Leadership and Management
How Do You Deal With Employee Burnout?
I love running. Specifically, I love distance running. It’s so peaceful when you go on a long run in the early morning. And that’s really true now that the weather’s gotten colder. It’s just you and your thoughts. Or maybe it’s just you, your thoughts, and the occasional deer you see. I usually pace my…
Read MoreWhat’s Your Institutional Memory And Why It’s Important?
“We used to be even better than this,” the Vice President of one of the world’s largest distributors said to me as we were taking a tour of the distributor’s facility. The Vice President was responding to how impressed I was with the consistency of the answers and actions I was hearing and seeing from…
Read MoreWhen Should You Hire Interns To Develop Your MVP?
As the great business philosopher John McEnroe said, “You cannot be serious!” You want to hire interns instead of experts? Come on! You cannot be serious! Okay. Let’s go through with the pros and cons of hiring interns instead of experts. The Pros of hiring interns as engineers: The Pros of hiring expert engineers.…
Read MoreHow Should You Manage Employees In Your Startup?
There are two extremes when it comes managing people. There’s the old-school command and control model where you don’t give your employees any flexibility. On the other side there’s the Zappos style of management (or even coaching) where you push the decision making down in the organization. What I’ve seen work best is pushing the…
Read MoreWhat Should I Do When An Employee Challenges My Strategy?
One of the best people I ever worked with was Greg. Greg is a brilliant engineer, and Greg is probably one of the five best analog IC design engineers on the planet. Greg, like many brilliant engineers, isn’t shy about sharing his opinions. And Greg certainly wasn’t shy about telling me when he disagreed with…
Read MoreWhat Are The Three Reasons Your Startup Will Succeed?
Marc Andreessen wrote an excellent blog post about why startups succeed. His view is, when you look at the three key components to success (team, product, and market), that the market is the most important reason that a startup succeed. Andreessen quotes what he calls “Rachleff’s law” named after venture capitalist Andy Rachleff. Rachleff’s law…
Read MoreWhat Are Some Signs You Should Give Up On Your Startup?
I drove home from Sand Hill Road. We had just been turned down. Again. This was the 63rd VC that decided not to invest in our company. And this rejection was particularly vicious. We had gone through weeks of diligence, and the last thing we needed to do was present to the full partnership. Then,…
Read MoreWhat Should You Do In Your Startup That Won’t Scale?
One of the biggest debates we had early on was whether to buy an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system to scale our manufacturing. I’ll never forget it because it set off a chain of events that changed our company forever. Here’s the story… Two of my cofounders, “Ken” and “Randy”, came into my office about…
Read MoreWhat Is The Best Advice When You Are Partnering With A Larger Company?
I’ve been on both sides of this equation. We did several deals with companies bigger than us including: Companies that were distribution partners, and.. Companies that were manufacturing partners, and… Companies that were possible acquirers. There is one consistent thing about doing deals with large companies: Partnerships with large companies take time. Sometimes deals can…
Read MoreWhat Is The Biggest Challenge You Face As CEO Besides Funding?
Let’s say you don’t have funding worries because funding is the biggest challenge startups face. What is the second biggest challenge startups face? I’ll tell you what isn’t the second biggest challenge startups face. It isn’t: A. No market need. And it isn’t… B. Competition. And it isn’t… C. Pricing issues. And it isn’t… D.…
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