This post is not about starting and financing small businesses or what some call “lifestyle businesses”. It is about starting and growing venture-funded companies that must never become lifestyle businesses. I’ll ignore the issue of “doing what you love” as you’ll need that in either case. Your time is “scalable”. While you can’t be in [...]
Author Archives: Adam
The Next Big Thingd?
Thingd (Thing Daemon) is building a structured database of every object in the world and then mapping those objects (and associated metadata) to people and to other objects. The concept is still in its early stages of being realized, but it is a big ambitious idea and one worth thinking more about. The easy (and [...]
Posted in Startups, Strategy, Technology 8 Comments
Deconstructing The Economist
Image via Wikipedia The Economist is my favorite newspaper. It’s also one of the only profitable news publishers. Why is it successful while the rest of the industry is gasping for air? It’s not because they’re extremely innovative in how they charge for or deliver content. They don’t have a splashy online presence although they [...]
Coke’s API and the Outsourcing of Innovation
While he may not have realized it at the time, Asa Griggs Candler helped pioneer the “platform” business model used by thousands of web companies today. But Chandler wasn’t a tech startup guy, he was the founder of The Coca-Cola Company. Coke became a platform company almost by accident. Beginning in 1886, Coke was principally [...]
Posted in Economics, Startups, Strategy, Technology 2 Comments
What a 100 Year-Old Race to the South Pole Teaches Us About Design
Design informs most of what we come in contact with whether it be architecture, mobile devices, cars, software and web services, or a school’s curriculum. Sentences are designed, edited down so they convey meaning with efficient elegance. “Good” design delights with its simplicity, its flexibility and ease of use. Design was on my mind while [...]
Posted in Uncategorized 2 Comments
“Should I Get an MBA?” and Why It’s Not about the (any) Degree
There has been a lot of discussion about the best educational background for founders and for those who want to join startups. Earlier this month, TechCrunch ran an article from Vivek Wadhwa which argued in favor of an MBA education. Similarly, Vinicius Vacanti (a former banker) wrote a great post, “5 Reasons Why I-Bankers Make [...]
Posted in Startups 0 Comments
Open Graph is Facebook’s Beacon Pivot
Facebook Beacon was the company’s much-maligned initiative that captured and broadcast off-Facebook browsing activities to one’s Facebook friends. Signing up for a service, purchasing a product, adding an item to a wish list – all of these actions were automatically shared. The way it worked was that the affiliate would call a JavaScript snippet from [...]
Posted in Startups, Strategy 5 Comments
One Way to Join a Startup and “Try Before You Buy” Hiring Practices
Earlier this week Bijan Sabet at Spark Capital wrote a post, “An inspiring way to join a startup“. The post describes how a couple of companies in Spark’s portfolio had individuals offering to work for free in exchange for the possibility of a full-time position. I don’t know what the exact circumstances were for each [...]
Posted in Personal, Startups 0 Comments
Thoughts on Hiring a VP Sales and Why Rolodexes are Usually BS
Hiring a VP of Sales at a startup is challenging. While others have written eloquently about when to hire a VP Sales, I will focus on what type of person to hire. Having run a sales team, worked under a VP Sales and Business Development, hired a VP Sales, and served as an adviser to [...]
The Data Storage Conundrum & Oscar Wilde
The Economist is a great “newspaper”, my favorite. A couple weeks ago they did a special report on “The Data Deluge” which explored the recent and rapid expansion of data, and how to handle it. There were two parts of the report that caught my eye because they seemed contradictory. The first was an 1894 [...]
