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 sometimes asked for suggestions and ideas on blogs/books/articles to read, and one of the more frequent recommendations I make is Fred Wilson’s blog, in particular his MBA Monday’s series. Fred used to have a tool for managing the table of contents, however that has since been removed. This post is purely as list of […] 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 »
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 »
If you haven’t seen Ali Asaria‘s video on CBC yet, it’s worth watching. You can watch it here, but the best segment from it happens at 3:42 when Ali says: “There’s no better time to be running a tech company & there’s no better place to be running it than from Waterloo” I couldn’t agree […] Read More »
Unfortunately, Google Wave is officially in the DeadPool. What’s truly unfortunate about this, though, is that it highlights an issue: organizations that put significant money and effort behind an unproven technology, particularly when that technology is backed by a “reliable” player like Google. Read More »
This year’s Entrepreneur Week in Waterloo was a blast (kudos to Communitech for running a great program), and coming out of it, a number of things struck me: Too many of the events sold out Many people missed the round-table sessions like the “chapter” events in the past StartupCamp was absolutely packed Read More »
