Category: entrepreneurship
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Three Words of Startup Advice
Posted one at a time to his Twitter feed and spread using the #StartupTriplets tag, Dharmesh Shah–founder of HubSpot–has distilled his best startup advice into forty-seven three-word chunks: startup triplets. My favourite ten: Hire generalists early. Hire specialists later. Invest in culture. Encourage diverse thinking. Decide with data. Accept imperfect data. Encourage rational debate. Make…
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What a Non-Programmer Should Do In a Startup
Twenty things a non-programmer should do in a startup; a list compiled by Spencer Fry in response to a question asked on Hacker News: Writing the copy for the website. Mainly keeping the support documents up-to-date. Doing all the business related tasks. Doing all the customer service. Handling all incoming e-mail. Doing all of the…
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Apple, Disney and Pixar: It’s the Products
Written in early 2006 shortly after Disney’s acquisition of Pixar in a $7.4 billion all-stock deal, BusinessWeek looks at the relationship between the Disney and Apple CEOs and where their relationship may lead. Prescient in that it accurately predicted the Apple TV and the iPhone, the article also briefly looks at Jobs and his product-first…
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Entrepreneurial Success Not Correlated to University Prestige
An analysis of the educational backgrounds of tech company founders has shown that an elite education does not provide as much of an advantage as many expect. In fact the results seem to show that where one studies has no correlation to entrepreneurial success, as long as one actually does study. The 628 U.S.-born tech…
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Apple’s Strategy of Rejecting ‘Social Media’
Apple’s ‘rejection’ of the practices pundits “always say you should do to succeed in the Internet economy” isn’t unique, but it does make for interesting reading: Apple doesn’t blog; it doesn’t Tweet; it does little on Facebook; it doesn’t engage with its customer base. It doesn’t ask the “community” for feedback or rapidly iterate based…
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Sugar Ray Robinson and Self-Reliance
In Intelligent Life‘s review of Sweet Thunder, a Sugar Ray Robinson biography, they discuss Sugar Ray’s entrepreneurial spirit and tenacity in keeping control over his own business and brand. Robinson was savvy. He was the first black athlete to own most of the rights to his fights and to negotiate broadcasting deals on radio and…
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Influencing Behaviour Online
Ignoring, for a moment, the rather unsound and outmoded neuroscience propounded in the introduction, these tips for extending influence online and persuading your visitors are worth a few minutes: Show ratings and reviews by other users (for action through social validation). Provide instant gratification and a quick fix. Put the most important action to be…
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Fixed-Schedule Productivity: Fix the Schedule, Don’t Compromise
In a guest post for I Will Teach You To Be Rich, Cal Newport of Study Hacks discusses fixed-schedule productivity: a productivity system whereby you set a schedule of work (and play) between certain hours and stick to it ruthlessly. Tim Ferriss aficionados will note that this system relies on a premise that Ferriss heavily depends…
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Anti-Patterns
I’ve written about design patterns a couple of times in the past, but today I discovered anti-patterns: design patterns that “may be commonly used but [are] ineffective and/or counterproductive in practice”. One of the “key elements present to formally distinguish an actual anti-pattern from a simple bad habit, bad practice, or bad idea”: Some repeated…