Unplugged

This was the first time I truly used Customer Development to build something. Generated revenue (a little, anyway) almost immediately Got me talking to new people immediately Led me to abandon my initial thoughts about running this course Also, I was asked to speak at an event next week. I’m going to try to condense part […]

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