Going Gonzo to Build a Better Bootcamp
Hunter S. Thompson practiced Gonzo journalism, a format where the reporter participates in the story. Here’s the start of the Gonzo startup advisory (what I used to run as a “bootcamp”). In my experience, if you’re an early-stage entrepreneur and working with someone like me to learn Customer Development techniques, you will have some common troubles. […]
Why Startup Lists Don’t Matter But You Read Them Anyway
It just turned 2013 in Hong Kong and I feel like it’s 2008 in New York. Usually when I say that it’s because the startup growth I witnessed (and hope helped) in New York years ago reminds me of what I’ve seen in Hong Kong recently. This time, however, I’m talking about the latest in […]
School’s Out
A few years ago when I started working on a social voice service I thought a potential customer segment was college students. I spoke to around 120 students to test the concept. During that time I learned a lot about design and UX but also realized that this segment did not have the problems I […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]