Posts filed under “Leadership”
If you screw up, admit it
When you screw up, admit it. Sometimes, even when it’s not your fault, you should take responsibility (those of you with significant others know exactly what I’m talking about.) Jetblue is one of my favorite airlines and they screwed up big-time. I just got this in my inbox from them: where to download tangled online [...]
Great Post on Hiring At Early Stage Startups (via Ask the Wizard)
Dick Costolo has another great post up on his blog called Too Many Chiefs or Too Many Indians. The post is about hiring at early stage startups and whether to hire experience or youthful enthusiasm first. Dick favors experience initially and has some good arguments backing it up. First of all, in the first year [...]
Don't forget about your Ops Team
You’re not done until it’s tested, deployed and running. When working hard to build a site you think users will rave about, it’s critical to not lose sight of the operations support required to test, deploy and keep your site running. The best site in the world is a complete waste of time if pages [...]
“They're Not Going to Say I really love Amazon, but I wish their prices were a little higher.” – Jeff Bezos Interview in Harvard Business Review
There’s a great interview of Jeff Bezos in the October 2007 issue of HBR. I think Amazon is making some great moves lately with their web services initiatives, their foray into movies and music and after reading this article I came away even more impressed than I was before. It helps to base your strategy [...]
What he said…
Dave has a great post up about transitions and he talks about folks at Judy’s Book going above and beyond the call of duty to make sure that work gets done and things get fixed, even as they were moving on to other things. I’m in violent agreement with Dave on this one. People have [...]
Couponlooker Improvements
We released some significant new functionality on couponlooker today. (We also put out some new features on Judy’s Book which I’m really excited about but more on that tomorrow.) Kurt and Dave (Ops and Test) deserve a special thank you for great work in helping us iron out the kinks in this release and making [...]
Great Post on 'Me too' Companies (via On Startups)
There is a fantastic post on ‘On Startups’ (a blog I highly recommend) talking about why ‘me-too’ companies aren’t always a bad idea. ‚ÄúYes, there are competitors, but nobody has built a product yet that tangled download movie users really like‚Ķ‚Äù And there, quite simply is the crux of the motivation. ¬†It is easy to [...]
Daring to think big
Andy Monfried has a great post on his blog about having the courage to make decisions that aren’t safe and goes on talk about how he doesn’t want to build another cool company, but rather to change how media is bought. Not only is this post though-provoking and right¬† on the money, it’s engaging and [...]
Change is hard (but worth it)
There’s a new article on Techcrunch about our strategic shift from being a local review pure play to focusing on deals and saving users money. From the article: Judy‚Äôs Book, in contrast, made some fairly dramatic strategic changes last fall, in the hope of avoiding the same fate. They de-focused on local reviews, and went [...]
Great post on Term Sheets (via A Sack of Seattle)
Andy has a great post on his blog about negotiating term sheets. In it he also alludes to what I think is one of the most important things you can do in business – forming a network of people who want you to succeed. …life is long and you don’t know whether this company is [...]