Great piece by Joel Gascoigne: The Habits of Successful People: They Start Small “The challenge for a lot of us is that when we go about our lives, we interact with so many “big” things and we forget or don’t even know how they originally started. It’s difficult to understand how the evolutionary process of […]

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I think it’s really easy for anybody to say “we care about quality” or “quality is job #1”. In fact, I just wrote it twice…it’s very easy to do. But actually executing on quality is extremely difficult as quality takes time and care. And it’s hard to argue for something that takes time when all […]

Continue Reading: Jony Ive on quality

Two definitions of startups: One from an excellent piece by Steve Blank on why companies are not startups: “a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. The corollary for an enterprise is: A company is a permanent organization designed to execute a repeatable and scalable business model. […]

Continue Reading: What, exactly, is a startup?

An interesting framework from Grace Ng in which startups(products) are categorized along two axes: the level of pain you’re solving and the frequency of use: When should your startup focus on UX?. I think this is an interesting way to talk about products and their real value. A lot of mobile apps I’ve tried are […]

Continue Reading: Is your product a vitamin or drug?

An insightful piece by Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti: Is History Repeating Itself? in which Peretti channels David Halberstam’s book The Powers That Be, a history of the media/publishing industry. Halberstam makes the interesting observation that the stalwart news companies we’ve come to rely on were once startups themselves…the New York Times was once a fledgling […]

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Ryan Singer has written a really thoughtful post on product categories: The Category Moat. His thesis is that product categories, those artificial groups that products get put in (for better or worse), are troublesome for innovators. He says: “It’s natural to identify with a product category. You think “we make product management software” or “we […]

Continue Reading: How to redefine a product category