The “Boom” hiring playbook
Boom is one of the most ambitious start-ups I know – their mission is to develop supersonic planes and make the world more accessible. As you can imagine, you need incredibly talented people to achieve this goal. So when Blake Scholl, Boom’s founder and CEO, recently shared insights into the company’s hiring playbook in an […]
Lessons about company building from the WeWork drama
The WeWork drama of the past weeks is a great reminder of how perceptions of a start-up opportunity can change very dramatically in a short period of time. What was one of the highest flying start-ups with a private market valuation of $47B was brought down to Earth when trying to IPO. (Important to note […]
My journey of finding a coach so far…
Inspired by Bill Campbell’s influence and having seen firsthand how our founders and CEOs have grown as a result of having an executive coach, I recently put out a call on Twitter for recommendations for coaches. I received a ton of recommendations (happy to share if you ping me) – thank you to everyone! I’m still trying to […]
How times have changed in twenty years…
It was 20 years ago next month that we started JustBooks, creating a marketplace that connected buyers and sellers of used, rare, and out-of-print books. We initially launched in Germany before expanding into the UK and France, and then sold the company to our North American competitor AbeBooks in 2001. My co-founder Hannes Blum and […]
Do distributed teams need new tools?
A question I have been pondering for some time now, especially since a lot of our portfolio companies are now distributed organizations… This tweet sparked a lot of thoughtful reaction and discussion. Here’s where things have landed at the moment: According to the responses, entrepreneurs running remote organizations seem pretty happy with the current software […]