In the real world, you don’t have infinite resources; you don’t have a perfect product; and you don’t sell to a growing market without competition. You’re also not omnipotent, so you cannot control what people think of your brand. Under these assumptions, most companies need all the help they can get. […]
These are pictures from my trip to the Ludwigsburg Residential Palace in Germany. It is one of the finest examples of baroque architecture in Germany.
My time-tested, battle-hardened best tips to help you create the best presentations possible. If you feel the need to be creative, do it in your product design, not your pitch. […]
In their book, Absolute Value: What Really Influences Customers In The Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information, Emanuel Rosen and Itamar Simonson explain a new approach to planting seeds to build awareness for a new product or service. Their idea is that the gradual adoption, trickle-down approach that started when Moses went to see God is [...]
I’ve lived in California for forty years, and I have never visited Yosemite until last week. Wow, I was missing so much. The epic nature of the park is mind boggling. Here are pictures from my visit. […]
The art of board management is a skill that you need to master because it can mean your survival and at least greater leeway in managing your startup. The first issue is deciding when you need a board. […]
Several times a year a group of executives from startups do a six-minute demo of their products to an audience of venture capitalists, analysts, and journalists. This name of the event is, logically, DEMO. It’s a great occasion—especially if you understand the dance that’s going on: Entrepreneurs acting as if they don’t need venture capital, [...]
More "stock photos." This time from the Social Media Marketing World conference in San Diego, California.
Although this may bite me in the butt someday if it’s booked solid, I’d like to tell you about the Hyatt Place in Austin, Texas. I will stay at this hotel every time I go to SXSW. […]
I’ve joined the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. This entity is the parent organization of all the “Wiki” projects such as Wikipedia and other free-knowledge projects. […]
Some aspiring entrepreneurs are already working for a big company. Like external entrepreneurs, they dream of creating innovative products. They, too, must prototype, position, pitch, bootstrap, recruit, fund, partner, sell, and support. The purpose of this minichapter is to explain how to do all this when you’re employed by a large business. [...]
Entrepreneurs face hundreds of decisions when they start a company, and there’s often a temptation to optimize each one of them—sometimes by breaking new ground. However, it’s best to focus one’s energy and attention on milestone issues. My experience and expertise is with US companies, but these are generally accepted startup practices: [...]
Awestruck by the Vince-Vaughn series of stock photos, I was inspired to try my hand at this at SXSW. I'm not sure they're worth buying, but we sure had fun doing this--as the last few pictures show!
Since SXSW my first reaction when I see something worth sharing is to meercast it. I love Meerkat’s ease of use, immediacy, and visual feedback of seeing who’s watching and reading their comments. The gratification of meercasting is amazingly high. I have a couple of concerns about Meerkat. First, for the widespread adoption of Meerkat [...]
When I started working at Apple in 1986 I was afraid of public speaking—for one thing, working for the division run by Steve Jobs was intimidating: “How could I possibly measure up to Steve?” But if you want to succeed as an evangelist and CEO, you must learn how to make speeches. [...]
Forget “I think, therefore I am.” For entrepreneurs, the operative phrase is, “I pitch, therefore I am.” Pitching isn’t only for raising money—it’s for reaching agreement, and agreement can yield many good outcomes including sales, partnerships, and new hires. Here are the key elements of a great pitch. […]
I am evangelizing the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a pitch should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. This rule is applicable for any presentation to reach an agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming [...]
There is a myth that successful companies begin with grandiose ambitions. The implication is that entrepreneurs should start with megalomaniac goals in order to succeed. To the contrary, my observation is that great companies began by wondering about simple things, and this leads to asking simple questions that beget companies: […]
This is a guest post by Ben Parr, the author of Captivology. You probably deal with attention issues every day. How do I get the attention of new customers? How do I retain the attention of existing clients? How do I captivate my boss or my upcoming date? It’s a hard problem to solve, especially [...]
When I was a venture capitalist, I noticed that entrepreneurs whose primary goal was to make money usually failed. This is because this kind of entrepreneur attracts other people who want to make money, and then when the company doesn’t pay out big bucks immediately (and no startup does), these folks look for greener pastures. [...]