Over the last 25 years, almost all of the private sector jobs have been created by businesses less than 5 years old. It’s because of this fact, that I believe most economic development strategies are broken. They focus on convincing bigger, established companies from outside of the region to open up new, remote offices, and focus less on fostering new
In San Francisco, being an Entrepreneur puts you at the top of the food chain and failing is worn like a badge of honour – so most people can’t wait to jump into a pool full of startup Kool-Aid. Even the non-swimmers.
As a teenager I was a “skater.” One of those kids who hung out downtown and annoyed the pedestrians. Skateboarding is how I spent my teenage years. Was I any good? I like to think so. Towards the end of my skating days, I almost got my 360 flips dialed in, used to launch myself straight off huge sets of
Today I want to honour the entrepreneurs in our world. I know I’m super biased, but let’s put that aside for a second. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, gets better without someone standing up and deciding to make it better. I believe most people go through their day and take for granted that someone, at some point in time, decided
In 2009, I was at a party in San Francisco and had a chance to talk with Keith Rabois about startups and why certain ones succeeded, while others failed. As someone who’s invested and been involved with some of the best companies (Square, Slide, PayPal, etc.), his insights were extremely profound. One of my favourite anecdotes was that most great
Over the years I’ve had different mentors. There was Brian who I met when I found myself in jail at 16 years old, and others like Gerry who I reached out to 10 years later when I was weeks away from going bankrupt running a $1.2M dollar company. They showed up when I needed them most. Some refer to them
As the world evolves to one of “instant gratification,” it seems that doing business has as well. Even though I believe in moving fast and creating value for customers as quickly as possible, I do believe that we should take a long term view on building a business. Long term means that you invest the time to find the right
Roy Williams once said, “The risk of insult is the price of Clarity.” I truly believe that. Below are 7 questions that I’ve answered on Clarity using our Answers feature and I thought my responses could provide some Clarity (pun intended) for your startup.
Starting a full blown company is a scary endeavour… that’s why I’ve always started very small. My approach is very iterative. At each step I’m trying to prove if there’s a “there, there.” Or better yet, “Will the dog hunt?”, “Does anyone want this?” I also start off with a few contradictory assumptions:
I first heard of Google Helpouts on July 24th. It made perfect sense seeing that their video product – Hangouts – has been their “silver bullet” of social, it’s only logical. However, it’s not new. What they’re offering (consumer focused / expert video chat) has been tried in the past. In 2006 Skype launched something similar, only to shut it down. Since
