I think people often substitute time with metrics that more accurately measure their desired outcomes when it comes to measuring the commitment of their co-founder. Most likely, your desired outcomes are to have a partner who is achieving his/her milestones (short term and long term), and who has dedicated mind share (the company has his/her foremost mental and emotional attention). If this is the case, then the task becomes finding metrics that fairly and accurately measure these objectives.
While LivingSocial’s loss-leader strategy with Amazon gift cards was a great short term strategy, it could work out to be an even smarter long term strategy because of the data generated.
The biggest hurdle faced by Facebook or any platform trying to improve monetization of social transactions is the determination of who within a graph owns the trust of a user, and in what domains a user trusts that person.
Many startups bypass customer development processes, missing their chance at what I think is the best possible situation for a B2B startup to be in: knowing your customer’s business better than they do.
Fear of failure is common. In general, fear of failure is a result of putting too much stock in what others think of you. This is because they lack a certain confidence in themselves – paradoxically, a confidence which many of them could attain by facing their fears.
I was out for a walk the other night on a bustling avenue of restaurants and shops, when it hit me: 99.9% of the population doesn’t remove the hood ornament or automaker badge on their cars. But who would? Would we really expect the guy who paid an extra $10k for a Lexus ES over a Toyota [...]
As a collector of business books both new and rare, I love reading entrepreneur biographies – and am fortunate to have in my collection some which I bet you’ve never heard of. While many business books aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, the ones listed below have had a significant impact on my thinking:
The world is a better place when people can do what they do best, in an environment with people who support their vision.
As I’ve spoken with college students preparing to enter the “real world”, I’ve recognized an interesting “on” vs “in” parallel between launching and managing a business, and launching and managing a career
