Venture Hacks

“Some managers are uncomfortable with expressing emotion about their dreams, but it’s the passion and emotion that will attract and motivate others.”
– Jim Collins
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
– Maya Angelou

(Both quotes are from The Presentation Secrets of Steve [...]

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Last week, I spoke to a startup that was in discussions to license one of their products to a competitor. The competitor asked for historical sales data about the product, and the startup was wondering whether they should share that information with a competitor. Our conversation went like this:

The book I mentioned in the conversation [...]

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“Buying every book recommended by Venture Hacks.”
– Jonathan Grubb, Founder of Get Satisfaction
The Venture Hacks Bookstore is live and magnificent. Check it out.
It contains 8 of our favorite books for entrepreneurs and we’ll be expanding it over time. We don’t recommend a book unless we refer to it regularly.
We’ve sold $13,385.74 of books since [...]

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Pitching Hacks is here. The PDF is $29 and you can download it immediately. 83 pages. Buy it here.
Samples
We’ve raised $100 million for startups like Epinions, invested another $20 million in companies like Twitter, and advised many others. Pitching Hacks shows you how to apply the simple lessons we’ve learned along the way. Check out [...]

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From The Human Equation:
“Seven dimensions that seem to characterize most if not all of the systems that produce profits through people.

Employment security.
Selective hiring of new personnel [especially screening for attributes that cannot be taught such as attitude and cultural fit.]
Self-managed teams and decentralization of decision making as the basic principles of organizational design.
Comparatively high compensation [...]

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In 1936 (!), old-school economic giant John Maynard Keynes described the spontaneous optimism that drives startups:
“A large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over [...]

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“A raise is only a raise for thirty days; after that, it’s just your salary.”
– David Russo, VP of Human Resources at SAS Institute
This is one of my favorite quotes from the book Hidden Value. It explains why money by itself doesn’t motivate high performance. Money by itself can only motivate the quest for more [...]

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“We do use agile methodologies at Heroku—I developed my own (informal) style of agile at the last company I founded, and brought that forward to this venture.”
– Adam Wiggins, Founder, Heroku
I first learned about lean startups in an excellent book called Agile Software Development—learn more about it in our review.
The second step in my lean [...]

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I just finished reading Certain to Win. It’s about the warfare strategy of John Boyd, as applied to business. In war, you build your team and dismantle the enemy. In business, you build your team, delight the customer, and incidentally dismantle the enemy.
You might know John Boyd as the OODA Loop guy. I never really [...]

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“When confronted with a problem, have you ever stopped and asked why five times?”
– Taiichi Ohno
Summary: Whenever you find a defect, ask why five times to discover the root cause of the problem. Then make corrections at every level of the analysis. By applying five whys whenever you find a defect, you will (1) uncover [...]

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