People that know me are well aware of my passion for cycling. I ride all year and in all kinds of weather (as long as the temp isn’t too far below my age). I race cyclocross in the fall, and a few mountain bike and road races in the summer. Over the years I’ve been fortunate to build up a great group of riding buddies and I’ve been riding on the Horizon-Panache club team because I race a bit...
I hear this alot, particularly in the start-up world: "fail fast". I’m not exactly sure who popularized it, perhaps it was my friend Brad Feld. I’m pretty sure Brad didn’t mean that failure – and doing it quickly – was the best path to success. I think he meant learning in the name of expert mastery was the goal. What really seperates great entrepreneurs from everyone else is the ability to constantly move through a series of uncomfortable learning...
Venture capitalists are “meta” smart. Lots of people are deeply smart about very particular things. Niches that they dig into and become experts in. They become masters of their domain. They understand their ecosystem of a particular economy of a business. It’s this hard-earned knowledge that they willingly summarize and impart on VC’s, top business executives, angel investors, “celebrity” entrepreneurs and the like that make their audience “meta” smart. Ever wonder why the VC’s you meet are so damn...
I’ve written on this blog before about my affinity for Peter Drucker. Anyone that is a student of management theory and genuinely interested in building kick-ass businesses needs to read the Essential Drucker. This morning I read an article on the Harvard Business Review site: Why Peter Drucker Distrusted Facts Drucker provides several theses supporting this broad assertion: If we do not make opinions clear, we will simply find confirmatory facts. “No one has ever failed to find the...
No matter what company, job, industry, time of year, state of the economy, one’s age, or position in life – the words are always the same “I’m too busy”. Of course the words themselves vary from person to person, but the meaning is the same: I’m simply too freekin’ swamped and that’s why I can’t do it, or didn’t get to it, or whatever excuse of why I didn’t do something I said I was going to do. Bullshit....
