I was recently sent an email from a colleague: Hi Joseph, Would you agree with this list of “metrics that matter” to VCs considering investing in a startup? Would you add or remove any? http://tomtunguz.com/ten-financial-metrics/ After reading Tomasz’ post, I found myself frustrated with the article and the recommendations, and I figured it would be […] Read More »
I’m an advocate of data-driven decision-making, and so with TribeHR we spend a lot of time digging into our numbers, both from a business metrics perspective as well as from a product analytics perspective. When the question of product editions came up, we took a data-driven approach to the problem. Why Make the Switch to […] Read More »
As a Founder-CEO you’ll find yourself hiring-in expertise that you lack, and at some point you’ll have to hire your first executive – likely CFO, VP Marketing or VP Sales. When going through the process myself for the first time, although I had the benefit of exceptional advisers and mentors to prepare me, it was […] Read More »
This post was originally posted to the Forbes CIO Network here: The 3 Things Startup Founders Need to Know About HR Ask any startup CEO to rank their greatest challenges, and inevitably human resources makes the list. For new ventures, a little preparation can mean the difference between creating a culture of success, or becoming […] Read More »
When working on a startup, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day details and lose track of the things that are most important in life. Late in 2011 I had the opportunity to realize this – one could say that life completely blind-sided me and forced me to stop and smell the roses. […] Read More »
A recent Huffington Post article on AngelList reminded me I need to finish this post – my apologies to those that expected me to post it months ago. There are some fantastic posts about how to get started on AngelList (one of my favourites is Brendan Baker‘s post How to Hustle with AngelList), but I haven’t seen as many […] Read More »
I’m of the opinion that the startup journey is really just the process of repeated work between “a-ha” moments of key insights. The faster we get to new insights, the better we are at ongoing improvement. I’m writing this post to describe an a-ha moment that happened early on (although earlier would have been better) […] Read More »
It’s been a long and tumultuous road, but a few days ago Jesse Rodgers and I opened the curtains on a project that we’ve been working on with Thom Ryan at Communitech: http://Waterloo.TechStartup.ca It’s a simple idea – we’re trying to answer the questions “What’s going on?” and “Who’s doing it?” The site is intended […] Read More »
I haven’t spent much time with the folks at Simple Machines Form in a long time, but I was recently given the opportunity to discuss the question of what I would have done differently, if we’d started the project knowing what we now know. The question is a hard one – because our motivations at […] Read More »
Waterloo is a great place to launch a startup (particularly a tech startup), and one of the many reasons is the people that live or frequent the community. Yesterday I had lunch with Albert Lai and the conversation turned to the young entrepreneurs starting their first businesses; the consensus was that they were far too […] Read More »
