Recruiting programmers to your startup

2011-12-29

Here are some things I’ve learned over the years about recruiting programmers* to startups. This is a big topic: many of the points I make…

What jobs are users hiring your product to perform?

2011-12-21

One of Clay Christensen’s favorite concepts is that instead of dividing your customers into segments and asking which features each segment…

Trusting platforms

2011-12-20

In response to my post yesterday about how an internet of people has enabled a new wave of web-based marketplaces, Nick Mango commented…

An internet of people

2011-12-19

Over the past few years, a bunch of web-based marketplaces have gotten popular – Etsy, Kickstarter, AirBnb, to name a few. Many of these…

Forces that affect whether a large company will buy your product (according to Marc Andreessen)

2011-12-14

From Marc Andreessen’s “Moby Dick Theory of Big Companies“: You can count on there being a whole host of impinging forces that will affect…

Later-stage rounds and “setting the bar too high”

2011-12-13

I recently had a number of conversations with CEOs of later-stage startups (generating significant revenue) that went something like this…

Three types of acquisitions

2011-12-10

There are three types of technology acquisitions: - Talent. When the acquirer just wants the team (generally just engineers and sometimes…

Technology and job creation

2011-12-08

In response to my recent post “Making industries ‘garage ready’ for startups“, venture capitalist Jordan Elpern-Waxman made an interesting…

Growth curves of startups

2011-12-07

Pick whatever metric you want for gauging the success of a particular startup: profits, revenues, pageviews, etc. A graph I’d love to see is…

Always have 18 months of cash in the bank

2011-12-06

I was once told by an experienced entrepreneur (I can’t remember who) to always have at least 18 months of cash in the bank. The logic…

Making industries “garage ready” for startups

2011-12-05

One of the most important events in the history of modern computing was the advent of “fabless” (“fabrication-less”) semiconductor companies…

Why is enterprise tech so far behind consumer tech? Because it can be.

2011-12-04

Brian Manning put it nicely in a comment to my post yesterday about enterprise software: In my opinion, enterprise technology is WAY behind…

The enterprise: buyers versus users

2011-12-03

Why does most enterprise technology feel like it is a decade behind consumer technology? For the same reason our health care system is…