Agile VC

JUNE 5, 2011

When you’re company is growing >10x year over year, I suppose if management didn’t invest a lot in continued growth their board directors would line them up against the wall. The folks at Yipit did a detailed analyis of the Boston data and concluded Groupon’s model is deteriorating there.

North America 100

North America Chicago Boston Silicon Valley 100

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Imagine a general manager that has read The Innovator’s Dilemma and related books, and is therefore trying hard to help her organization make a transition to a new product category via disruptive innovation. Still, this manager is going to spend the company’s money, and needs to be held accountable. So far, so good.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

In the old days, the brand manager of a consumer packaged goods product had to spend energy inferring the effectiveness of their television ads through a combination of trailing indicators (like market share) or time-consuming market research. My blog has over 14000 subscribers, for example. Is that a lot?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Every board meeting, the metrics of success change. These founders have not managed, to borrow a phrase from Steve Blank , to create a scalable and repeatable sales process. First of all, it means that most aggregate measures of success, like total revenue, are not very useful. And yet, their investors are frustrated.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

Managing weekly releases got a lot harder once I started doing customer development. That is when I devised a set of work hacks to manage my schedule ( described here ) and what drove me to adopting Continuous Deployment. Managing weekly releases got a lot harder once I started doing customer development. Things started to slip.

Continuous Deployment 151

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Wiki 151

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

But aggregated across many schools, there are thousands or tens of thousands of them. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

Designed for large businesses, the channels let a company share several types of documents, brand the channel with their own design elements, and then include display advertising, contest promotions, blog aggregation, social media integration and metrics reporting. The idea seemed to SlideShare to be a natural direction.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167