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 [...]
I read this post a few weeks ago by Joel Spolsky about growth and the need for speed (The post is entitled “Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?”. I thought to myself for a while and nodded… and all of the examples were spot on: Word vs WordPerfect / Oracle vs Ingres. But there was [...]
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 [...]
I enjoy listening to streaming music from Pandora while I’m working. (Special thanks to big Dave for sharing his channel with me so I don’t have to spend time sifting or curating the good stuff) Pandora is an awesome product- it allows for discovery, evolves with me, and is generally a pretty good experience. I’m [...]
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 [...]
Last night I was reflecting on working on BettrAt for the last year… Talking with a friend and commiserating about how no one really appreciates how hard it is to start a company (a meaningful and sustainable one) on the internet and not just be a feature or a commodity. I talked about showing my [...]
This is embarrassing, but I have to admit a remarkably cheesy thing about myself. When you’re working on a somewhat crazy, new to the world idea, and your primary intention is to “make meaning” and to improve people’s lives, people doubt you a lot. “Why would I use that? That doesn’t make sense to me… [...]
I just switched to Disqus commenting (I’m a huge fan of Disqus. Not that I get a ton of comments on here, but I haven’t been posting a ton in the past several months, which I fully intend on changing. For reals. In part I was reinvigorated to communicate the dire situation that our world [...]
