Seattle has long been in need of good VC bloggers. What Mark Suster has done for LA, Brad Feld has done for Boulder, and Fred Wilson has done for NYC just through writing high quality blogs (nevermind all the other great stuff they do for those ecosystems) is remarkable and game-changing and we need it.
Time Recovery Hacks
By Startup life has intense time requirements. In the early phases, there’s a lot of nose-to-the-grindstone need, and if the company successfully scales, the internal and external demands on your time rise dramatically. With this blog, and my commitment to staying close to the everyday issues of the marketing industry, I’ve had to build up a
24 Things I Know Now That I Wish I Knew Then
By I really liked Rae Hoffman’s post from last month, Entrepreneurial Lessons: 48 Things I Know Now That I Wish I Knew Then. And, while I don’t agree with everything on her list (at least as it applies to the experiences I’ve had), I felt compelled to take up the format she’d presented and do something similar.
More Retweets Lead to More Twitter Followers, Right?
By Being a moderately analytical marketer, I should be pretty smart about assuming a correlation between two events that might not necessarily exist. And yet, for the past few years, I’ve foolishly done the opposite. Below is a chart of my Twitter follower growth from Followerwonk over the past 60 days: The spikes are probably days
Never Have the “What Would It Take to Keep You Here?” Conversation
By As a CEO, many of the scariest days I’ve faced have been those when a critical member of our team told us they were leaving the company. Your heart sinks. Your mind races. Your pulse pounds. Everything else fades into the background. On startup teams of 5-50 people, a team member lost is almost always
There is No Work/Life Balance
By I recently started getting some CEO coaching help from Jerry Colonna, at Brad & Amy‘s recommendation. The first session was introductory. The second one was revelatory. We talked about the Ireland trip (which Geraldine wrote about here). It was a really tough one, and it shook our marital relationship more than I thought was possible.
Some Thoughts on Firing Employees
By This past week, I read a terrific Quora thread on firing. The depth and breadth of answers shows the wide range of opinions and practices on the subject, and it made me think about the topic for this blog. Companies are rarely transparent about how and why they let people go, so hopefully we can
The Missing Narrative
By I love the Green Bay Packers. I love the history of the team. I love that the town of Green Bay’s (population 107,00) residents own the team rather than a billionaire in a big city. I love the stories of struggles and near-bankruptcies they faced in their history and how the sale of shares that
When Brilliant Minds Become Brilliant Jerks
By The NYTimes Bits Blog has a worthwhile read from last week entitled “What Do You Do With the Brilliant Jerks?” I’d encourage startup founders and team members to take 8 minutes and read it thoroughly. On its face, the article didn’t strike me as especially controversial, but the comments(and some of the responses on social
Yellow Shoes and Personal vs. Company Branding
By For the first few years that I spoke at conferences in the search marketing field, I consistently wore a single pair of yellow shoes. Initially, it was so I could be recognized by the many people I’d formed friendships with on the forums and blog comments of the SEO world. In time, it grew to