This past week, I was interviewing a candidate for a VP role along with two of our engineering leads. Everyone in the room excluding myself was classically “technical” – they could write code, had experience solving hard software problems and a background in computer science. I wrote my last line of PHP in 2004, and it had to be rewritten by a real programmer within 6 months.
go to http://randfishkin.com/blog/153/fear-of-ignorance to finish off the article.
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Don’t. Waste. Time
by Jason Freedman
Stuff we startups do that doesn’t delight users:
Office space Launch parties
Health insurance plans
Salary negotiations
Founder equity splits
Series F stock
Office Food
Team-building activities
CRM systems
Bookkeeping
Head count
Working in SOMA
Convertible debt caps
Valuations
TechCrunch
Karma scores
ISOs
Powerpoint
Business Cards
Banks
Lawyers
Desks
1099s
Bug Trackers
Agile Processes
Advisory Boards
Hiring
Cap Tables
Payroll
Meetups
Meetings
Of course, much of this stuff still needs to get done. At some point. And some of it really is important to the process that eventually creates delight for users. But none of it directly delights users. They’re all inputs. None of it is product. When you build a great product, one that delights users and achieves product-market fit, you’ll have lots of time to work on all these things and optimize them to your heart’s content. When your product is not even built yet, none of this stuff matters. But your startup, in the pre-product phase, is basically a ticking time bomb. The only thing that can prevent it from exploding is user delight. User delight attracts funding, enhances morale, builds determination, earns revenue…Until you get to user delight, you’re always at risk of running out of money or, much more likely, losing a key engineer to something more interesting. Time is your most precious resource.
Finish the article here http://www.humbledmba.com/dont-waste-time
Psychologists from the University of London have designed a scientific test of entrepreneurialism. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook and is now worth over $4billion. To what extent do you notice and exploit bountiful opportunities? Find out how you rate:
What could the future have in store for you?
Take our short, 10-minute test to find out. Simply answer some demographic questions, and then rate your agreement with some statements.
The Four Steps to the Epiphany is a seminal book written by Steve Blank, a Stanford Professor. Subtitled ‘Successful Strategies forProducts that Win’ the book describes a theory of product development called ‘Customer Development‘ which has had a remarkable impact in the Lean Startup scene.
This chart shows the growth in revenue for each of the 100 technology companies. They are split into rocket ships (in red) which reach $50 million in annual sales within six years, hot companies (in orange) which take up to 12 years to reach this figure, and slow burners (in blue) companies which take 13 years or more to hit $50 million.
Yesterday I attended another excellent event run by the SEEDA funded Higher Education Entrepreneurship Group. This particular event was at the University of Surrey in Guildford and was a conference entitled “Does It Really Make a Difference? Evaluating the Impact of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education”. Not the catchiest of titles, but I was really pleased to meet the brilliant Professor Mark Hart of Aston University. Mark presented his latest research for Enterprise UK, which clustered students into 6 groups, according to their enterprising beliefs and behaviours. The groups were: self starters, hesitant creatives, freedom seekers, inventors, determined novices and reluctant novices. Which type are you?
Despite working longer hours, American business owners are the most satisfied workers, according to the latest research from Gallup. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index shows that entrepreneurs are happier than managers and workers in any other sector or profession, although they are not always the highest paid.
The ability to control their work environment is a critical aspect of their satisfaction score, with entrepreneurs scoring a clear 16 percentage points higher on Work Environment.
Such freedom is often cited by entrepreneurs as a motivating factor, and this research suggests that long hours spent working on a project which the business owner is passionate about may be well rewarded.
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