Real Market vs Expectations Market — Your Investor Pitch

This is a modified version of a post from the current Leanlaunch Pad session. One of the most challenging aspects of business today is that the financial world mostly lives in an "Expectations Market" (investing/gambling) and your success as a startup requires that you immerse yourself in a "Real Market" (servicing customers). As you progress...

What A Beautiful Rant! Willful Blindness – A full frontal assault on the image of our daily lives

What a beautiful rant! Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril by Margaret Heffernan is so much fun. The book moves with the pace of a Sci Fi Thriller like Kill Decision. She just rips our day-to-day existence to shreds! Page after page. But like a Sci-Fi Thriller I was turning pages...

Web Sales – Readings & Links

This is a modified version of a post from the current Leanlaunch Pad session. It's intention is to provide a set of "Introduction to Web Sales" readings. Web Sales. On the topic of Selling on the Web the Startup Owner’s Manual « Steve Blank is a great resource. There are a couple things extra that...

What is Sales? Recommended Readings

This is a modified version of a post from the current Leanlaunch Pad session. It's intention is to provide a set of "Introduction to Sales" readings. Let’s talks Sales. I cover the positioning of a Sales department in a company by Steve Blank. The “Spirit of Sales” by Malcolm Gladwell on Ronco founder Ron Popeil....

Riffing on Consumerization of Technology (@pmarca tech crunch interview )

Marc Andreessen On The Future Of Enterprise | TechCrunch is a “beautiful riff” on the Consumerization of Enterprise Software. If you’re in the technology business you’ve known this for a long time. The consumer problems are often “more technically challenging” than the Enterprise/Telco problems. Thus the consumer solutions are often very good at a fraction...