Ask Simple Questions

We all know that whenever we build a product or design a service, we have to talk to our users. Observe. Ask questions. It’s the often the only way to find out what the real pain points and problems are.

Success Requires Courage

When you look at successful businesses — be it one of the tech startup unicorns, a thriving social business or a nonprofit making a dent in the universe, they all have one thing in common:

You Can’t Motivate

Go to any bookstore (yeah, I know — they don’t exist anymore…), browse the management section and you’ll find tons and tons of books talking about how to best motivate your team.

Peter Drucker once said: “We know nothing about motivation. All we can, is write books…

Get Back to First Principles

All too often we get our frame of reference from analogy. We intuitively look for previous examples and model our understanding of the world and the solutions we develop, on this frame.

Let’s All Cut The Bullshit For a Moment

Ask any entrepreneur (particularly here in Silicon Valley) how they are doing and they will smile and give you an enthusiastic “Great!”.

Bullshit.

The Most Important Things About Delegating

On your journey from someone who is doing everything (the jack-of-all-trades entrepreneur working out of her garage) to a leader, one of the most important things you need to learn, is to delegate.

Culture is Strategy

The culture in your startup is truly all-encompassing. From the way you work, to the way you interact with your customers to your brand, marketing… Heck — it even affects your coding style (“Two space indents? Or four space tabs only?”) and certainly influences your people’s energy and…

Breaking Through The Noise

Yesterday we hosted a group of Mexican entrepreneurs at Singularity University. One of the founders asked me, what I believe the most difficult thing to do is for any startup. Without thinking about this all too much I said: “Getting users”.

Why Are You Doing This?

If you would have asked me this question about 20 years ago, when I built my first startup, I surely would have given you a reasonable answer. But if you would have kept asking me: “No, why do you really do this” — I am confident I could not have given you a good response.

Management and Leadership

Much has been written about management and leadership (including here). They are different skills and you need both to succeed. The problem is, that people sometimes think that they are the same. They believe they show leadership when in reality they manage. Or they don’t manage as…