Entrepreneurship

Chris Dixon had an important post over the weekend title The Idea Maze . He starts off with a very strong juxtaposition of thoughts around the importance of “the idea” to a startup. Ideas_Matter: The pop culture view of startups is that they’re all about coming up with a great product idea. ~Ideas_Matter: In response to this pop culture misconception, it has become popular in the startup community to say things like “execution is everything” and “ideas don’t matter”. ...

Following is a guest post by Zack Rosen , co-founder and CEO of Pantheon . Pantheon is building “A big badass platform that will run 30% of the Internet.” They are making it easy for professionals to build, launch, and run websites. Pantheon is one of the Silent Killers in our portfolio – and I’m immensely proud of the progress they are making and excited about their future. This post was an internal email to the Pantheon team following a major feature release (Multidev ). When I saw it, I asked Zack if I could post it on my blog as an ode to all startups. Many of you are out on the frontier, and I thought Zack captured the essence of it in his message to his team. ...

An increasing number of companies we are investors in are focused on DevOps . A year or so ago I read an early draft of a new book titled The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win . I really enjoyed it and asked Gene Kim, one of the authors to write a guest post on DevOps. He wrote it a while ago and it has sat in my draft queue waiting for the perfect moment to emerge. That moment is now. Following is a guest post on DevOps by Gene Kim , Multiple Award-Winning CTO, Researcher, Visible Ops Co-Author, Entrepreneur & Founder of Tripwire. ...

A classical relationship problem is the dichotomy between solving a problem and providing empathy. If you really want to understand this, spend two minutes and watch the awesome “It’s Not About The Nail” video below. Amy and I have figured this out extremely well in our relationship. We talk about it in Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur using the example of the scene from the movie White Men Can’t Jump to frame the situation. ...

My partner Ryan send around the following awesome video about a bead-chain experience. It’s a fascinating phenomenon. Beautiful, actually. Now, while the experiment, especially in slow motion, is beautiful, I especially enjoyed the discussion around trying to explain what was going on. I’m in conversations like this all the time – where someone is trying to explain how or why something happens based on observation. This is in stark contrast to my experience at MIT. I call this experience “the engineer brain” where you immediately start going to the underlying mathematic model. The qualitative description is definitely useful, but what’s the underlying set of equations that describes what is going on. ...

Startups fail. That’s part of the natural entrepreneurial cycle. A great post is making the rounds from an entrepreneur who has 30 days left before he hits the wall . His blog – My Startup has 30 Days to Live – promises to be a powerful one, at least for 30 days. I’m only sad about two things: (1) It’s anonymous and (2) There are no comments so it’s one way. ...

One of my favorite acronyms of all time is IHTFP . Its originated at MIT in the 1950s and has achieved widespread adoption. And yes, it does actually stand for I Hate This Fucking Place, which as any MIT alumni will tell you, is part of the beauty of the MIT experience. Today, I was in a meeting helping a CEO work on an upcoming investor pitch and told him that his problem was that he wasn’t getting to the fucking point. I scribbled down GTTFP . I just looked it up and lo and behold a new FLA (the cousin of the famed TLA ) has now entered my vocabulary. It’s got nice onomatopoeia if you say it just right. ...

The Boulder TechStars program is in week three and the intensity level is high. The TechStars office is across the hall from ours at Foundry Group and it’s wild to see the level of activity ramp up during the three months that TechStars Boulder is in session. I’m trying a new thing this program and doing a weekly CEO-only meeting. I’ve been trying to figure out a new way to engage with each program other than mentoring a team or two, and have been looking for a high leverage activity that I could do remotely for all of the other programs. My current experiment is an hour a week with all of the CEOs in a completely confidential meeting, but a peer meeting so each of them gets to talk about what they are struggling with to help solve each other’s problems as well as learn from each other. ...

This post originally appeared last week in the Wall Street Journal as part of their Accelerators Program in answer to the question “When and how should you wind down a failing business .” Some entrepreneurs and investors subscribe to the creed “failure is not an option.” I’m not one of them. I strongly believe that there are times you should call it quits on a business. Not everything works. And — even after trying incredibly hard, and for a long period of time — failure is sometimes the best option. An entrepreneur shouldn’t view their entrepreneur arc as being linked to a single company, and having a lifetime perspective around entrepreneurship helps put the notion of failure into perspective. Rather than prognosticate, let me give you an example. ...

For the past two days I’ve been at an even called SERGE (Seasoned Entrepreneurs Gathering Exchange). I co-founded it with two long time friends, Martin Babinec (founder of Trinet ) and Keith Alper (founder of Creative Producers Group). Martin, Keith and I have known each other since the mid-1990s when we were much younger entrepreneurs playing leadership roles at the Young Entrepreneurs Organization (now simply “EO”). We each invited about ten entrepreneurs and their partners to the event. 50 people showed up – 25 entrepreneurs and their partners – and we spent two days on Miami Beach hanging out and covering a lot of different topics. All of us were between the ages of 40 and 50 (+/- a few years), have each had at least one successful business, and were from all over the US and in plenty of different industries. ...