The Disposable Startup
I wrote this post a while ago, but am posting it here for the first time. The Disposable Startup.
Hey Hong Kong Startups — You Know That List? It Doesn’t Matter
Two years ago today I said goodbye to friends and colleagues, got on a plane and left Hong Kong. I had spent just a year in Hong Kong focused on working with the growing number of startups there by running AcceleratorHK and an earlier program called Startup Bootcamp. When I gave a farewell talk at […]
Investment Thesis for a University Incubator
Recently I was hired by USC, specifically USC’s Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the Marshall School of Business, to build a USC Incubator program, open to any USC student or alum. As I started to survey needs of potential participants, I wrote an investment thesis. You might ask why have an investment thesis for a university program […]
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 […]