Author, Investor, Speaker, Mentor
One of the perils of living a portfolio life is the need to decide how to allocate your time and energy among potential initiatives. The challenge is that most initiatives are full of uncertainty. In an effort to structure my thinking about my own life, I decided to create a classic chart, with one axis representing … Continue reading The Effort-Outcome Model For Evaluating Your Portfolio Life
One of the expressions I hear a lot in the startup world (and which I even use from time to time) is “it’s a numbers game.” What the speaker means is that in certain activities, such as selling a product, pitching a VC, or asking a woman out, failure is the most likely result, and … Continue reading Startups Are A Numbers Game, But Use Your Good Sense
Inexperienced entrepreneurs seem to believe that they need their team to agree. “Get everyone on the same page,” is a common mantra I hear from teams I work with. The problem is, anyone who develops the expectations that all the members of a group (even a group of two) will completely agree about anything is … Continue reading People Never Completely Agree
Most entrepreneurs are control freaks. That’s not a bad things. When you’re a 1- or 2-person company, and when you want to create a great product, you need the person in charge to really sweat the small stuff. The problem arises as the organization increases in size. Soon, other people are talking with customers, writing … Continue reading It’s easier to push the big picture to the frontlines than to feed details to headquarters
When you’re startup is fortunate to have paying customers, it’s very tempting to evolve your product based on the feedback you receive from them. After all, isn’t that the best practice–to iterate based on customer feedback? The problem is, if you base what you do solely on the feedback that comes in from customers, you’re … Continue reading Design for your best customers, not your worst ones
I once worked with a very successful entrepreneur. He had founded a company, taken it public, and made him and his shareholders hundreds of millions of dollars (the total wealth created was over a billion, but I don’t think any one entity ended up making 10 figures). He told me once about how his engineering … Continue reading Almost any idea (yes, including yours) can be improved by collaboration
Here’s a fascinating little mathematical tidbit, courtesy of an entertaining article about the mathematics of gambling in New Scientist: Suppose you are told you must marry, and that you must choose your spouse out of 100 applicants. You may interview each applicant once. After each interview you must decide whether to marry that person. If … Continue reading How To Make The Right Decision Without Seeing Every Option
The latest post from Scientific American says that exercising self-control can deplete your brain’s decisionmaking muscle. It turns out that resisting those chocolate-chip cookies or deciding which movie to see exhausts the same muscle that you use for making important decisions–the so-called “executive function”. If you tire out your executive function with petty tasks, it … Continue reading Don’t Let Your Decisionmaking Bonk
John Wooden is famous for saying, “be quick, but don’t hurry.” Unfortunately, it’s hard to act on this Yoda-like utterance. That’s why I’ve rephrased it (glancing nervously at the sky, hoping to avoid a lightning bolt) in my own words: Be decisive, but don’t rush in. Sports is one of the most popular metaphors for … Continue reading Be Decisive, But Don’t Rush In
Loyal reader Foobarista had a great comment on my recent post on capital efficiency: “Pay attention to the right spending. In a company I worked at, the CEO paid close attention to things like printer cartridge expenses and other office supplies while running up huge bills on unnecessary lawyer consultations and expensive “business consultants”.” When … Continue reading Make Sure You Consider Magnitude *and* Percentage