Fighting Uphill with Market Awareness

August 28, 2014

David Cummings put up a post yesterday about market awareness. I have written before about how early on we had to educate our customers generally about the GPU and accelerated computing. The entire market was in the dark. It was a huge uphill battle of market awareness. Luckily we were not alone. Other partners in […]

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On Drones

August 27, 2014

Drones have been on my mind a lot lately. Once our new office construction is finished (less than a month to go with that!) we are going to start building drones in our new office shop space. Our initial plan will be to follow Paul’s detailed blog here. I am excited for the new Go […]

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Comparing Funding and M&A Activity by State

August 25, 2014

I ran across a post today by Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures that discusses the impact of a startup’s location on its acquisition potential. His post left out Georgia, so I spent 20 minutes today to add Georgia to his first chart. Here it is: The chart shows the percentage breakdown of the number of […]

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Assembling an Early Startup Team

August 23, 2014

One of the biggest decisions for an early startup is the composition of its team. There is no bigger headache later on than having to deal with removing dead weight team members from the picture. I like to assemble an early team through a gradual ramp of working together. Do some work together on the […]

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One of the Hardest Things to Get Right for Entrepreneurs

August 21, 2014

I spent some time brainstorming earlier this week with several entrepreneurs talking about various parts of our business that we all wanted to improve. We made a list of nearly 20 items in our brainstorming session. Every single person in the session ranked one of the items as more important than all the others. The […]

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Employee Onboarding

August 20, 2014

We have been hiring a number of people recently. I have thought some about employee onboarding. There is a really good article here about onboarding employees so that they have a great experience. The gist for a really good first day is: Have the employee come in late, like 11am Don’t outsource the welcome Keep […]

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When the BigCo Competes

August 19, 2014

If you are attacking an important problem and making waves, it is inevitable that the BigCo’s in your space will try to copy and compete. Today, I ran across a blog post by Andy Powell of the Atlanta-based CallRail talking about Google who has entered their space with a new product. The post reminded me […]

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10 Reasons To Become An Entrepreneur from the NYT

August 18, 2014

The New York Times ran an article that lists 10 reasons to become an entrepreneur. Go read the full article here. Here is a summarized list of those reasons: You can do something better. I have written about “better” before. You enjoy making customers happy. You are self-determined. You like adventure. You like figuring things […]

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Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose and Tours of Duty

August 17, 2014

Tonight I have two thoughts about team building. The first comes from an article that discusses team building. It talks about how high GPA/SATs and elite universities on a resume are poor predictors of success, especially for a challenging work environment like a startup. I agree. Along these lines the article states that the best […]

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Dealing with the Big Question Marks

August 16, 2014

For brand new startups, there are big question marks. The answers to those questions could kill the early startup. For instance: * Can we build this? Is it even possible? * Will we get particular distribution rights or partnership agreements necessary to do business? * Will funding come through? * Will FDA approval come through, […]

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