Category: Uncategorized

Tom Nies:

What are the three factors for entrepreneurial success?

• Passion
• Luck
• A willingness to risk everything

Technorati tags: entrepreneurship

Don Box:

For the past few years, it has become fashionable to embrace a dynamic language such as Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby. While I’ll admit to having a short but pleasurable tryst with Ruby, I believe I have found true love in the dialect of Lisp called Scheme.

I never thought I’d see the day when MSDN Magazine published an article on Lisp.

And there was much rejoicing!

Technorati tags: programming, lisp, scheme, microsoft

Jeff Cornwall:

I invited Bobby Guy, a local attorney with Waller/Lansden here in Nashville, to speak in my MBA class last week. While it may not seem that unusual or blog-worthy to mention that I had a lawyer in my class, it is his area of law that makes his visit unusual. For you see, Mr. Guy practices bankruptcy law. How often do entrepreneurs get to hear from a person who understands business failure from the inside before they start their ventures?

From this perspective, Mr. Guy clearly has a very instructive message for entrepreneurs. He likes to give a talk called “A View From Down-Under: The Top Ten Reasons Companies That Should Make It…Don’t.”

Technorati tags: mistakes, startup, management, bankruptcy

Joel Reymont:

I released OpenPoker under a dual GPL/commercial license today. The project is not bringing in much money and poker engines are a commodity item. I still think that Erlang is the best language for a truly scalable poker server and will be maintaining OpenPoker going forward.

I not sure that it’s his intention, but Joel is doing more to advance the case for Erlang as a language for scalable net-enabled applications than anybody I know. Keep it up, Joel!

Technorati tags: software, poker, erlang, oss

Larry Borsato:

A good friend of mine in the valley used to say that when you were at the point that you needed to hire an HR person, it was the beginning of the end. And when you actually created written job descriptions, the fun was gone.

Technorati tags: startup, hr, fun, motivation

Dave Pollard:

I came across an eight-year-old article the other day entitled Discovering New Points of Differentiation, by Ian MacMillan and Rita McGrath (not online, you can buy it from HBS). It provides a rigorous approach to identifying ways to differentiate your company from competitors on more than just product or service. Here’s a synopsis…

Technorati tags: business, marketing, strategy, innovation, startup

Bruce Andor (via Dane Carlson):

The dark secret is that a majority of soloists have no interest in building a major entrepreneurial enterprise. Many of them don’t even like business. These soloists thrive on the work they do, and would be very cranky if you asked them to give it up. For many, their work is a fundamental expression of their creativity.

What they want is a lifestyle. They want the holy grail of freedom and quality of life! They want to do work that feeds them, work that matters. They want to see their kids grow up. They do not want to be Donald Trump!

Technorati tags: lifestylepreneur, entrepreneurship

Niel Davidson (via Mary Sullivan):

Stories about your customers are everywhere in your organization, in the chitchat in the lunchroom, in emails, at the coffee machine. Such stories are easy to tap into, and collectively they can increase the levels of customer understanding, insight and creativity in the organization, without expensive research.

Technorati tags: customers, research, marketing, service

David Cowan:

Without revealing exactly which areas we’re scouring (we’re open to all of them), I can share one important lesson on assessing consumer investments, one that we have learned the hard way–from either bad investments or regret from passing on good deals. The lesson is that venture capitalists don’t have a clue how consumers will behave.

Technorati tags: vc, funding, prediction

Wouter Deelman:

It’s more difficult in one country than another to do business. That’s the idea behind a study published last week by the World Bank, ranking 155 countries on a set of criteria including Starting a business, Hiring and firing, Getting credit, Protecting investors, Paying taxes and Trading across borders.

Technorati tags: economics, entrepreneurship, international