Archive - page 3
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Interview at Architalks#7
I gave a quick interview at Archipelago’s Archietalk#7 at the Sugar Club on Tuesday 7th. Despite two pints of guinness I managed to be more or less coherent about the “Startup Spring” in Dublin.
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The Lean Portfolio
In previous posts I discussed why serial entrepreneurs should upgrade to parallelism, and how startup founders might band together to create a startup cooperative. It is this thinking that is shaping our new company, Scale Front. In addition to adopting Lean, we want to develop many ideas in parallel. We are calling this approach “The Lean Portfolio”. Much as The Lean Startup articulates what the best startups are doing, “The Lean Portfolio” is a name for the next logical step.
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The Lean Reality Check
This isn’t a critique of the Lean Startup. I don’t have the guts to do that. No, this is just an attempt to put the Lean Startup back in its box, from which it is has been inadvertently liberated. Don’t get me wrong - I believe that Eric Ries and friends have given entrepreneurialism a great gift, by codifying best practices and defining a common language that has made it possible for us to talk about our process. I’ve found the Lean Startup movement very useful in terms of refining my own thinking, but have encountered some who have adopted it too religiously, and are in danger of grossly misapplying its teachings. In response I’ve compiled my top 5 Lean Startup reality checks. Read on if you dare, and comment if you can.
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Incubate or Accelerate?
I once found myself standing upon a small wooden platform at a great height above the ground, willing myself to trust the harness I was attached to, and step into the void. I was attempting the zip line on an adventure weekend, which is an exhilarating and wholely unnatural activity involving pulleys and wires. As I stood there, cerebral cortex wrestling with limbic system and otherwise paralysed, the staff member manning the platform performed his solitary function: he pushed me.
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The Startup Cooperative
In my last post I talked about our new approach to developing startup ideas: doing lots of them in parallel. It was my most visited article to date, and the feedback was that many entrepreneurs are already doing the same thing, deliberately or otherwise. I now want to talk about solving the big problem we face as parallel entrepreneurs - how to collaborate. I want to describe a new kind of organisation, the startup co-operative, and provide a convincing argument for why they should exist and how they can run.
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The Parallel Entrepreneur
My first shot at business was early in college, making simple websites for small companies. It was the first step on a career of company creation. Many years later I’m proud of never having had a real job, and prouder of the startups that turned into real businesses. Over the last year, I’ve begun to think about “startuping” more scientifically, with a focus on managing risk. Under the best of conditions most startups will fail due to any number of unpredictable intrinsic or external issues. This is all in the game, as they say in The Wire, but these learning experiences can take up a lot of time. Time is money, and if you’re an entrepreneur, its your own money, not someone else’s. I started DemonWare 10 years ago, I hope to repeat that success many more times. I’m establishing a strategy to help me do that. In this post, I want to talk about the risk equation facing entrepreneurs, nail down a few facts that we can steer by, and propose a new way to start companies.
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Fixing the Boxee Box Remote
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Taking Software Seriously
I often find myself struggling to communicate to non-geeks just how complicated software engineering is, probably because there’s no familiar lines of work that are any way comparable. There’s a danger that I often end up looking like I have an even bigger head than previously imagined, going to such lengths to convince everyone that my field is more special that theirs, but I feel compelled to correct the attitudes of the multitude in business who think that programmers are glorified typists who should get back in line.
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The Dangers of Excessive Effectiveness
My last post, on effectiveness and efficiency via the technology of Transformers, was sufficiently well received that I thought I should offer up a sequel, in way of warning. The flipside of continuously striving for maximum effectiveness at work is that its hard to leave it in work and not bring it home with you.
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The Energon Methodology
Several years ago, during DemonWare’s initial growth spurt, I was a very stressed out guy. I had difficulty keeping track of the company’s commitments, of meetings, conference calls, trips and conferences, not to mention the regular work of handling 100+ emails per day and managing product development. I had difficulty sleeping, and probably wasn’t much fun to be around.