Contracts are necessary to doing business but surprisingly many people miss a central point about them: they define the starting point for future negotiations. Where you actually wind up as an outcome depends on both the contract and external factors that determine your bargaining power. Let me illustrate what I mean by that by looking at a rental contract (lease) for an office. Suppose you have signed a three year office lease and two years into it you have to leave. The lease says that you ...

Contracts are necessary to doing business but surprisingly many people miss a central point about them: they define the starting point for future negotiations. Where you actually wind up as an outcome depends on both the contract and external factors that determine your bargaining power. Let me illustrate what I mean by that by looking at a rental contract (lease) for an office. Suppose you have signed a three year office lease and two years into it you have to leave. The lease says that you ...

One of the questions asked by a Tech Tuesday reader was about using multiple different programming languages for different parts of a site. Back in the early days of the web that wasn’t really an issue because you would write the page generation in something like Perl or TCL and that was all there was. Well, not really because even then you had to know HTML but of course early HTML was so minimal that it didn’t really matter much. Well along came more HTML, CSS and most importantly Javascript...

One of the questions asked by a Tech Tuesday reader was about using multiple different programming languages for different parts of a site. Back in the early days of the web that wasn’t really an issue because you would write the page generation in something like Perl or TCL and that was all there was. Well, not really because even then you had to know HTML but of course early HTML was so minimal that it didn’t really matter much. Well along came more HTML, CSS and most importantly Javascript...

I still have quite a few great topics suggested by readers to work off for my Tech Tuesday series on technology in startups. But today I want to take on a different issue because it has been on my mind. I have now been programming computers in one way or another for over thirty years (yikes) and have seen a lot of technologies come and go during that period. So when something new comes along I tend to think of the great French saying: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (the more thing...

I still have quite a few great topics suggested by readers to work off for my Tech Tuesday series on technology in startups. But today I want to take on a different issue because it has been on my mind. I have now been programming computers in one way or another for over thirty years (yikes) and have seen a lot of technologies come and go during that period. So when something new comes along I tend to think of the great French saying: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (the more thing...

The topic fo today’s Tech Tuesday is one that every startup I have ever seen struggles with: what to do about technical debt. First off, what is technical debt? The Wikipedia page explains it as “the eventual consequences of poor or evolving software architecture and software development” which result in more effort for subsequent work.This is actually quite good because it makes clear that technical debt doesn’t just result from mistakes (the “poor” part) but also from “evolving.” And as you...

The topic fo today’s Tech Tuesday is one that every startup I have ever seen struggles with: what to do about technical debt. First off, what is technical debt? The Wikipedia page explains it as “the eventual consequences of poor or evolving software architecture and software development” which result in more effort for subsequent work.This is actually quite good because it makes clear that technical debt doesn’t just result from mistakes (the “poor” part) but also from “evolving.” And as you...

At the height of the re-engineering craze there was one fantastic HBR article titled “Re-engineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.” In light of the changes in the labor market the choice of “obliterate” may now seem unfortunate, but the basic point of the article was spot on: don’t implement your existing processes in technology, come up with entirely new ones that simply weren’t possible before. Much the same applies to building net native businesses. It is not about building a smoother ...

At the height of the re-engineering craze there was one fantastic HBR article titled “Re-engineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.” In light of the changes in the labor market the choice of “obliterate” may now seem unfortunate, but the basic point of the article was spot on: don’t implement your existing processes in technology, come up with entirely new ones that simply weren’t possible before. Much the same applies to building net native businesses. It is not about building a smoother ...

I have written about prioritization previously on Tech Tuesday, introducing a prioritization heuristic and emphasizing the importance of a healthy mix of different projects. Today I want to add some point on how to think about competition in the context of prioritization. This is particularly important when you are in a somewhat crowded field and need to differentiate yourself from the competition. What features should you prioritize when competing? Go back and take a look at the post on the ...

I have written about prioritization previously on Tech Tuesday, introducing a prioritization heuristic and emphasizing the importance of a healthy mix of different projects. Today I want to add some point on how to think about competition in the context of prioritization. This is particularly important when you are in a somewhat crowded field and need to differentiate yourself from the competition. What features should you prioritize when competing? Go back and take a look at the post on the ...

I have been meaning to write about “internet exceptionalism” since I read a post titled “It Always Comes Down to Math” but various political and economic events intervened. The key quote summarizing the post is “but at the end of the day, regardless of what business you’re in, everything comes down to the same math problem. Revenue minus expenses must equal a positive number.” That is of course not much of an insight although it would have been useful to add something like “from some point fo...

I have been meaning to write about “internet exceptionalism” since I read a post titled “It Always Comes Down to Math” but various political and economic events intervened. The key quote summarizing the post is “but at the end of the day, regardless of what business you’re in, everything comes down to the same math problem. Revenue minus expenses must equal a positive number.” That is of course not much of an insight although it would have been useful to add something like “from some point fo...

For startups, backup is a lot like security, something you need to have but not something that’s really visible to endusers or that endusers even care about unless of course things go terribly wrong! So in today’s Tech Tuesday I want to talk a bit about backup and will follow up with a broader disaster recovery post. It used to be not uncommon to encounter super early stage companies that quite literally have no backup strategy whatsoever. It simply didn’t make the cut with everything else th...

For startups, backup is a lot like security, something you need to have but not something that’s really visible to endusers or that endusers even care about unless of course things go terribly wrong! So in today’s Tech Tuesday I want to talk a bit about backup and will follow up with a broader disaster recovery post. It used to be not uncommon to encounter super early stage companies that quite literally have no backup strategy whatsoever. It simply didn’t make the cut with everything else th...

Several of the past Tech Tuesdays have been about topics that often get short shrift in startups, including security, backup and disaster recovery planning. Today I want to write about another topic in that annoying-but-needs-some-attention category: documentation. One of my very first experiences in commercial software development had me working as a 17-year old in a small software company in my hometown in Germany. The project they dumped into my lap was to port an accounting system from an...

Several of the past Tech Tuesdays have been about topics that often get short shrift in startups, including security, backup and disaster recovery planning. Today I want to write about another topic in that annoying-but-needs-some-attention category: documentation. One of my very first experiences in commercial software development had me working as a 17-year old in a small software company in my hometown in Germany. The project they dumped into my lap was to port an accounting system from an...