Tag: startups
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Maybe You’re Just Not Lucky
I just finished reading Fooled By Randomness, by Nassim Taleb. I loved the book, and if you’re interested in financial markets, behavioral finance, probabilities and statistics I think you’ll really enjoy it. Check it out if you haven’t already. Nassim has a section that talks about survivor bias and it got me thinking about how…
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Managing Startups: Objective-Key-Results (OKRs)
Having spent the past year working with and incredible team on a product I love, I thought I’d share a management tool that we adopted from Google called Objective-Key-Results (OKRs). OKRs are a quarterly panning tool that help you and your team focus priorities and align around a common set of objectives. Before I lay…
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Hustle
I spent yesterday morning at the DreamIt Ventures demo day and had a few takeaways. First, I was reminded that good accelerators are a near-perfect vehicle for early stage companies to get a punch of exposure to investors, and also get the added benefit of refining their stories down to a concise package. I’m optimistic…
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Focus (a.k.a. f(success) = M * (runway / burn rate) )
Of all the characteristics and skills we consider when assessing the quality of a given entrepreneurial team, the ability to focus on the right things is probably the most critical. Any given early stage startup probability of success can be expressed as the relationship between a key problem-solving milestone, the cost of taking a shot at hitting…
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Rethinking the Tip Jar
I picked up some coffee the other day at Birch Coffee near our offices and encountered this tip jar (yes, I tipped for LOTR): Aside from this being a creative way to ask for tips, I am willing to bet that this tactic is more effective than a standard tip jar. Instead of asking explicitly…
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Joining the team at K2
I’m very excited to announce that I’ll be joining the team at K2 Media Labs on a full-time basis in the coming weeks. K2 is an early stage private equity fund that invests in startups focused on the connected consumer. The Company is a bit of a hybrid, in that it makes early-stage investments and also…
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Connecting the Dots
A couple weeks ago when Steve Jobs announced his retirement, I did a little research to try to sum up my takeaways from his success. One of his stories was about taking a calligraphy class in college, and how that class gave him enough knowledge in the subject to create font sets in the first Apple…
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Five Things I Learned From Steve Jobs
On the heels of Steve Jobs’ announcement that he’s retiring from Apple (okay, I’m a little late for the heels, but there was a pseudo-hurricane), I thought I’d reflect on the top five things I take from the single greatest entrepreneur in the history of consumer technology. 1. Know Your Customer: When you start a…
Hi, my name is Christian. 