The Big, Slow Company Stereotype
The playbook for “startup disruption” has remained the same for a while: the small startup moves faster than its much larger competitor, hustling out new features, products and markets at a much higher clip. Raw...
Startups
The Risk of Failure
Silicon Valley is often derided as a place that non-ironically accepts and celebrates failure. For people who have not bought into this culture, it’s natural to make fun of the notion that people are failing their way to success, and be cynical of the effectiveness of the sheer amount of capital spent. As the...
Hatching Twitter
One of my guilty reading pleasures is tech company biographies. That I'm a part of the industry and can relate to the motivations of founders and early employees is a given; I'...
The Distorted Numbers of Company Founders
This article came across my Twitter feed today. It talks about how as a founder, one of the nice side benefits of success is being able to reward those loyal and faithful employees with equity that turns into real cash. It's a happy story for everybody involved: employees win, executives and high-level managers...
Assuming Everybody Else Sucked
The year was 2010. We were searching for the next big Facebook app, high off our previous successes. This was when Facebook just released the News Feed, and everything from cute icons to animated fake pets made millions from ad impressions and virtual pet food. People were beginning to understand what "viral" meant...
Placing a Real Value on your Time
Most of the people reading this blog are workers whose skills and experience are in demand; we'd all like to think that our time has real value, and that someone using it ought to be paying to use that time. Of course, outside of work, that's a much harder argument to...