Techstars is rolling out a short video program with some of the entrepreneurs and mentors favorite quotes. I recorded a few of them recently – my first one is up. I’m a huge Battlestar Galactica fan and think Commander William Adama has amazing leadership lessons for any entrepreneur. If you don’t know what “rolling the hard six ” is, it’s a classic example of a high risk / high reward scenario. Per Urban Dictionary: ...
Phin Barnes at First Round Capital just nails it today with his post To get the most out of your investors, turn them into rubber ducks. Go read it – I’ll wait and will be here when you get back. I love Rubber Duck Debugging . I use this approach when writing, which I call “Writing with Yoda.” I have a little Yoda figurine staring at me at all times and when I stall out I just talk to him for a little while and then get started again. He always looks serene and wise and I almost always get going after talking to him for a little while. ...
“Passion is temporary. It doesn’t last long. Love is enduring. And that’s the important thing. If we all had love in our lives to the degree that we should, it would be much happier.” — UCLA Anderson | John Wooden Global Leadership Award ceremony (May 21, 2009) Last night I had dinner with my partners and our significant others. It was a wonderful evening with the three people I work most closely with, the people they love, and the most important person on the planet to me. ...
I’ve been a big supporter of Startup Weekend , locally and nationally, since the very beginning and I’m continuing to do so by both sponsoring and mentoring in the NEXT Boulder program. NEXT by Startup Weekend is a wonderful next step for entrepreneurs looking for feedback on their idea or early business, while heavily leveraging the Lean methodology. Below are the words of Ken Hoff, an up-and-coming leader in the Boulder startup community. As the City Coordinator of the NEXT program, check out what he has to say about why he thinks the program is valuable. Ken can be found at @ken_hoff or thekenhoff@gmail.com . Following are Ken’s thoughts on NEXT Boulder. ...
Matt Blumberg’s new book, Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business **, is about to come out. If you are a CEO and haven’t preordered it, I recommend you go get it right now. I had a chat with a CEO I work with who has had a challenging year scaling up his company. He – and the company – have made a lot of progress after hitting a low point this spring. After the call, he sent me the following note he has pasted on his desk. ...
Though it may seem as if politicians in Washington, D.C. have a hard time agreeing on anything, those on both sides of the aisle seem increasingly keen to support entrepreneurs and their communities. Some recent examples include the passage of legislation expanding crowdfunding under the JOBS Act and meetings similar to one hosted last month by the Global Accelerator Network in which we worked with the Small Business Administration to gather 16 accelerators to demo their programs for the White House and SBA funders. ...
As Amy and I get to the end of Season 2 of Battlestar Galactica, I’m noticing more and more management and leadership lessons. Oh – and it’s awesome SciFi. In my experience, it’s a challenge for CEOs and management teams to get focused on a small set of numbers that drive behavior. I talked about this in my post Three Magic Numbers . I regularly suggest that you should only have three numbers that you focus on daily – that reflect “what is going on right now in the business.” ...
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. ...
One of my favorite books of all times is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance . I read it every few years and recommend that every entrepreneur read it early in their journey. While a plethora of entrepreneurship books have come out recently, including the ones I’ve written in the Startup Revolution series , there hasn’t yet been the equivalent of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for entrepreneurship. ...
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. ...