Why you need to innovate on three horizons
How does your startup think about innovation? Is it a new feature that gets incorporated into the next release? Is it a new market breakthrough that’s years away? I recently held a mini Tweetstorm where I opened the conversation to innovation across three horizons: short-term, mid-term, and long-term. Here’s more dissection on the topic beyond […]
How to keep founders around after an acquisition
Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Twitter…all the top players in Silicon Valley want to get their hands on the best talent around. That’s why we’ve seen example after example of “acqui-hires” in the past few years as well as some very large acquisitions where a big driver was the talent behind a start-up (e.g. Nest, Beats). However, only a […]
Mobile is eating the web
Marc Andreesen famously said that “software is eating the world.” Now it looks like mobile is eating the web. Back in 2010, Mary Meeker and Morgan Stanley predicted that within the next five years, “more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.” We’ve arrived at that milestone. The shift from desktop […]
Re-imagining the mobile use case
Google recently released the results of a new study on mobile search and conversions. Along with Nielsen, Google analyzed over 6,000 mobile searches and the actions that came after the search. While there are quite a few interesting findings (including the fact that 55 percent of conversions occur within the first hour of the mobile […]
Does your product pass the toothbrush test?
Repeat usage is one of the most important success factors for building a large, stand-alone company. It’s hard to grab people’s mindshare and create a loyal user base when people only need to use your product or service occasionally. One of the best metaphors I’ve come across to describe this reality is Google’s “toothbrush test” […]