Alex Payne is a software engineer (& Scala fan), an early Twitter employee, and now an angel investor: he writes succinctly and well, while pulling few punches. His excellent recent post “On Business Madness” tries to nail a number of Big Bad Ideas floating around the startup business noosphere. I’ll Powerpointify his major points first so I can get on to discussing [...]
The biggest shadow hanging over nearly every business book is the ghost of unwarrantable universalism. Which is a fancy way of saying that, whenever any business writer claims “Methodology X worked for me, so it will work for you [despite the fact that your situation is almost certainly completely different]“, you know that pretty much every bullshit warning bell [...]
…how would they make films? First of all, they wouldn’t do anything so consciously planned as write a script – oh no, that would be far too deterministic and control freakish. Only an MBA trapped in the early 1970s would start with a plot treatment, let alone a shooting script, right? No, the #1 thing Lean Startups [...]
Eric Ries’ 2011 book “The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses” has garnered lots of attention, and indeed plenty of favourable reviews. He’s a thoughtful guy, who has been gradually building up interest in his “Lean Startup” ideas over the last few years: if you haven’t really heard of it, [...]
As recommended yesterday by Ben Markland on the London OpenCoffee meetup forum, here’s a video from July 2011 you might enjoy: a 50-minute lecture + Q&A session by Fred Destin at Miniseedcamp Ljubljana. Fred’s a smart guy, and manages to squeeze in the whole lifecycle of startups: founders (the magic number is two), funding, launch, build, the [...]
Opportunity is rather a strange thing. In many ways, it’s the life-blood of business: but what kind of entrepreneur would have the cojones to pierce the pretence of business strategy and put their job title down as “Shameless Opportunist“? [To be honest, I did try it for a while, but got bored and moved on]. Perhaps we collectively need to kill the stigma attached [...]
As I blogged here a while back, there’s broad agreement amongst the startup chatterati that traditional business plans are dead. MBA thinking is (allegedly) useless for entrepreneurs, bootstrapping (and low-end funded) companies are stuck at the front end of the [necessity-----strategy] spectrum, everyone is talking about Eric Ries’ “Lean Startups” (even if nobody yet knows [...]
This Tuesday (25th January 2011), I’ll be off to rub cheeks [*] with the great and the good of UK manufacturing at a BIS-chaired summit in London. That ultra-lean micro-manufacturers (such as my startup Nanodome) can sensibly share governmental mindspace with über-politicized macro-manufacturers (such as Land Rover, Jaguar, etc) may at first seem paradoxical, but [...]
I’m confused and angry: for heaven’s sake, what’s a startup guy supposed to do? On the one hand you’ve got Steve Blank proposing his Customer Development startup loop, Eric Ries proposing his Lean Startup development loop, and (one you may not have read about) Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation loop. These three dovetail neatly into [...]
Just as Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” had an extraordinarily high (buy:read) ratio, Steve Blank’s influential self-published book “Four Steps to the Epiphany” (first three chapters are online here) has an extraordinarily high (cite:buy) ratio – almost everyone relies on online summaries of what it says, rather than actually read it for themselves. In [...]
