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When we think about a problem, we like to solve it. Our brains are suckers for the open loop and we want to close it. If you are asking how to make something cheaper, you get solutions and thoughts on cost-cutting or quality cutting. And those that are super efficient
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Automattic, the makers of this blogging platform, WordPress, bought Tumblr for less than 2% of it's previous acquisition price of $1.1B. The hype has died with another platform. And technology darwinism, survival of the fittest, the tried and true, is brutally pervasive. Social can make you feel
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Does it work? Was it designed in and for the real world? It's critical to take whatever idea you have and see if it stands up to the rigor and texture of people - customers, partners, critics, etc - in the real world. That's honest design.
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When we are buried in the details of our work, it's hard to look around and see connections to worlds outside ourselves. We can be talking to the same people within our crowd, read the same blogs, and look at the world through a myopic lens. Some of
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I don't do grand openings. If you have an idea, skills and the hard work to persist, simply get your first customers and start serving them. This idea that we are anything special out in the marketplace of hundreds of thousands of options is absurd. You have to
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Principles prevail in a world of chaos. Much of life is indeed chaos. I think the importance of collecting and testing your mental models - how you problem solve and approach the world - is critical to drive success. The 80/20 rule can help you focus on what has
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The SaaS company WorkBoard announced it closed a Series B round for $23M to total out its fundraising to $36M to date. At this point with their revenues tripling year over year, they have market validation. With more complexity and faster growth, keeping the main thing the main thing is
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We have a hard time appreciating what drag does to our lives and work. If you're used to sifting through your junk to find your clothes, notebooks, gadgets or everything to help you in a day, the friction may be lost on you. It's become a
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The romantic idea of creating something innovative and new can get us sidetracked quickly in entrepreneurship. There are 28 million small businesses in the United States as of this writing. You are competing with all those businesses, minds and offerings. The likelihood of being original is difficult against such staggering
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The temptation for businesses, especially after they have success, is to overreach. You have the choice of price, quality and service as your focal points in the marketplace. But you can only have two. We are tempted to be all three. But we live in a world of natural trade-offs.
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Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us. ~ Nassim Taleb Yes, entrepreneurs are indeed heroes. Ultimately, entrepreneurs are about initiative and responsibility for risk. However, at a fundamental level, entrepreneurs are problem solvers. They own the difficult problems others are reluctant to carry. There are
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Are you doing what you are supposed to be doing? Is the work you have been doing for many years as relevant today, or are you having to unlearn and reinvent? I think that effort and working hard are relatively natural for many driven and successful people that I know.