Ross Mayfield
CEO and co-founder of Pingpad, making social productivity as instant, simple and social as messaging. Previously VP at SlideShare (acquired by LinkedIn), Co-Founder, CEO at Socialtext (the enterprise social software pioneer) and RateXchange (a B2B bandwidth exchange)
Focus is the Startup Advantage
Photo by Stefan Cosma on Unsplash The single greatest competitive advantage a startup has is it’s focus. It’s what you must do. It’s how you can survive and advance. It’s where you find differentiation. It’s why you can slay big dragons. Here’s some key considerations for finding your Startup Focus and putting it to work. The […]
Slack and Pingpad gives you Tasks and Decisions like Atlassian Stride, and more
The enterprise messaging war is well underway. First Slack and Atlassian Hipchat battled it out, with Slack reaching escape velocity. Then came major entrants Microsoft Teams, Cisco Spark and Facebook Workplace. My bet is Slack will continue it’s unprecedented growth, grow it’s ecosystem and be favored by best-of-breed shops for text, voice and video conversations. […]
Practices for Effective Distributed Teams
Alignment isn’t a wing formation (photo credit iStock by Getty Images) I’ve worked with distributed teams with my last three startups. I find that with the right practices distributed teams can be more efficient and effective, so long as you over-invest in certain things to make up for distance. To share best practices, I’d like to […]
Content Marketing Isn’t Marketing Content
Here’s a summary of a short talk on Content Marketing I gave at Demandfest, a practitioner-to-practitioner event for marketers. In today’s SaaS market, one thing stands out, nothing. There is too much noise. Standing out and engaging customers is harder than ever. And there are too many spammy approaches that hurt the brand and drain […]
What I’m doing about the Tech Backlash
This week I posted The Coming Tech Backlash, on how my industry is due for a reckoning with the job destruction caused by automation. The article struck a big chord. A question to ask is: what can I do about it? As a small startup founding CEO, here’s my answer. I signed an entrepreneur pledge […]
The Coming Tech Backlash
Tech innovation is killing jobs, not foreign scapegoats, and revolt after Trump will be Luddite The tech industry played an influential role in the outcome of the US Presidential election. Not just in providing the medium for Fake News and propaganda. The root cause is job destruction by Automation — that drove a base of dissatisfied […]
Facebook Can Address Fake News and Raise Media Literacy
Many Americans get their news through Facebook, some of it is fake, and it has influenced the outcome of the Presidential election. Fake is more popular than real. The motive of fake news is disinformation or profit, and realistically both. Much has been written about how this happened and what it means. Real news will […]
A lesson on how not to innovate
Great post on entrepreneur lessons learned by Tod Sacerdoti of BrightRoll. And I completely agree with the lesson “Don’t Innovate.” Perhaps it’s in our blood as entrepreneurs to see a problem we have to solve and try to experiment with it. Let me share a big mistake I made. In short, only innovate when you […]
“Practices for Effective Distributed Teams” in Social Productivity
Practices for Effective Distributed Teams I’ve worked with distributed teams with my last three startups. I find that with the right practices distributed teams can be more efficient and effective, so long as you over-invest in certain things to make up for distance. To share best practices, I’d like to begin by exploring how time and […]
Unicorrection
We’ve had a correction in Unicorn financing that has trickled throughout venture capital. A lot of people lost jobs, opportunity and wealth. You could say this began with the creation of a the secondary market for private equity, and the dust on Chris Sacca’s spurs. But the correction began with Fidelity’s very public markdown […]
