Archive for 2009

In the pursuit of a co-founder it is better to be exclusive than inclusive. Listen to your heart. If something seems off, step back, evaluate, and if necessary, continue to look. I know you need the co-founder. I know he (or she) seems ideal. But it’s like that hot girl (or guy) you just fell…

Here’s why your favourite charity won’t receive a donation from me this year… I receive a lot of email from PR people on a daily basis. Everyday, hundreds of press releases and announcements and who knows what else. All of them clamouring for my attention. All of them unsolicited. I asked for not one of…

If you ever use the line “I just work here”, you have no business in working here.

A lot of people talked about web 2.0. Quite a few people talked about Start-Up 2.0. These “2.0” labels are the great solver of business problems and so we spend far too much time looking for Short-Cut 2.0. I notice nobody is really talking about Hard Work 1.0 very much, perhaps because it isn’t shiny…

You can spend time dwelling on your failure or celebrating your success, but whilst you’re doing that, someone else is moving ahead of you by executing on their idea. Don’t spend too much time lauding the win or lamenting the loss because in that moment, the world changed, and you didn’t.

I often go off, for a couple of minutes, on a tirade of hate and insults against a situation. A few minutes of getting all the toxicity out of my system. And then I either accept that which I cannot change and become Zen-like about it. Or I actively work to change the situation that…

There are many job descriptions that say they want people to deliver brilliant work and take responsibility for their projects. Very few bosses will actually cede the authority to you to take responsibility though.

Recently I was invited to attend as a guest speaker at a Los Angeles regional Science Fiction and Fantasy convention, which I am very pleased to announce I will be attending, as my professional work schedule is finally slackening off enough that I can consider not only doing that, but also posting on this blog…

Here’s an old trick I show people around Halloween. Go to Google and enter “filetype:xls password” as your search term without the quotes. Then giggle inanely at people’s naivety. Try adding “twitter” or “linkedin” or “facebook” or “wordpress” to search expression. And the really scary thing? You might be smart enough to not do this.…

Your customer doesn’t care that one of your vendors has a quality problem. They only perceive that you have a quality problem.

Whenever someone says “it will be good exposure” to me, my default answer to whatever the request was is automatically “no.” No, because if it were good exposure, I would have already figured out that I need to be doing it for myself. P.S. Spec work is evil.

The best talks are given not when you share things you know with an audience who (hopefully**) don’t know about the things you are sharing but when you share observations about those things you know with an audience that begins to ponder and later discuss your observations. **Why would you go to a presentation to…

No really, tell me again how this idea you just so generously let me have for free is going to make me rich again.

The longer the supply chain, to get from raw atoms to physical product in your hands (in the case of a SaaS, from raw bits to a digital product in your browser) the easier it is for a company to wash their hands of a problem. “Oh, that wasn’t our fault, that was a supplier.”…

If the Chief Technology Officer in your organization has not personally and directly solved a deep technical problem in the past six months, I would have to say that it is safe to discount every opinion they have on the best way to do something with technology.

Ever tried to organise a really, REALLY, REALLY messy room? Picture a messy, disorganised, cluttered, upside-down room. No, not that one, messier! Almost there! Messier still! Got it? Okay, now imagine you have to organise it. But, you cannot throw anything out, and there just is not enough space to hold everything even if you…

Difficult conversations, like negotiations, should never be done by email. In-Person > Skype > Phone > Email > SMS. Doing nothing is an option, and sits somewhere between “phone” and “email.”

Over the years, conversations with people have frequently taken the form of: This food tastes awesome. I wish mine tasted as good as this. What’s your secret to making it taste so good? When I search for you online, you show up everywhere. I wish I could be found so readily. What’s your secret to…

Young and inexperienced? No credibility? Want people to take you seriously as an entrepreneur? Focus – get really good at one thing. Networking, software development (in a single stack), raising funds, managing people. That expertise you build will demonstrate to your connections that you can see something through to the end. Don’t make the mistake…

There are few endeavours in life that require you to immediately stop what you are doing, go off and read a couple of pages in a book, browse through Google Groups or search Stackoverflow for a close enough answer and then return to work. And yet, this is what people do all the time. Stuck…