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 […]
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 […]
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): – […]
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 […]
Famous teacher or good teacher
Years ago, when I was at Columbia, I heard about an interesting-sounding course taught by a Nobel Laureate. Competition to get in the course was tough so I decided to sit in on a class first (always a good idea). What I found astonished me. The class was half full with most of the attending […]
Random factoid about Cluetrain Manifesto and URL longevity
Here’s something I put together while on hold on the phone. Everyone remember “The Cluetrain Manifesto”? I came across a copy of the book a couple days ago, full of references to “electronic mail.” After the 12 years or so the book has been out I wondered what the longevity was of the URLs they […]
Are the TechStars Results accurate?
I have total respect for TechStars and what I know about it tells me it’s a great program. So when I recently saw TechStars’ results page with a 80% success rate I had to learn more. I’m always very interested in “success/failure” at startups so I looked through their list of previous classes, going back […]