May 8Funding is not the Biggest Startup ProblemStartup success & failure depends on these five things — The year 2021 will be remembered as a record breaking year for the world of startups and venture capital. The total amount of venture investment raised was $643 billion, nearly doubling the amount of funding raised the year prior. To put this in perspective, there was 10x the capital deployed…Startup7 min read
Apr 21Notifications OverflowTo fix notifications, working backwards from the right place — The demise of Clubhouse* will someday become a business school case study in the power of notifications to sink a high-flying startup. While I host regular shows about startups on the app, the insane number of notifications the app would send forced me and many others to stop notifications entirely…Work5 min read
Apr 9Communications OverloadFour tips to clarify communications with managers & executives — I used to write long emails. When I say long, I mean pages upon pages long. You would have to scroll and scroll and scroll some more to get to the end. This was not every email, just the ones reporting on outcomes or providing instructions on a program I…Leadership7 min read
Mar 28One Way and Two Way DoorsA framework for how you can make better decisions faster — Sometimes you just do not know what to expect. Case in point with SxSW where I was the week before. If you do not know, SxSW is a conference hosted every March based in Austin. It started as a music festival in 1987, then added film and tech programs. …Startup7 min read
Mar 10Principles, Not DirectivesTo inspire innovation requires giving teams freedom to explore — While this is supposed to be a weekly publication, some weeks are just too busy to sit down and write. Such was the case with my trip to Singapore last week. First, it was just a week, so three days are already lost in a haze of jetlag. Then, because…Startup8 min read
Mar 4The CTO That Learned to SellRising to the top requires more than technical skills — I am heading back to Singapore for the first time in nearly two years. In fact, when I leave later today, it would have been exactly 23 months when I got on a plane from Singapore back to the US thinking I would be back soon. We all thought we…Leadership6 min read
Feb 21How We Got to web3What you are missing about web3 and how innovation works One of the simple pleasures I enjoyed in the time before COVID when I traveled regularly was to flip through the pages of SkyMall magazine. There would be page after page of bizarre and impractical products. You could get a…Web 38 min read
Feb 11Pour One Out for Stack OverflowThe sunsetting of Jobs and Dev Stories is the passing of an era — What were the movies you watched growing up that defined your youth? If you are the typical tech geek, you might hear something from the sci-fi genre, superhero movies series, or horror flicks. Then there were the movies that friends in my neighborhood in Brooklyn liked. For those of us…Product Management7 min read
Feb 3Stop Asking Inane & Pointless Interview QuestionsGreat hires start with thoughtful candidate experiences — Sometimes people will be wrong on the Internet. Ok, maybe it happens a lot. Rarely do I ever comment on other people’s posts these days. Mostly because correcting all the wrongness on the web would be a never-ending, thoroughly exhausting, and depressingly hopeless endeavor. This is also why I…Recruiting6 min read
Jan 20Thoughts from a Bitcoin ConferenceWhat is hype vs. reality in the crypto and web3 world? — I remember coming across Bitcoin back in 2011 at a startup event in NYC. Someone mentioned it in passing to me as this thing you “mine” on a computer and create a “currency” from scratch. He seemed quite excited about it. I thought he sounded unhinged. The next day I…Bitcoin7 min read