How to write great/awful tech press releases: Satire
If you’re running a startup and wondering how those PR people do their magic, read on. (If you work for these firms, click away now.) I checked in with my colleagues over at Blithering Media (my sub rosa PR firm). They shared their best/worst practices with me. Here goes: So, suppose you’ve got a new [...]
The Case for Collaboration
There is an interesting article in the New York Times this morning that I hope lots of people read — that means you Mr. Benioff. It’s a tale of a shoemaker’s kids going barefoot. It seems that Yahoo, trying to breathe life back into a sclerotic organization, has cancelled its work from home policy and [...]
Is Silicon Valley Worth the Cost for Tech Startups and Bootstrappers?
There’s always some article or other in the blogosphere rambling on about why XYZ will be the next Silicon Valley–they’re quite popular. I just read an interesting piece that has some clues about the true costs of living here (yes, I live at least near SV and have worked most of my career in SV). [...]
A Solo Bootstrapping Odyssey: 2012 Was The Year I Quit My Day Job
For those who like Bootstrapping Case Studies, here is mine. 2012 was the year I moved on from a Day Job and started doing my Bootstrapped Company CNCCookbook full-time. I’m not the first to do so, and certainly not the last, but I thought I’d provide a historical background and then some data on CNCCookbook in 2012 [...]
Most Hiring and Investment Decisions are Terrible Due to Pattern Matching
One often hears venture capitalists refer to their decision making process as “pattern matching“. This reference to machine learning (and a fuzzy match really ought to be pattern recognition, but hey, the techies aren’t using this language so much) is intended to sound smart. One envisions coupling years of hard-earned experienced with the biggest neural [...]
Enterprise Headlines and Highlights, 2012-06-15
Highlights of enterprise software and solutions news from the past two weeks. Acquisitions, lawsuits, IT failures, Oracle’s cloud announcements (yawn!), some humor, and and Larry joins the twitterverse @larryellison (but still just one tweet!). Yammer Agrees to Sell Itself to Microsoft Business-software company Yammer Inc. agreed to sell itself to Microsoft Corp. for $1.2 billion, [...]
Memorial Day, Emergency Room Doctors, Minimum Viable, Pivoting, and More
Memorial Day has me reflecting on various things I’ve read or thought about recently. I know there have been wars and fallen since, but I always think of World War II and the Greatest Generation when I think of Memorial Day. The Greatest Generation is a term Tom Brokaw coined that refers to that generation [...]
Canada’s Next Five Years
1997-2012: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. 2012-2020: Optimism, Opportunity, Execution. I’ve been bullish for a while now, it’s no secret. It was 5 years ago that I was writing off VC in Canada and explaining how startups needed to step up to create an environment to bring them back. And like a bowl of Sea Monkeys, the [...]
How Pinterest Became What Flickr Failed To
Like a lot of people I have been fascinated by the explosive growth that Pinterest has experienced. At first curiosity, Pinterest is now a full blown phenomena that has jumped from women planning their weddings, or wishing they were planning a wedding, and foodies to mainstream consciousness. Businesses are openly embracing Pinterest and media organizations [...]
Facebook IPO Lessons
Like most people, I had the opportunity to review Facebook’s IPO filing yesterday and admit that, like Apple’s recent earnings announcement, this is pretty damn impressive. Here are a couple of lessons worth reinforcing: 1) People’s view of what is normal and acceptable in emergent online activities is constantly evolving. What Facebook deserves a lot [...]
