Brevity has never been my strong suit. Witness this morning’s PE Week Wire (an excellent daily newsletter for those with an interest in Private Equity and Venture Capital): Alexander Haislip offers a single sentence that delivers the same message as my recent post on the same topic, but in just 25 words: Good companies, they continue…
Q: Hi Chris, I’ve randomly become an occasional reader of your blog, and I’m starting to get addicted. I remember that you were interested in questions…I read your last post about the founder feeling, where you said… “It also unlocks previously unknown reserves of energy, a “fight or flight” response that fuels the creative effort continue…
Thanks to my friend Robin (via Google Reader’s new Share with Friends feature) for pointing me to this post from Evan Williams on the Theory of Constraints. Reading it, I had a simultaneous flashback to my b-school Intro to Operations class, and to a great meeting I had with a very exciting pre-release Web startup continue…
I just got off the phone with another young entrepreneur who’s in the process of starting a new “social reviews” site for local restaurants. I tried hard not to be a complete wet blanket, but I have so many knives in my back from my Judy’s Book experience it was hard not to pull a continue…
I have my friend Sree to thank for introducing me to the writings of Warren Buffet’s longtime investment partner, Charlie Munger. In his excellent book of investment (and other) advice, Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Munger offers 10 rules for investment success, one of which has been on my mind lately. Rule number 1: Measure Risk, includes continue…
I love my BlackBerry and I love Google’s suite of productivity and communications apps, but until recently I’ve had to rely on apps I don’t love at all (like Microsoft Outlook and BlackBerry’s own desktop sync) to make the two play nicely together. It was a great day when Google released Gmail for the BlackBerry, continue…
Lots of ink gets spilled on the mechanics of starting a business (I guess readers and search engines both love “how to” content), but I haven’t come across many accounts of the emotional experience of starting up that feel true or accurate to me. (Marc Andreesen has one of the better posts on the subject, continue…
In his excellent series of blog posts on building and managing technology startups, Marc Andreesen advances (with an oblique credit to Benchmark’s Andy Rachleff) the idea of “product/market fit” as the foundation of startup success. In his view, achieving product/market fit is the only thing that matters to a startup, trumping all other factors like continue…
I still buy CDs. Not that I actually play them – they get ripped to my hard drive and put on a shelf never to be touched again – but because I never got comfortable with stealing music and I don’t like paying for DRM-restricted tracks. (I’m excited about Amazon’s new DRM-free MP3 store but continue…
I spent a bunch of time today (between coughing fits) building screenshots for an application prototype I’m working on. Whenever I try this, I’m reminded how hard it is to build a usable application, no matter how simple it seems at the outset. I don’t claim any great gifts at the discipline, but whenever I continue…