Entrepreneurship

Crabgrass Theory of Tech Startups

June 14, 2012

I’m fascinated by Fred Wilson’s recent post he called The Darwinian Evolution of Startup Hubs, on his AVC blog from late last month. This is so much like my own sense of how it was, beginning with the first semiconductor companies appearing in what was then called the Santa Clara Valley in the 1950s. I was in [...]

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How Stop Signs Illustrate Decision Making

June 8, 2012

Remember when you were a kid, learning to drive, and they taught you that a stop sign requires a full stop? And a full stop means that you can actually feel the car settle back when it does? I’ve come to realize that, for me at least, decision making reminds me of the need for [...]

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Don’t Expect Truth When You Ask an Entrepreneur

June 5, 2012

I enjoyed this thoroughly and I’ve been meaning to post about since Scott Shane first posted Entrepreneurs’ Job Creation: Expectations Versus Reality on Small Business Trends last March. His chart, shown here below, compares what entrepreneurs said were their hiring expectations to the actual hiring:  You can read the details on Scott’s post. I don’t really care [...]

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Give People Value and You Should Succeed

June 1, 2012

Russ Capper of the BusinessMakers show interviewed me three weeks ago for a 20-minute segment on that show. In this snippet be focus in on one two-minute piece of that that he calls “the BusinessMakers Classic Minute. It comes down to two points: First, the myth of persistence. Persistence doesn’t make a business succeed. It’s [...]

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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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7 Bad Habits That Aren’t, plus a Great Title That Is

April 24, 2012

Here’s a great title: The 7 Bad Habits of Insanely Productive People. That was on copyblogger last week, posted by Sonia Simone, one of the nicest plays on contradiction and irony I’ve seen a while. There’s some real truth here, but hidden in paradox, and a lot of humor too. Who wants bad habits? You have to [...]

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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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What Business For You? Look in the Mirror. Two Good Posts.

March 27, 2012

I’ve always said that what business is right for you depends not on the market, or what’s hot, but on who you are. So look in the mirror. Today I stumbled on two excellent blog posts that put this in good perspective. First, What Kind of Startup is Right for You, a post by Nellie Akalp [...]

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True Story: Begin With a Job at a Startup, Then Start Your Own

March 8, 2012

The title of this post is taken from Martin Zwilling’s Begin With a Job at a Startup, Then Start Your Own on the Gust blog. In that post, Martin starts with this: For those of you who want to get in on the ground floor of a new venture, but haven’t yet worked up the nerve [...]

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