Continuations

Over the holiday day weekend I did a lot of driving in a loaner Tesla (we have ordered one ourselves but it is, ahem, delayed). Well, actually, the car did a lot of the driving. I made extensive use of “Autopilot” features, including the smart cruise control and the autosteering. New cars by other automotive brands have similar capabilities. Long before getting to fully autonomous cars, I am blown away by how immediately transformative this experience is for highway driving. For me there were...

Last night Susan and I met up with friends of ours for dinner at Atera. The idea of spending several hundred dollars a person for dinner seemed more than a bit crazy to me but I was proven wrong: it was completely worth it and I rank it among a small group of magical experiences that money can buy (right up there with say scuba diving). This is not a regular meal in any form. We had close to 30 different dishes and each of them was a uniquely enchanting combination of flavors and textures. Ev...

I have written before on Tech Tuesday on how to grow engineering teams but wanted to tackle this issue again from a slightly different perspective: what is the role of experience? Startup engineering teams often start out skewing very young as young founders tend to hire more young people. The overall bias tends to be to hire “bright young people who will figure it out” (whatever the relevant it may be). Many companies will go so far as having what they consider tests for brightness. The prob...

Most startups spend all their time on optimizing the experience for registered and logged in users. But what about those who come to a site through a link? Or right to the home page by either typing the company’s URL or more likely searching for the company name. Most companies spend very little time on this which is a mistake because it is the top of the user acquisition funnel. Companies that get the logged out experience right can get a lot of mileage from that. In particular showing immed...

In 1997 I started a company with two professors from MIT in the emerging Internet healthcare field. We made a lot of mistakes, but probably the biggest mistake was made at inception. We did not have the right DNA in the company for what we were trying to accomplish. The two professors were academics and I had a consulting services background (albeit a consulting startup). Their research had been on using lightweight web based systems on bringing information on the same patient from disparate ...