Twitter is going public today. This is something many startups aspire to yet very few succeed in doing. My congratulations to everyone who has contributed to Twitter’s growth over the years. There are many people whose names will not be in the news today who at varying moments made this possible. It is also a good point to remind oneself just why these successes are so improbable: because every startup goes on an Odyssean journey in which failure is generally closer than success. I often talk...

Twitter is going public today. This is something many startups aspire to yet very few succeed in doing. My congratulations to everyone who has contributed to Twitter’s growth over the years. There are many people whose names will not be in the news today who at varying moments made this possible. It is also a good point to remind oneself just why these successes are so improbable: because every startup goes on an Odyssean journey in which failure is generally closer than success. I often talk...

I am often asked about what has changed in Venture Capital and how that has impacted startups. Inevitably I answer that the right place to start when looking for impact on startups is Amazon. My line is: “Amazon has done more for startups than all early stage investors combined.” Why? Because founders can now generally get a service up and running on AWS with a close to zero upfront investment. And of course once you have something fundraising gets a lot easier and you probably have to sell a...

I am often asked about what has changed in Venture Capital and how that has impacted startups. Inevitably I answer that the right place to start when looking for impact on startups is Amazon. My line is: “Amazon has done more for startups than all early stage investors combined.” Why? Because founders can now generally get a service up and running on AWS with a close to zero upfront investment. And of course once you have something fundraising gets a lot easier and you probably have to sell a...

Susan and I are trying something new: we are offering an online pitch practice aimed at women entrepreneurs. Susan came up with this idea based on working hard to hone her own pitch for Ziggeo (which is also the platform we will be using to power this). We are both big believers in the importance of deliberate practice and feedback is an essential ingredient to this. Giving feedback asynchronously on a recorded pitch is an experiment – if it goes well, we will figure out how to repeat and/or ...

Susan and I are trying something new: we are offering an online pitch practice aimed at women entrepreneurs. Susan came up with this idea based on working hard to hone her own pitch for Ziggeo (which is also the platform we will be using to power this). We are both big believers in the importance of deliberate practice and feedback is an essential ingredient to this. Giving feedback asynchronously on a recorded pitch is an experiment – if it goes well, we will figure out how to repeat and/or ...

At MIT one of my statistics classes was taught by Prof. Jerry Hausman (of the Hausman test). In every class Prof. Hausman would at some point reach a result and then exclaim “and this proves that life is unfair” (usually it was that your statistical test had less power than you would have hoped for). Reading Nick Bilton’s Twitter story in the NY Times Sunday magazine reminded of that. I read it not because I expected to find something new but because it is always fun to see an event described...

At MIT one of my statistics classes was taught by Prof. Jerry Hausman (of the Hausman test). In every class Prof. Hausman would at some point reach a result and then exclaim “and this proves that life is unfair” (usually it was that your statistical test had less power than you would have hoped for). Reading Nick Bilton’s Twitter story in the NY Times Sunday magazine reminded of that. I read it not because I expected to find something new but because it is always fun to see an event described...

I already hinted at this topic in my last Tech Tuesday, when I wrote about having a healthy mix of young and more experienced engineers. More generally, diversity in engineering teams (and teams more generally) tends to be a healthy thing. Diversity helps prevent group think and provides for a better match with the wide variety of tasks that come up in the live of a startup engineering team. In the extreme if all you have are say realtime systems engineers your UI/UX is likely to be atrocious...

I already hinted at this topic in my last Tech Tuesday, when I wrote about having a healthy mix of young and more experienced engineers. More generally, diversity in engineering teams (and teams more generally) tends to be a healthy thing. Diversity helps prevent group think and provides for a better match with the wide variety of tasks that come up in the live of a startup engineering team. In the extreme if all you have are say realtime systems engineers your UI/UX is likely to be atrocious...

It’s been a while since I have written a post in my Scylla and Charybdis series. As a quick refresher, the basic premise of the series is that startups are hard because on pretty much anything you can do too much or too little and the path to success thus requires navigating a narrow straight with deadly obstacles on both sides. Today’s post is about listening. As an entrepreneur you can do too much or too little listening. How can you do too much listening you may ask? Well, by listening her...

It’s been a while since I have written a post in my Scylla and Charybdis series. As a quick refresher, the basic premise of the series is that startups are hard because on pretty much anything you can do too much or too little and the path to success thus requires navigating a narrow straight with deadly obstacles on both sides. Today’s post is about listening. As an entrepreneur you can do too much or too little listening. How can you do too much listening you may ask? Well, by listening her...

Later today I am giving a talk titled the “ABC of Startup Recruiting” as part of a speaker series that Susan is putting together for Ziggeo. This is the first time I am giving this talk and I am quite excited about it as this is such a critical topic for startups. The opening slide is a picture of Alec Baldwin from Glengarry Glenn Ross in the famous “Always Be Closing” scene. For startups and hiring the ABC instead stands for “Always Be Collecting Candidates.” I have found that the best entre...

Later today I am giving a talk titled the “ABC of Startup Recruiting” as part of a speaker series that Susan is putting together for Ziggeo. This is the first time I am giving this talk and I am quite excited about it as this is such a critical topic for startups. The opening slide is a picture of Alec Baldwin from Glengarry Glenn Ross in the famous “Always Be Closing” scene. For startups and hiring the ABC instead stands for “Always Be Collecting Candidates.” I have found that the best entre...

Today’s Tech Tuesday is a relatively short note on the “Bleeding Edge” – technologies that are even beyond the cutting edge. Every technology tends to start life at the bleeding edge with early releases that are unstable and poorly tested, many different ways of doing something (instead of an agreed upon best way) and with upgrades that are not backward compatible. It is tempting for startups to embrace bleeding edge technology for several reasons: first, you are starting from scratch, so why...

Today’s Tech Tuesday is a relatively short note on the “Bleeding Edge” – technologies that are even beyond the cutting edge. Every technology tends to start life at the bleeding edge with early releases that are unstable and poorly tested, many different ways of doing something (instead of an agreed upon best way) and with upgrades that are not backward compatible. It is tempting for startups to embrace bleeding edge technology for several reasons: first, you are starting from scratch, so why...

The last two Tech Tuesdays were about common blindspots for all engineering founding teams (marketing, sales) and ditto for all business founding teams (technology). In the comments Brandon asked “how many designer led companies have these problems”? The short answer is “it depends”! What does it depend on? What you mean by “designer.” If by designer you mean someone who is in love with a pretty surface (UI) then I have actually seen both failure modes – failure to deliver the actual product ...

The last two Tech Tuesdays were about common blindspots for all engineering founding teams (marketing, sales) and ditto for all business founding teams (technology). In the comments Brandon asked “how many designer led companies have these problems”? The short answer is “it depends”! What does it depend on? What you mean by “designer.” If by designer you mean someone who is in love with a pretty surface (UI) then I have actually seen both failure modes – failure to deliver the actual product ...

Last Tech Tuesday I wrote about how engineering led companies sometimes underrate the importance of marketing and sales. One of the comments on Twitter pointed out that the converse is also often true and I replied that I will write a post about that, so here it goes. Many companies founded by a pure business team tend to struggle with technology and fail to deliver the products or services they envision. There are at least three distinct failure modes that I have seen here over time. The fir...

Last Tech Tuesday I wrote about how engineering led companies sometimes underrate the importance of marketing and sales. One of the comments on Twitter pointed out that the converse is also often true and I replied that I will write a post about that, so here it goes. Many companies founded by a pure business team tend to struggle with technology and fail to deliver the products or services they envision. There are at least three distinct failure modes that I have seen here over time. The fir...