Passion Vs Skill

One piece of advice you hear over and over again is to “follow your passion” and all will be good. As much I believe this to be true — it is also (sometimes) a false promise.

Recently I spoke with an entrepreneurs who was deeply passionate about a specific problem in the…

Sales Before Marketing

Most of us (yours truly included) love to market our stuff. We love to think about our brand, the design, the logo, the name, the story we want our products and company to tell, the way we engage and delight our customers along their journey.

Being The First-Mover (Typically) Sucks

One of the common held believes about building your company and you hear repeated over and over again is: Being the first in a market gives you the “first mover advantage”.

Neediness Kills Deals

The worst thing an entrepreneur can do (particularly when raising funds) is to appear needy. The moment someone appears desperate, he triggers our prehistoric “fight or flight” instinct and any investor will just turn away from the deal.

Time Is Precious

The last couple of days I had an incident which made me think about the wise words of my friend Rick Schmitz, who keeps asking himself and those around him:

“There is a finite amount of heartbeats you have left. What do you want to use them for?”

HAVES and WANTS

Today, in a meeting with the leadership team of a nonprofit organization, I ran the participants through an exercise to get to product/market fit:

We started out with listing the HAVES of the organization on a whiteboard. The “haves” are all the assets an organization has —…

Do at Least One Thing a Day

My most frustrating days, are the ones where I don’t get anything done. Maybe I sat in meetings all day long, maybe I had to fight fires or maybe I just had a shitty day.

There is little more frustrating and dissatisfying for me, than going to bed…

What and How to Measure

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the magic metrics you monitor obsessively to determine if your company is on the right track or not. Setting up the right set of numbers to track, sometimes feels equal parts science and mystery. It’s easy to track the wrong things and send your…

Rising to the Top of the Stack

In programming there is the concept of “the stack”. The stack makes up all the pieces forming your technology. Starting from the operating system to the applications which run and execute your code, the databases, web servers and so on.