The existential crisis for the ages “What is the difference between a Product Owner and a Product Manager?” Melissa Perri Jun 29, 2017 · 7 min read It’s an interesting question and one that takes time
Leer en español Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the November–December 1974 issue of HBR and has been one of the publication’s two best-selling reprints ever. For its reissue as
Mark Suster Mar 11 Photo by Juliette F on Unsplash Networking is a critical part of relationship building and there is no event more valuable to building relationships than the proverbial “breaking of bread” with people. I personally run many group lunches & dinners and I attend even more so I’ve…
For decades, the consulting industry has bred an army of road warriors with hefty travel expenses. New Signature’s 20% onsite delivery model is leading the industry to a far more sustainable balance,
Two blockchain veterans are gearing up to launch what could be the first cryptocurrency exchange in the Persian Gulf to be licensed by a central bank. Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, Rain Financial has opened its public waiting list after a year in the Central Bank of Bahrain's fintech sandbox .…
Buy me a coffee Become a Patron TLDR After starting the CC mini- project in our last post, we ran into several challenges, all of which we more or less resolved (or avoided altogether). In the end, the full pipeline looks like (see detailed explanations below) this: python3 parse_cc_index .py…
Clients Pay For Value, Not For Time A few years ago, I was a much-put-upon grunt programmer at a large Japanese megacorp. I go home every Christmas to Chicago, so I was going to be in Chicago during December 2009. I have an Internet buddy in Chicago named Thomas Ptacek. We met on Hacker News. He's…
Featured a day ago Join over 125,000 developers building location-aware experiences with Foursquare technology and data. Reviews +8 reviews Helpful Adam DePasqua Founder of To Eat List Pros: Lots of features Cons: Little to no dashboard to give you information on API stats. We tried multiple options…
Samuel Hulick I turn web experiences into better life experiences. May 2 Why Is Your Onboarding So Fragile? In 2006, I made a big decision: I resolved to throw everything I had into pursuing a career in software design. I’d been handcrafting GeoCities-like websites for myself and others since the…
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . July 2013 One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator isto do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believethat startups either take off or don't. You build something, makeit available, and if you've made a better…
Recently, I caught up with two great entrepreneurs/CEOs, both doing a few million in ARR and growing quickly. Doing well. Both had a roughly similar make-up of customers, split between: Big Customers (Fortune 500 / Global 2000 types) — not many, but each paying a lot; Small and medium-sized…
Deadlines happen in real life, and they work. Christmas happens on December 25 and virtually everyone who celebrates buys their presents on time. Taxes are due on April 15 and few people ask for an extension. Deadlines create urgency and some stress, and they motivate action. In product development,…
Many companies face the paradox of wanting to build a delightful product without knowing if people actually want the product until it’s released. Spotify’s vision was to give people the right music at the right time while incentivizing artists by paying them based on number of shares their music…
Entrepreneurs are psychologically unique. In a world where up to 90% of startups fail, the most enduring visionaries will push through, energized by the idea of experiencing freedom and success alongside the 10% who beat the odds. They’re resilient. They’re adaptable. They’re extreme risk-takers.…
A few years ago I used to be a hothead. Whenever anyone said anything, I’d think of a way to disagree. I’d push back hard if something didn’t fit my world-view. It’s like I had to be first with an opinion – as if being first meant something. But what it really meant was that I wasn’t thinking hard…
Lazy Leadership Why I rarely go to the office, only see my team a couple times a week, and let other people make important decisions. Let’s just get this out there: on paper, I’m a terrible CEO. I avoid going into the office, I only meet with my team a couple times a week, and I especially hate…
Getting Your Series A Mojo Back You Need to Find Your Mojo A Chip On Your Shoulder A few years ago I wrote a blog post on entrepreneurs with a chip on their shoulders . I think it’s an important read. A chip on one’s shoulder as in, “Fuck the system, it’s broken and I want to fix it” is exactly the…
The best lessons in business come in plain English and speak uncomfortable truths. One such example is something we learned from Hunter Walk . During a conversation with Ben, our Director of Growth, Hunter pointed out how fundamental it is to avoid low-impact work. To explain, he drew a 2×2 graph…
People are unpredictable. And they are animals. These two tenets are often overlooked by startups trying to appeal to customers based on rational assumptions. Remember, people buy expensive wine they know nothing about. They place value on what their peers value whether they want it or not. They…
Joseph Floyd Crunch Network Contributor Joseph Floyd is a principal at Emergence Capital,/a>. Last Friday, LinkedIn, Salesforce and Workday lost $18B in market capitalization. To put that in perspective, these three SaaS companies lost more in market cap on Friday than 15 current SaaS leaders are…
The Resetting of the Startup Industry Much has changed in the past four months of the technology startup world and how outsiders value the business. Of course it’s too early to predict whether this is a trend or an aberration but the smartest people I know in the industry are predicting the former.…
December 2014 Many startups go through a point a few months before they die wherealthough they have a significant amount of money in the bank, they'realso losing a lot each month, and revenue growth is either nonexistentor mediocre. The company has, say, 6 months of runway. Or to putit more…
Let's imagine that you are the founder of a company that has successfully raised an angel or institutional round and are currently in a situation where you have 12 months or less of runway. For weekly recaps of The Macro, sign up here . The hardest part of dealing with a low runway situation is…
A little more empathy Posted in Blog & News on 06 January 2017 The other morning I was listening to “Hurt” by Christina Aguilera. It’s a song about a daughter who loses her father and never got a chance to tell him how much he meant to her … Read More The COSMOS Connection Posted in Blog & News on…
Last updated:Thursday, December 3, 2015 You may have noticed that we’ve chatted with a lot of really smart people through our Inside Look interview series. As we wrap up 2015, we’re revisiting some of the sage advice we’ve encountered from these founders, CTOs, and engineers. We’re starting with a…
Startups are the search to find order in chaos. Steve Blank At a board meeting last week I watched as the young startup CEO delivered bad news. “Our current plan isn’t working. We can’t scale the company. Each sale requires us to handhold the customer and takes way too long to close. But I think I…
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . July 2009 Now that the term "ramen profitable" has become widespread, I oughtto explain precisely what the idea entails. Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay thefounders' living expenses. This is a different form of…
Michael Sippey has been shipping software since that meant literally shipping software. “We used to have a field in our CRM to indicate whether the customer needed 5¼-inch floppies or 3½-inch floppies,” he says. It was the early 90s — and the process and structure of product management was still…
When I first heard of “the sheet,” I assumed it was bogus. Word was that Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky had boiled down his strategic road map–all of Airbnb’s secret plans for 2014–onto a single piece of paper. Yet on an early evening in late January, I am sitting in a conference room at Airbnb’s San…
Written by Sam Altman · Illustrated by Gregory Koberger · Spanish translation We spend a lot of time advising startups. Though one-on-one advice will always be crucial, we thought it might help us scale Y Combinator if we could distill the most generalizable parts of this advice into a sort of…
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . July 2013 One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator isto do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believethat startups either take off or don't. You build something, makeit available, and if you've made a better…
This article examines the characteristics that make a data business valuable. It will be useful for entrepreneurs refining the strategy of an early stage data business, and those seeking to best position their data business for a successful funding round. At Cue Ball, we are specialists at investing…
3 Steps to Finding Product/Market Fit To build a successful business, you have to be able to effectively define, develop, and achieve product/market fit. In other words, success doesn’t come when you wait to launch until your products or ideas are perfect — instead, it comes when you’re able to…
Ugh, then there are those times when I feel dead inside. I wake up early and swing on the pre-school swingset like a pervert. The sun rises and instead of being orange and blue and beautiful it’s white and glaring and it’s a terrible terrible sunrise, burning everything inside of me. Another day.…
The HubSpot Culture Code: Creating A Company We Love Like HubSpot, the Culture Code is a perpetual "work in progress," so we'll update it periodically. What you see now is Version 16 of the deck. The presentation has been very well received, with over 1.3 million views so far.. (Thank you!) As we…
This article is by Dave Girouard , CEO of personal finance startup Upstart , and former President of Google Enterprise Apps. He’s well known for building Google’s enterprise apps division into a $1B+ global business. Here he shares his tips for making speed fundamental to your company. I’ve long…
Last summer, Matthew Bellows was handed a startup’s PR dream: A sit-down with The New York Times . But he didn’t talk about how his company Yesware , the sales productivity software maker, had quickly attracted thousands of enterprise users. He touted not a single product feature. Instead, Bellows…
Dan Kador is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Keen IO , a custom analytics development platform. We had the opportunity to sit down with Dan and chat about the realities of building a start-up, investors, diversity in tech, and the role of a CTO. An Inside Look is a new series on the…
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