Entrepreneurship

I’ve spent the past two days at the Global Entrepreneurs Congress in Rio. It’s been really powerful for me as it’s shown how broadly the message of Startup Communities has taken hold across the world. At the point I can see that the Startup Communities movement is in full swing, the language and principles that I introduced in the book are being talked about, dissected, and improved on, and many entrepreneurs around the world are leading the development of the startup community in their city. ...

I meet a lot of people. I hear a lot of people introduce themselves. I interview a lot of people. Sometimes I want to hear their story; most of the time I don’t. I’ve realized recently that I’m tired of hearing histories. And I’m tired of telling mine. It’s easy to find out most by a simple search on the web. Or a scan through LinkedIn. Or listening to one of the video interviews I’ve done where someone has said “tell me your story.” ...

Every year in December and January I go through the same cycle for all the boards I’m on. It’s the annual bonus, next year bonus plan, option grant refresh cycle. For many management teams, especially in rapidly growing, or mature companies, it’s an important part of their existence as culturally we’ve oriented compensation, bonuses, and future compensation around an annual cycle. I embrace this – my goal is to help these entrepreneurs and management teams win. I know compensation is an important part of the feedback / reward loop. While I’ve occasionally had conflict over compensation, and I’ve had a few CEOs I work with tell me they feel like it’s an uncomfortable discussion, my own perception of my behavior is that I’m a softy. If things are going well, I am supportive of anything that’s reasonable. And, having thousands of data points over the past 17 years, I’ve got a good calibration on reasonable. ...

This first appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s Accelerator series. A few our entrepreneurial heroes work on more that one company at a time. Steve Jobs (Pixar, Apple), Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square), and Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn, Greylock). And we regularly hear of entrepreneurs who are working at companies that acquired their first company who are now working on new companies while still at their acquirer. It’s takes an extraordinary talented entrepreneur to be able to do this. So, should you try to emulate this? “Mostly” no. ...

I’ve been in three board meetings in the last month where it was painfully apparent that there wasn’t a person in the company who owned the UX philosophy of the product. I’m explicitly saying “UX” (user experience) rather than “UI” (user interface) as each company had an excellent designer and the application looked great. But the UX broke down quickly, especially as you went from novice first time user to experienced user. ...

*This post first appeared in the WSJ Accelerators series titled The $100,000 Experiment in response to the question “When should you make a substantive change to one or more parts of your business model?” * During the past few years, the word “pivot” has become one of the most overused words with regard to startups. For some, it means a tiny incremental change in the business. For others, it means killing off whatever path you are on and rebooting the business, creating something entirely different. For others, it means everything in between. ...

We are sandwiched between Thanksgiving and Christmas in a country that is recovering emotionally from two disasters named Sandy – one natural (Hurricane Sandy) and one man-made (Sandy Hook). Our politicians in Washington are playing a zero-sum game around the Fiscal Cliff. The CEO of the NRA just held a press conference and said “we should be able to afford to put a police officer in every school” and he called on Congress “to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school in this nation.” ...

I thought this was a powerful and clever video about the risks to the free and open Internet. It’s worth a watch with an appropriate cynical and concerned view. I was happy to see Google launch their Take Action site last week about a Free and Open Internet. I’m a supporter and strongly encourage your support as well. Vint Cerf (one of the actual creators of the Internet) talks more about the need to keep the Internet free and open . ...

Amy and I wrote a meaningful amount about entrepreneurs and depression in Startup Life. Since we finished the final draft a few weeks ago, I’ve given several talks where depression came up as I’ve woven my own experience with depression into the short (less than 15 minute) version of my story. I’ve received a surprising (to me) number of emails from people thanking me talking about it publicly, along with my discussion of the anxiety disorder (obsessive compulsive disorder) that I’ve struggled with my entire adult life and that was severe during the serious depressive episode I had in my early to mid 20s. ...

Amy and I shipped the final draft of Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur yesterday. “If you are interested in this book, go pre-order it now on Amazon to help our pre-order numbers”, said Brad the Book Salesman. The backlog of things on my to do list is at an all time high. I’m normally super responsive to everything and have zero backlog. That is not the case right now. ...