The Boring Life of a Focused, Disciplined Startup Since we’ve started LinkSquares over a year ago, I’ve noticed how often people ask “So how’s it going?”. And I always say “Great! etc.” I mean no one actually ever shares would any bad news in that situation. Dont get me wrong, its great that people are interested and supportive of our venture, and more… Read More
False Positives As we’re working through our first few sales at LinkSquares, I thought it would be fun to reflect on the process so far. One thing that stood out to me was what we call “false positives” in sales. Wikipedia describes it as: a false positive is an error in data reporting in which a test… Read More
Customer “Dating” in Startup Sales From the outside looking in, most people think think startup sales is all about hustle. To be fair they are right, but more often than not no one talks about the strategy of selling a new product/idea to the market. To me, finding customers for your new product is a lot like dating. You’re… Read More
The Artist And The Scientist I was asked recently, “what does someone who works in early stage technology do?” After thinking about it for a moment, I said I thought it sits somewhere between an artist and a scientist. If you look at different aspects of building a technology company you can see a clear division in activities that take on more of… Read More
Couple Updates I recently went and did a much needed update on my site and blog. It had been a couple years, as I’ve been pretty busy working for Backupify, an enterprise security company that was acquired by Datto, a New York based security company in late 2014. I thought it was time to make some changes… Read More
The Value of Working for a Startup I recently read a post from Rob May that he wrote about a month ago. He was explaining why he was really glad he spent his 20’s working on startups, but how difficult it was at times considering the stress, failures, and seeing friends who had nice jobs, new houses, etc. He was saying that… Read More
The Value Of A Large Group Of Investors In 2012 my company, Ucloser, closed a seed round of funding. The round included 20 investors, mostly angels. Besides the cash, the round afforded us several other benefits that I think were important. I thought I would list a few below: Funding Connections – Getting the first few angels allowed us to get the next… Read More
Lift App Typically after I hear about a new mobile app, I'll download it and try it out. I'll use it a few times, and on the rare occurrence I begin to use it daily, I move it to my iPhone homescreen. I recently moved the Lift app over there. It was the first app I've moved over in… Read More
3 Things I Want To Do More Of This Year This year I want to try and focus on doing only a few things, but doing them really well. Here are the three things I’d like to focus on: Writing – I’ve committed to trying to blog each evening during the week. I know I wont be perfect, with some missed days and bad… Read More
Identity When a product is created, the challenge is to find a niche and market that product. Â Navigating that process is really tough, and it typically does not follow a straight line. Â The single most difficult thing young companies seem to have a challenge with is finding their identity. Companies are always trying to perfect the… Read More