YakShaving

Yak•Shaving (noun) Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem

Tag: entrepreneur

Useful, Courageous, and Beautiful

Much ink has been spilt in the last several weeks following the death of Steve Jobs. Most entrepreneurs, CEOs, and business leaders have come out and wrote posts talking about the things they have learned from Steve while he built one of the world’s most magical companies. I’ll spare you my extended version of the [...]

Book recommendation: The Monk and the Riddle

I’m surprised I waited so long to read this book by Randy Komisar, now almost a decade old, titled The Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur. The book is a light read, I finished it between two short airplane flights to/fro Philly. Lots of this stuff is intuitive if you [...]

Every entrepreneur is a social entrepreneur (well, almost)

Late last week, the University of Michigan had their BOP conference, limited to a core and exclusive group of BOP notables (Patrick Whitney, Dean of the IIT Institute of Design, and BettrAt’s “Thinker-In-Residence,” was in attendance). I had a chance to catch up with a friend tonight I hadn’t talked to in several years and [...]

Registering spaces and conveying powerful ideas

Lately I’ve been thinking about high concept pitches. I read pitching hacks by Naval Ravikant and Nivi, and I’ve looked over lots of stuff before that says you need to have the simple, high concept pitch. Here’s how it usually goes: 
”We are the X meets Y”
 Most of the time, this is X.COM meets [...]

Why can’t anyone make awesome green home appliances?

The NatureMill composter is terrible. The waste still smells so much worse than when I put it in… it’s incredibly loud, and the thing is designed so flimsily (Is flimsily a word?). What a sham (also, a shame). I’m returning it promptly and getting my money back. This is the thanks I get for being [...]