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3 Essential Truths About Startups and Investment

May 11, 2012

Today I’m answering, with this post, a lot of similar questions I get often in email, where somebody is asking me how to get connected to or hooked up with or recommended properly for angel investment. Here are some unpleasant and unpopular facts about startups and investment. Only friends and family believe in you and [...]

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Thinking of Quitting? Don’t Let Survivor Bias Ruin Your Life

May 1, 2012

You may have missed Alyson Shontell‘s piece asking an answering the question When You Should Quit Being An Entrepreneur? I marked it when it first appeared earlier this year, then left it in the back burner. If you’re an entrepreneur, especially if you’re engaged in a startup and not yet rolling strong and on your own, [...]

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Pricing is Magic. Stranger Every Day

April 25, 2012

Pricing is magic. There are no good algorithms. No best practices. Grab a theory — competitive pricing, value-based pricing, scientific wild-assed guess pricing, you name it — and stick with it. If it works, stick longer. If it doesn’t change it.  Some reflections on pricing:  Yesterday I bought a short story,  off of Amazon.com for [...]

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Oh No! Microbreaks Are Productive, Real Breaks Aren’t

April 23, 2012

What, no coffee break? This feels vaguely like the idea that so-called grazing all day is better than three good meals and nothing else. Clearly, I’m way too old-fashioned. I just discovered that traditional coffee breaks do nothing for productivity.  And I do mean traditional. The idea brought me quickly to this old number, from a [...]

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The Problem With the Myth of Persistence

April 20, 2012

How often do you see successful entrepreneurs, experts, teachers, and various other experts telling would-be or wanna-be startups that starting a business is all about persistence? Too often. It’s a dangerous myth. Why: persistence is only relevant if the rest of it is right. There’s no virtue to persistence when it means running your head [...]

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True Story: Programming, Paradox, and the Pot of Gold

April 18, 2012

Paradox is the spice of life. Maybe. Because life is full of contradictions and other hands. Take this very interesting juxtaposition. Kevin Systrom, founder and CEO of Instagram, just sold it for $! billion to Facebook. And he built the Instagram prototype himself, in his spare time, after teaching himself to code, also in his [...]

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The Joy of Startups, Revisited

March 2, 2012

Getting really into a new startup, when it goes well, is exciting like a clear mountain morning, like a warm spring rain, like falling in love. Cheesy? Sure. But I’m doing it again, and loving it. I’m not just saying what people always say; I’ve been there, and I’m there again right now. If you’re [...]

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Paul Graham: A Company is Defined by the Schleps It Undertakes

January 19, 2012

Paul Graham has posted a(nother) brilliant essay, this one called Schlep Blindness, which is about hackers and startups and “tedious unpleasant tasks” (which he calls schleps, from the Yiddish, and of course popular culture).  Here’s what he says: No one likes schleps, but hackers especially dislike them. Most hackers who start startups wish they could do [...]

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Reflection: 10 Lessons Learned in 22 Years of Successful Bootstrapping

December 28, 2011

(I posted this about two years ago on Small Business Trends. I’m reposting it here today because this is a good time of year for this kind of reflection. And maybe also for not writing a new post. Tim ) Last week a group of students interviewed me, as part of a class project, looking for [...]

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Use Business Lines to Read Warnings in Numbers

September 15, 2011

Are you minding your business? I’ve found through the years of minding my business that most of the important insight in the numbers comes in lines, not dots. I mean that tracking the change in key indicators over time, with lines, is much more valuable than looking at them at any specific point, as a [...]

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