article thumbnail

8 People And Process Skills Required In Any Business

Startup Professionals Musings

During my time in Silicon Valley, I was struck by the fact that most successful entrepreneurs seemed to personally know and regularly hear from all the “movers and shakers” who had the investment capital and leadership they needed. Using metrics to measure results and commitments.

article thumbnail

8 Keys To Migration From A Consultant To A Freelancer

Startup Professionals Musings

I learned this the hard way, when I left IBM a few years ago to share what I had learned with the exciting world of startups in Silicon Valley. Luckily, I had always been a “hands-on” professional, and I had learned the pragmatics of people leadership, marketing, management tools, and funding.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Times Square Strategy Session – Web Startups and Customer Development

Steve Blank

What metrics do we use to see if we learned enough in Customer Discovery ? I gave my boilerplate answer, “I’m a product guy and I tend to invest and look at deals that have measurable revenue metrics. Dave McClure has some great metrics…” It was an honest but vaguely unsatisfying answer.

article thumbnail

Technology, Innovation, and Modern War – Class 17 – Organizational Design – Safi Bahcall

Steve Blank

It’s not leadership. The military has three of the four pieces of the puzzle you need: strategy, access to technology, leadership. Leadership was not the problem. Strategy, technology, leadership – those were fine. Not just in the military, but also in Silicon Valley, where it dooms otherwise successful companies.

article thumbnail

Is Your Team Failing Elegantly? Seven Leadership Mistakes That Wear Away At Your Company’s Will To Win

YoungUpstarts

Read on for a few leadership mistakes that put your team in danger of failing elegantly—along with some remedies to get them back into the winner’s mindset. The right metrics will serve you in enormously useful ways. Measuring what matters is perhaps the very highest use of leadership authority in leading the domain of execution.

article thumbnail

SuperMac War Story 5: Strategy versus Relentless Tactical.

Steve Blank

Metrics – Mine is Bigger Than Yours The first thing SuperMac needed to do was to change how our potential color desktop publishing customers viewed our products versus our competitors’ products. As hokey as it is, when confronted with uncertainty or unknowns, human beings like to be reassured by comparative metrics. Order Here.

article thumbnail

Can You Trust Any vc's Under 40?

Steve Blank

» Dig for Leadership - Stories that try to make the world a better place. , AKPC_IDS += "1128,"; (No Ratings Yet) Loading … Posted in Leadership | Tagged [.] My own metric is that you need experience >= 1.5 Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. carry on reading.