Our Draft Core Values

July 22, 2014

One of the things we accomplished the past two days at our company retreat was a lengthy brainstorm about our company’s core values. While they are not fully finalized yet, here are the ones we have drafted so far: Fearless Committed Innovative Personable I will describe those more fully once they move out of draft […]

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Valuing Company Retreats

July 21, 2014

It is often hard for managers and employees to value company retreats. It is easy for everyone to become mired in the details of the day to day and not value more strategic, long-term, or business-level thinking. Today and tomorrow the ArrayFire team is at a lake house on Lake Rabun for our annual company […]

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A Potential Pivot for Brinktop

July 18, 2014

This past week, we had a discussion about the trajectory of Brinktop. We have been talking with people about our plans for selling custom laptops and laptop kits. One of the things that came out of our customer discovery was the option to sell build-your-own Android tablets. I got really excited by this concept. As […]

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My First Five Years of Salary

July 16, 2014

One of the biggest struggles for bootstrapped entrepreneurs is their own salary. During the first phase of the business, there is no cash so there is no salary. Then when revenue begins, it is spent on other people’s salaries. The last people to get paid as a startup gets off the ground are the entrepreneurs […]

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A Walk in the Park?

July 15, 2014

Viewing your life on this side of things it seems like it’s a walk in the park. Someone recently said the quote above to me. I thought it was interesting. And not at all true. A few thoughts come to mind about that statement: The rewards of entrepreneurship start becoming wonderful for bootstrapped businesses once the […]

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When Customer Discovery Breaks Down

July 13, 2014

Customer discovery interviews with Dyced were easy and quickly led to the conclusion to step out of that business. However, with Brinktop, customer discovery interviews are harder. It is difficult for laptop owners to visualize using a different device than they have been using for a long time. It’s similar to what I would imagine […]

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Costs of Customer Discovery

July 12, 2014

I have written recently about the two new startup ideas we are working on this summer. In this post I outline the costs of customer discovery. Both of these ideas started as ArrayFire employees were excited about something and just started to build the product. I intervened in both cases and said, “Let’s not waste […]

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Introducing Brinktop

July 11, 2014

A few days ago, I introduced one of the two new startup ideas we have been working on this summer called Dyced and then I wrote about how we have stopped working on Dyced. Today, I introduce the second startup idea called Brinktop. With Brinktop, we  are rethinking laptops. We want to bring control, customization, and […]

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Killing Off Dyced

July 10, 2014

Two days ago, I introduced Dyced which we have been working on this summer. Today I’m killing it off. After performing sufficiently many customer discovery interviews. Here is an analysis of why we are not going to pursue this startup idea: Software is not the issue:  Different segments of the video wall market have different fundamental needs. […]

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Rejecting Hiring Candidates

July 9, 2014

I recently ran across this article that says the worst hiring mistake you can make is not following up nicely with the people you reject. I’m curious how you reject candidates in your company?  Here is what we’ve been sending recently: Hi <name>, Unfortunately, we will not be offering you a job on our team […]

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