Y Combinator’s Sam Altman has put together a “playbook” of the advice and insight commonly shared with founders of the startups they fund. You can view it in HTML and epub here and listen to it online here (but not,…
Category: Starting Out
Of course, efficiency is a virtue. Waste is… wasteful, makes everyone worse at their jobs, and reduces the number of possibilities open to you and your team. Knowing where it goes Good financial management is essential for this, of course:…
“What am I hoping to get?” Once we’ve admitted to ourselves that we’re doing our work (at least partly) for ourselves, we can think more clearly about our motives by asking “What am I hoping to get from doing this?”…
If you’re not familiar with Steve Blank, start here: The Principles of Lean “No business plan survives first contact with customers.” On Acting on Customer Discovery If you’re going to go out and discover whether customers like your idea or…
I’m horrified to discover that I haven’t posted anything much focusing on Steve Blank’s work on Startups, customer discovery and iteration. His definition of a startup is a great place to start: A startup is a temporary organization formed to…
Clayton Christensen’s The Innovators Dilemma is a business classic, providing a framework for understanding how technological or business model innovations (or more usually, both) allow new businesses to gain a foothold in markets or to create new ones. It’s been…
… isn’t an innovation yet. Our definition of innovation refers to something rather specific: A change in the processes by which an organization transforms labor, capital, materials and information into products and services of greater value. Clayton Christensen, Efosa Ojomo…
The most important thing to remember now a simple sentence: “It’s not for you.” … So you run an Indian restaurant on 6th Street in New York and you have a $24 spicy vindaloo, if you finish it you get…
Some types of work that leaders do: Foundational and Directional Work This is the vision and values stuff – identifying needs, thinking through the “why” of the project, articulating its importance and sharing the vision and values with those both…
Running is unpleasant until you get fit. Swimming is the struggle to avoid drowning, until you can swim. Writing of any kind can be a horrible sort of trudge through fog until you’ve done it enough to trust the process…