General Business

One of the great challenges of business in general and smaller, fast growing businesses in particular is figuring out the balance between near term focus and long term vision.  While all companies become slaves to the calendar (striving for quarterly sales targets, specific product release dates, etc.) too many never look up to see where they are really headed.  I’m not talking about making sure you have the latest IDC report on your industry on your bedstand, I’m talking about having a meaningful understanding of your business, you competitors and spending real time focusing on how and where you are going to take your company. The typical paradigm for this is wrong, in my estimation – and most companies that…

Brad has a nice series running on patents which I’ve enjoyed a lot (I think the existing patent system is completely hosed, totally ineffective and open to blatant abuses of power – see this post from Jason for the perfect example). Well today, there’s a glimmer of hope that change may be on the way as the administration and it’s head patent policeman Jon Dudas announced the intent (note the gap between intent and action, but at least it’s a first step) to reform the patent system. While I generally like the idea of requiring patent filers to include more information on why their invention is ‘novel’ the gem for me in today’s announcement is the idea of opening up…

Would you work for $1? Here’s a few people who do.

Let’s say you have some bad news to deliver to your board/investors. For example, you lost a huge customer or your software has a major bug that’s going to set you back 6 months or your CFO just got arrested for cheating on his taxes, etc. Should you: Take out an advertisement in the Journal announcing this and then send out a note to your board with a link Rent one of those sign trucks and have it drive by your investors offices repeatedly Bury it deep inside a board book and hope no one notices it Don’t say anything – your investors/board are too involved in your business already and ask way too many questions as it is None…

I was on a call recently where I had to ask someone 4 times to repeat what they were saying using more exact terms.  It’s a major pet peeve of mine and so prevalent I’m losing my ability to be nice about it.  Perhaps it’s a result of being a kinder, gentler society or maybe it’s just because we’ve all sat through too many PowerPoint presentations or maybe we’re all testing our political-speak skills, but whatever it is the result is the absolutely maddening trend of people not saying directly what they mean and forcing the rest of us to play 20 questions to tease it out of them. Here’s an example: Direct description:  This is a red circle “Business”…

When you know it’s not right, it isn’t. A fellow board member said this to me the other day and I wrote it down as something I wanted to remind myself of every once in a while. She was referring to the human tendency to act slowly in the face of clear evidence and in particular to venture capitalists’ reluctance to be decisive. A good thought to ponder.

“Successful people spend the majority of their time on major things. Unsuccessful people spend the majority of their time on minor things.” Relayed to me by my good friend Chris, who is dutifully following this advice…

My last post generated a bit of harsh comment (a few on the site, but many more in private e-mail and on a few other sites that picked up the theme).  Apparently I came off as pretty insensitive (perhaps ‘jerk’ would be an appropriate description) in how I described my approach to some of the “can I get 30 minutes of your time?” meetings that I seem to have a difficult time saying no to (note to commenters: I do see value in the meetings and as a general rule spending time getting to know as many people as possible. Hey – at least I TAKE the meetings . . .). Trying to roll with that theme, I’ve been thinking…

I should probably do a better job of controlling my meeting schedule. I don’t and as a result end up with too many ‘networking’ meetings (i.e., where I’m on the receiving end of the networking). I have two observations about these interactions: 1) Left to their own devices, people tend to ramble . . . ramble . . . ramble. The conversation lacks focus, direction and purpose. Sometimes this is fun; most of the time it’s a waste of time. 2) Most people don’t seem to know what they want to get out of meetings like these. This clearly contributes to the rambling – there’s no focus because there’s no clear end point or goal. To speed things along a…

In a recent note Bill writes: I love your blog, but if you’re going to use TLAs (three letter acronyms), you need to spell out the first reference so the uneducated (like myself) know what you’re talking about. When you write about NOLs, us neophytes from Colorado think you’re talking about spending three days alone in the wilderness. 😉 He’s right. I sometimes forget how insular venture/finance/technology can be. In one of my very first ever business experiences – a training session at Morgan Stanley – I spent an hour listening to a Morgan associate (who happened to be the assignments associate from the group I was about to start working with) talk about the “Morgan way of doing DCF…