blog An Interview Tom O'Dea of Rocket Whale It wasn’t until the Rocket Whale team had been out of Flashpoint for months that things started to gel. “We went into Flashpoint with a digital employee handbook product and a desire to help companies improve their leadership, company culture, and/or governance,” says cofounder Tom O’Dea. “We
blog Why Do Startups Think Fundraising Equals Success? The answer may be that almost no scalable startups are actually successful, so people depend on proxies to “grade” themselves. The best research I’m familiar with looked at 18 million startup companies (including 14 million that have been around for at least six years) and asked the question: how
blog Beyond “Strong Opinions Weakly Held” This phrase shows up periodically, like a comet, in close orbit around the startup world, particularly the Silicon Valley part. Fred Wilson wrote about it a few months ago.1 It’s in Marc Andreessen’s twitter bio. It originates, as far as I can tell, with Paul Saffo, who
blog Entrepreneurial Mindsets. Or, Three Guys Walk into a Bar… Three men: a rube, a nerd, and a wise guy, are walking into a bar when a piano falls on them. They appear instead in front of the pearly gates and there’s Saint Minerva waiting. “You’re not Saint. Peter” says the wise guy. “Correct” says the saint. I’
blog Keep an Eye Out for Nothing When entrepreneurs get out of the building to go and talk to their customers, they accumulate data. People get excited about the idea or they don’t, they ask good questions or misunderstand what the entrepreneur is saying. They cut the conversation short or keep it going past the allotted
blog Angels? Think Gas Station Attendants. When startup founders start thinking about money, they start thinking about angel investors. What are these elite, wealthy creatures like? How can I sell them on investing in my company? They'd be better off forgetting about the heavenly flock of angels and thinking more about the local gas station attendant.
blog Authentic Demand The secret of growing a startup isn't a great team or a great strategy. There have been a lot of good posts on startup growth strategies lately, like this one and this one. But when you start with the wrong mindset, you can only get so far. Here's an analogy
blog The Not Not Approach Understanding customers in terms of what they cannot not do is a way to discover authentic demand and found a potentially successful company. You can’t avoid doing the things that make you who you are. In a chess game, almost all the pieces can attack, defend, or be sacrificed