On innovation in start-ups
One of the most impressive pieces on innovation I recently read was Jeff Bezos‘ answer to a shareholder question at the last annual meeting. The question was: Amazon seems to be executing well lately — is the company taking enough risks? Added the shareholder, “If it’s still Amazon’s philosophy to make bold bets, I would […]
Investor updates
Keeping your investors in the loop about how things are going is one of the most important tasks for a start-up CEO. You want not only avoid surprises but also engage them as much as possible so they can provide timely advice and input into strategic decisions. Here is what I usually recommend as best […]
Pivoting
It is not uncommon for start-ups to pivot their product and / or business model a few times and the right pivot at the right time can determine success or failure of an early-stage company. The Startup Genome project found that “startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better […]
Announcing GrowLab, a new start-up accelerator for Vancouver
With the growing success of YCombinator and Techstars in the past couple of years, accelerators have become a crucial piece of developing a vibrant start-up ecosystem – a crucial piece that was unfortunately missing in Vancouver after Bootup Labs stopped taking in new companies in fall last year. So I am extremely excited that we […]
Why Google became so successful – reviewing Steven Levy’s “In The Plex”
I just finished reading “In The Plex”, Steven Levy‘s book on Google, and can highly recommend it to anybody who wants to better understand Google’s success. While many things are not completely new if you have followed the company for a while, the systematic recount of Google’s history and the decisions they have taken along […]