Ok, I will confess that I am a process improvement fanatic. I suppose it has something to do with my experiences early in my career working in a TQM environment at TSYS, and working with a key customer (AT&T Universal Card Services) to win the Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award. In reality, though, it probably has …
I learned to play the game of chess as a kid, although I’m certainly no Gary Kasparov. I have always been intrigued by its simultaneous complexity and simple elegance. After running several startups, and going through the exit process more than once, I have come to the conclusion that running a company is very akin …
Okay, I’m not ashamed to admit it. I’ve been listening (and watching) to Prince since the late 1970s – long before Purple Rain. Obviously, he has come a long way in his career since those early days. Sure, there was the wacky time where he changed his name to a symbol in a public protest …
I came across this great story on the Kenneth Cole website. There is definitely a lesson here for early-stage entrepreneurs on resourcefulness, and doing what it takes to get the job done. As a side-note, Kenneth Cole is now doing revenues of over $500M each year. Cheers.
I have been contemplating writing this post for about 2 years, and have been jotting down various notes for it for at least a year. There are lots of ways to unethically nudge your fledgling company along. For example, you can artificially inflate your numbers. “You’ll love our site! Millions of other people are already …
One of the things that we’ve implemented for the upcoming StartupLounge.com Capital Connections event is that we require all attendees to provide us their “one-line” elevator pitch as part of the application process. We limit them to 125 characters. How important is it? Extremely. You have 125 characters to convince our steering committee that your …
Sooner or later, every startup struggles with the issue of how best to offer healthcare benefits to their employees. In a recent StartupLounge.com podcast, we were joined by Angus Mcrae, a guy who does a ton of consulting and brokering for healthcare benefits for Atlanta-area high-tech startups (for companies like N2 Broadband/Tandberg, ViTrue, etc.) As …
For a great sneak peek at Vendormate, check out the latest installment of the StartupLounge.com podcast. Vendormate’s CEO Andy Monin stopped by and shared a great overview of the company, as well as his thoughts on creating high-performance teams in a startup. We also had some great emails (including a particularly good question on raising …
For the past few months, people have been pestering the hell out of me about Twitter. “What do you mean you aren’t using Twitter?! Oh man, you’re really missing out!” Well, I finally had some time today to join Twitter and take a look at it. I was underwhelmed, to say the least. Aside from …
We were very thrilled to have Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora on the StartupLounge.com podcast this week. In addition to discussing how Pandora was really on the verge of extinction during the dot com flameout, we had a pretty good chat about the current RIAA ruling, the new royalty rates for Internet broadcasting, and …