“In the end, resistance is futile. Change or die.” Jeff Sutherland Last week I attended a rather productive discussion panel about Film Distribution and where the film industry is and is headed to. I had a lot of fun listening to the similarities between what the panel members were discussing and what happened to...
Paul Marshal created a poster to help us keep the Customer Development principles in the forefront at all times. A startup isn’t a mini-me corporation, it is Temporary Organization Designed to Search for A Repeatable and Scalable Business Model. The one principles that I always like expanding on is to avoid turning passion for...
In his Kauffman Sketchbook “Take the Leap” video clip (at end of post), Noam Wasserman, associate professor at Harvard Business School, perfectly summarizes the three key areas that new founders must carefully analyze prior to taking the leap: People (skills, knowledge, preparation), Market (real need vs. passion), Life Stage (can you afford to do...
Can something so fundamental really be changing? Steven Johnson in an interview for the series How We Will Read Since the last week of 2011, I’ve been learning everything I can about the incredibly fast-pace changes the publishing industry will continue to experience. A couple of projects have enabled me to quickly understand key...
…The odd fact of the $500 million financing round completed just before the company sold for a B. This head scratch was best captured by Alexia Tsotsis in her post on TechCrunch. Mark Suster Like many of you, I’ve been curious about Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and read several posts on the subject (this...
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman points out that “One of the benefits of an optimistic temperament is that it encourages persistence in the face of obstacles,” which is extraordinarily important to anyone involved in startups. However, as several researchers also do, he cautions us against the danger of being overly optimistic: “Most...
Seth Godin, amongst many other successful entrepreneurs turned mentors, teaches us about the importance for startups to set up extremes or edges (i.e. open vs. closed or innovative vs. traditional) while also emphasizing how moving the set poles (extremes) is necessary for moving the masses. No doubt it has worked for both Google and...
Last night, after a delightful evening with new friends, I felt like reading something light, uncomplicated and some how my System 1 (from Thinking, Fast and Slow) concluded this title fit that desire My Experiment to Get Rich From Making Viral Cat Videos. By the second paragraph System 2 awoke to how trivial this...
During the first few months after Hunch was launched, I became fascinated by what their collective intelligence decision-making system could become. Back then it certainly didn’t look like it did by the time eBay acquired it. At that time, I also realized that the ways collective intelligence would evolve was absolutely anybody’s guess. Many...
Over the years, I’ve learned the importance of scratching your own itch and the tremendous value of understanding the pain you are trying to solve with your products. Recently, however, I’ve been noticing that there seems to be a very thin line between that and the danger of falling in love with your “hot...
The abundance of how to books, ebooks and articles on startups can certainly create paralysis by information, particularly because reading them and testing their teachings take a lot of time away from the valuable Just Do It, Learn, and Fix It approach. And no matter how much you read, you might find out that...
“If you can’t laugh at yourself, then how can you laugh at anybody else? I think people see the human side of you when you do that.” Payne Stewart I was in a red-eye and the people around me weren’t amused when out of the blue I busted laughing (they were trying hard to...
There is little doubt that if you follow the advice Noah Kagan gives in this post via Tim Ferriss titled How to Create a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend (Examples: AppSumo, Mint, Chihuahuas), you would have a good startup idea in a weekend, literally. Or you and your team could join any of the many...
Jeff Sutherland has a great intro to his upcoming webinar hosted by SmartBear software. …As we put together the presentation, one of the re-current themes of good Scrum came up. Getting stories ready, and getting things done.We’ve also been working on a new book we’re calling “The Scrum Handbook: Everything You Need To Know...
If you are a developer or member of an IT team, you must have had to rely on tech support forums too many times to remember. Thus, the story I tell you below about a fatal memory error, which to me feels like a comedy of errors (no pun intended), is probably not uncommon...
A possible definition of a successful offspring could be based on a linear progression measure of backwards-static-forward. If the offspring lives its life in a larger, bigger or more expanded manner than its parent, the offspring has moved farther ahead in the progression line, thus has been more successful than its parent. If the...
When I read the headline that a Safari user was suing Google I honestly thought it had to be an Onion parody. But, of course not, reality has to always be more outrageous than fiction. You might have a very strong opinion one way or another with regards to this…uh…this effort to keep one’s...
There is a thought provoking post by Jeff Jarvis that I haven’t been able to shake off my mind since I read it: The temporary, pop-up corporation. In this post, Jeff raises good points that relate to the increasing number of IT incubators-labs and VC-sponsored mentorship across the country, and even to the recent...
There are very few people, dead or alive, who, like Mozart, have achieved an everlasting and transcendent legacy from just using their talents. His music still stands as an archetype of the Classical style, with no sign of that changing any time soon. There are several talented persons who have achieved success in the...
I got this via @tferriss and at 1.02 seconds, this clip needs nothing more to say. Tops any post I could ever write about this subject!!!
Last Saturday I was going to write about Friendship and how we should stop confusing it with connectivity. As we get more saturated, social media users who truly pursue value from connections will become more sophisticated at building noise-blocking gates. And because of that, the the next wave of technology will probably include a focus on...
If a member of your team makes a mistake, how does the rest of the team react? Do all of you dismiss it as just being human and do nothing about it or do you find a way to avoid the mistake being repeated by any of the members? Does your team leader encourage...
The fictionalized Salieri character in the movie Amadeus presents a very enlightening take on mediocrity combined with a sense of grandiosity and poor execution, a combination I call the Salieri Complex.* In the movie, Salieri’ self-perceived mediocrity is best portrayed in the scene where he renounces and denounces God for having given him the...
Whether we seek it or not, we are a permanent and constant target of information from the net, from daily nuances and encounters, and from the organic information generated by our own brain-mind complexity. And we can choose to overuse that information until we become inconsistent people, or eliminate the useless information and focus...
The Big Apple offers more of everything than anyone of us could experience in a lifetime. On Monday Mornings, NYC blogger Gotham Gal brings us reviews of the entrepreneurship spirits of the women she encounters in her path and describes the experiences as an honor to meet so many women who are marking their...
Success, as beauty, is in eye of the beholder. Recently I read a post titled What We Talk About When We’re Dying, and although I thought it would be a depressing post, it wasn’t. It reinforced a belief that it’s in our dying beds where we might truly understand the quality of our success...
One of the greatest value Lean Startup methodology offers is that it forces a startup to pay attention to when the market is telling it that it’s time to pivot: …develop the judgment to know when it’s time to change direction and when it’s time to stay the course. That’s why so many lean...
If you ever listen to an interview with Caterina Fake, the co-founder of Flickr and Hunch, or read one of her posts, you might agree with me that she is an endless fountain of transcendent advice for startups. One of my favorite interviews is one she did with The National Center for Women and Information...
If you’ve ever played a game of maze, whether real structures or digital ones, you probably went thru something like this: 1. Before you started the game you clearly understood that it’s rigged and that there is an exit or price somewhere, you won’t be trapped in the maze forever, 2. The moment...
In logic, consistency (consistent theory) is one that does not contain a contradiction. Thus, in logical terms of consistency, we could say that humans can’t be consistent since contradiction is a natural characteristic of being human. Our ability to change our minds and contradict some previously held belief when new information becomes available is...
The odds are that while playing games as a child you were often in the flow, that irreplaceable mental state where you’re so immersed in the game that the full involvement brings the game to live. Sadly, getting to the flow becomes more difficult as we get older since it is harder to keep...
As a leader or founding member of any project or startup, it is necessary to surround yourself by people talented in their areas of contribution. However, it is indispensable that everyone of them, and you, operate as a single mind capable of carrying on the CoDePPFP regardless of what life throws at you. Without...
Are you aware of the 700+ decisions you make daily? Are you happier when you get to choose for yourself or when others do so? When faced with choosing to join the masses and adapt a newly released product, do you jump in and just get it or do you wait? Are you an...
In physics a Reflection is the change in direction of a wavefront at an interface between two different media so that the wavefront returns into the medium from which it originated… Last year I saw a bad Tim Robbin’s movie whose only redeeming quality was a line said by a woman to a man...
