The last 60 days have been eventful at Black Mesa Ventures and for our new GEOINTELIS online service. I haven’t had much time to blog. We are in the middle of an industry-wide revolution in the delivery of software, moving from desktop and client/server delivery
Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets
The short story is that a prominent start up financial services firm allegedly faked their audits and raised about $90MM in funding from VC firms over a couple of years: Canopy Financial Accused Of Serious Financial Fraud, Investors Burned Canopy Financial Turns Into Sad, Comical
There’s a lot of discussion in small business and start up literature about creating a “system” that runs your business. You document your processes and hand those documents off to your people. You script your back office. You script your sales process. You script customer
Time management is worthless. It really is. I’ve spent plenty of “time” trying to get things done, solve problems and create value. But often, the most productivity comes from a few hours here and there during which I am energetic and focused. So, don’t think
As work progresses at Black Mesa Ventures on the launch version of GEOINTELIS, I ran across this blog entry: Ghost in the Pixel » Only real artists ship I heard Guy Kawasaki say something similar at a conference I was at least year: Just ship
Friend of mine who has recently become director of operations at a hardware/web 2.0 company (yep, pretty exotic), put out a request asking for recommendations for building a world class customer service organization. Good for him! So, how do you build world class customer service?
Pay for performance not for effort. Of course, every entrepreneur knows this, because this is how they pay themselves. But they sometimes forget that money and performance need to be closely aligned throughout the company and that rewards need to flow downwards based on actual
Keep the vision alive. Starting a business can be boring, long, tedious, and bureaucratic. It really isn’t romantic. But don’t forget what you started out to do. Take specific times, events, meetings to talk about and review the vision. Don’t get so caught up in
Don’t be afraid to lead and to lead by doing. This may seem obvious, but it sometimes gets lost. What I mean by this is that you shouldn’t be afraid to take a true leadership role in your company, and that the best way to