Archive for the ‘ My Startup ’ Category

When to be Scrappy

When I was 16 I asked my dad for a car because thats what 16 year-olds do in America, and because even though I went to a public high school everyone and their mom drove a BMW or a Bentley.  My dad put the kibosh on my dreams of being a teenage driver.  To him [ READ MORE ]

Fundraising and Feedback

Dave McClure’s recent post on investing before product/market fit inspired me to address a few observations I’ve made as an entrepreneur when pitching to investors (angels and VCs), crafting my product proposal, and explaining the vision of my current startup. Risk and Rejection As a first time entrepreneur I understand that I’m seen as a huge risk, [ READ MORE ]

Retaining Startup Engineers

In my previous post I focused on the key issues to think about when recruiting a startup engineer.  In this post I’d like to shift focus on how to keep them. Engineers jump ship early for various reasons, its usually a combination of the following three: instability in management, unclear path to an exit, and work that [ READ MORE ]

Recruiting Startup Engineers

With the startup market taking off, there is always a clamor to find good engineers, developers, and designers.  People constantly ask if I know people, where to find the so-called ’startup-engineers’, or even where the can find someone like me. Here are some things to think about for those on the recruiting side: 1. When to start [ READ MORE ]

Startup Founder: Prepping, Prototyping, and Pitching

In 2 days I’ll be celebrating my 6 month anniversary of leaving my last startup and working on my current one (cue Jay-Z).  Having been a startup engineer I knew I had to prepare myself for the transition to founder. The long hours of a startup engineer are drastically different from the long hours of a founder. [ READ MORE ]

Perspective on Pitching

Having been at the ground floor of a startup before I’ve experienced writing the first lines of code, shipping a product, and then getting acquired, but I never had the experience of pitching or seeing someone else do.  Last Wednesday I did my first pitch for my startup, BizeeBee, in front of about 75 people, [ READ MORE ]

Team Dynamics

For the past three months, as a startup founder, I have been focused on customer development, creating a product roadmap, understanding the complexities of the industry of my product, and establishing a company culture.  This month in particular I’ve added another component to the mix: team dynamics. To me team dynamics goes beyond culture fit.  Culture [ READ MORE ]

The Hive is Live!

The BizeeBee team has been hard at work putting together our product.  Our first addition is our blog The Hive.  Please check it out! Tweet This Post[ READ MORE ]

My Product Development Process

Design books are some of my most favorite and enlightening reads of all time like: Donald Norman’s DOET, John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity, and Indi Young’s book Mental Models. They bridge together reason, emotion, and the physical faculties of humans in order to create tools to help people live everyday. As an engineer I [ READ MORE ]

Momentum

Being at the ground floor of a startup is the best, not that I’ve ever come in at a later stage, but having gone through the full lifecycle of one startup I can vouch for the beginning being the most exciting and romantic period.  You define the product, engage with users, research technologies to use [ READ MORE ]