Daniel Bishop
Jul 25, 2017 · 2 min read

Thoughtful. I appreciate the effort you’re putting into spurring improvement. As an entrepreneur and former EV, I can relate.

I’ve run healthcare startup events for many years before seeing them lose energy as I and others gave them up to focus on my startup fully.

I’ve loved being part of the Pittsburgh community with my startup for many years but now have made the decision to spend more time outside Pittsburgh.

A couple startup concepts that have been part of our own startup’s recent iteration come to mind as applicable:

  1. Scaling at the right time — in startups, scaling too fast before product-market fit can feel like amazing progress. New users, new meetings, new hires, etc. feels great but you often pay the price of promises, initiatives, customers, etc. that don’t have a solid customer/problem/solution as its foundation and don’t result in a viable business. Furthermore, instead of spending time finding PMF, time is spent managing the extraneous. Pittsburgh feels like its scaled beyond what it’s startup ecosystem core can vibrantly support. What would it look like to make sure we’re focusing more time on improving that core over the extraneous?
  2. Focus on doing less things, better — in startups, there’s always more good ideas than time. Saying yes to too many customer segments, features, channels, etc. at once is a great recipe for a huge collection of mediocrity instead of a few really great things. For our startup to get clarity on what to say no to, we had to decide what we were going to be great at and then simply say “No” a whole lot more. Right now, it’s not clear to me what the Pittsburgh ecosystem is focused on being great at. If we could focus everyone on doing less things better, what focus fits our strengths? What would have the greatest impact?

    Daniel Bishop

    Written by

    Healthcare improvement nerd & home cook