Startups provide both the luxury and the risk of having very little data on which to base the important early decisions. A business model must be created out of whole cloth, and generally it’s a compilation of assumptions piled on top of other assumptions. …
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9 articles in category Essays
At the time of this writing it happens to be the opening weekend of 2017 college football. There were some great games, but there were a lot of bad decisions made by coaches and by individual players. Some coaches are already on the hot …
Read more →One difficult part in startup decision making is choosing the decisions to make. Some may be obvious, but many have the effect of trying to fix things that aren’t broken. Let’s take the example that you’re missing your sales targets. Do you make changes …
Read more →An excellent article in The New York Times on August 19, 2017 explored how creativity declines as we age. The authors described how we grow from a stage of exploration in early years to later years of exploitation of the knowledge we have accumulated. …
Read more →This is the second installment on startup founders making decisions with a deeply ingrained sense of context. In episode one we covered hiring, compensation, cap table, investors, board and governance, and self-awareness. Here comes a half-dozen more. My previous essay on this topic included …
Read more →Today marks the first email distribution of Startup Decision Making, and this brief post welcomes those of you on my TechDrawl list to join me in this endeavor. My intent, as you see on the site, is to produce a “super-useful field guide for …
Read more →One of the most common mistakes I see in startups is making decisions that lose sight of the context, including the past, present, and future. The New York Times reported on August 9, 2017, that dealing with Confederate remembrances on its campus has “put …
Read more →I attended the Austin Technology Incubator’s SEAL presentation night this past week. The teams on stage spent the summer thrashing out their business models, with a goal not to sell them at this event but to reveal whether their idea would be a go …
Read more →I have made tens of thousands of business decisions and observed many times that number. The most common mistake I see in the decision making process is losing sight of context. The choices you make on Day 1 will affect your actions on Day …
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