Author, Investor, Speaker, Mentor
Random Product Idea #1: Inbox100. It’s an email inbox where it has a hard upper limit of 100 messages. Once you hit 100 messages, until you archive or delete some current messages, no new emails come in. This forces you to deal with emails rather than allowing them to pile up. And the instant you … Continue reading Email Product Ideas: Inbox100 and InboxNow
Even if we’ve moved on from the “Great Man Theory” of history, the very human desire for simple stories with clear protagonists continues to affect us today. I was reminded of this fact by a Fast Company story on how Jeff Bezos and Amazon designed and launched the (at this point) unsuccessful Amazon Fire Phone. … Continue reading Trust In Process, Not People
Today, I got a chance to meet a very impressive entrepreneur, and I learned a new way to find a great idea. John-Thomas Marino was a software engineer when he and his co-worker Daehee Park decided that they wanted to start a company. But rather than just build an app, they took a very different … Continue reading The Hate List
When people talk about power, they invariable are referring to hard power. Hard power is the power of authority and might. Hard power is swift and decisive. Hard power is the ability of the President of the United States to order assassinations, and have them carried out half a world away by drone strike. In … Continue reading Hard Power and Soft Power
Vera John-Steiner interviewed 70 living geniuses and studied the notebooks of 50 dead ones. What she found was that all of these geniuses built their great ideas over time using sketches and notebooks: http://bit.ly/14mD24G “The one characteristic that all of these creatives shared— whether they were painters, actors, or scientists— was how often they put … Continue reading Every Entrepreneur Should Have a Holding Tank for Ideas
I believe in the lean startup philosophy, but our love of pivots has a downside, in the belief that it doesn’t matter where you start. Where you start matters. The path you choose matters. It’s never too late to change (until you run out of money), but it gets harder and harder the further along … Continue reading Choose your path wisely
I was reading a BuzzFeed piece on the proliferation of notifications (http://bit.ly/1cbXJ8c), when I was struck by a business idea: What if you provided a truly trusted means of electronic communication? This tool would require you to specifically grant communications privileges to specific people or data sources, and probably impose a strict limit on the … Continue reading Business Idea: Truly Trusted Communication
I loved Sam Altman’s post on 95 pieces of great startup advice: http://bit.ly/17RlyVt The whole piece is a must-read for entrepreneurs, but I want to highlight one particular item: “9. In the current pivot-happy world, good ideas are underweight. It’s worth the time to think through a good one.” I’ve discussed this point with a … Continue reading What every investor thinks about your startup…but isn’t willing to say