April 2011
25 posts
10 tips on choosing your investors
A number of 1st time entrepreneurs have come to me recently asking for advice on choosing their investors.
Here’s my quick and dirty guide to choosing your investors:
Choose investors you want to work with. From my experience this is much more important than choosing based on valuation. Trust me, once you are within a few percentage points on the valuation, you will do better to choose...
“You’ve either started a company or you haven’t. ”Started” doesn’t mean joining...”
– cdixon.org – chris dixon’s blog / There are two kinds of people in the world
“Good competitors challenge you, and force you to think hard about your business....”
– Do not be afraid of your competitors - Josh’s Lessons in Entrepreneurship
Giant Fortune Cookie Scarf →
The Four Legs of Job Satisfaction →
How to get a job at a startup if you aren’t a... →
Drop Out
Entrepreneurs take risks.
They see an opportunity and they jump at it.
They are willing to stop what they are doing and “drop out” to pursue their dreams.
Here are 4 examples of how I dropped out in my career to pursue my own startup dreams.
One thing that very few people know about me is that I dropped out of school twice.
The first time I caught the startup bug was in 1991. I...
Behind the Scenes at Fab.com →
We wanted to take a few minutes to give you a behind the scenes account of what we’re up to here at Fab.com. Our hope is that this sort of transparency will give you a little more insight into who we are, what we’re all about, how we think, and how we do things around here.
Giving your startup a point of view →
Do you have a point of view for your startup?
Which Comes First: The Person or the Job?
Working at a startup is all about having the right people on the bus in the right seats.
But what do you do when the right person lands in your lap but you don’t have a role for them?
Or, what do you do when the person you hired for a specific job comes to you and says he or she wants to do something else?
This past week I faced this sort of situation with a new employee. I thought...
“whether you are at a small start up or a large organization, whether you are a...”
– Why We Need Storytellers at the Heart of Product Development | UX Magazine
Why We Need Storytellers at the Heart of Product... →
Far too often, teams focus on execution before defining the product opportunity and unique value proposition. The result is a familiar set of symptoms including scope creep, missed deadlines, overspent budgets, frustrated teams and, ultimately, confused users. The root cause of these symptoms is the fact that execution focuses on the how and what of a product. But in a world where consumers are...
Startup Office Hours?
A fellow startup CEO recently posed the question:
What do you do for office hours at your company? Do you enforce a strict time expectation for people to be in the office? Is it 9 to 5? Is it 10 to 6? What about work from home vs. in the office? How about vacation days? Do you count days off? What’s best for startups in this regards?
Here’s my take on office hours:
...
Getting Social and Getting Big Fast
Here at Fab.com we are pursuing a specific strategy to really put the social into social commerce and to use such social features to foster a community of enthusiasts and get as big as possible as fast as possible before launching the sales on our site.
For those of you who are not familiar with what we’re up to at Fab.com, we’re gearing up to launch a new form of flash sales site...
“Elements of Sustainable Companies”
– Writing a business plan - How to write a business plan - Submit a business plan - Sequoia Capital
“stop talking. start building.”
– me
Before You Blame Your Employee, Ask Yourself Some... →
Google Told You So. →
This is the deal. We know that search engines want to provide sites that people (aka audiences) find valuable. We know that they use signals like social mentions and influence, and clickthroughs from search, and potentially dozens of other buzz-measuring indicators that go into determining if a site is something that people are really into or just some shallow content hanging around the web trying...
Gearing up to ship some code this week...
Love that.
Hopefully you’ll love it too.
How To Run A Company That Engineers Actually Want... →
What Lucky People Do Different →
“Just remember, you’re not entitled to anything. Hustle for everything you’re...”
– Love of the Game: Be foolish enough to believe your startup will make it. | The Startup Foundry
13 Things You Must Do Every Week As A Startup CEO
Being the CEO of a startup is a hard and complex job. Here’s my quick list of the 13 things every startup CEO should make sure to do each week:
Remember your One Thing. Your startup can only do one thing well at a time. Know Your One Thing. Write it on the wall. Repeat it every day. Put it at the top of every regular company-wide communication. Don’t let anything distract you...
Instagram: A Post-Facebook Social Network?
There’s a lot of things I love about Instagram. It makes every photo a piece of art. It makes it really easy to get a visual glimpse into peoples’ lives. It is beautifully simplistic: Browse peoples’ photos without getting lost in the other bullshit they post. (i.e. tweets, status updates, links, etc.).
What impresses me most about Instagram though is how it supersets my...
