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 […]

What’s the problem with too much funding?

With the influx of seed money, much has been written about the fact that start-ups that are taking far more funding than they need. For example, check out Fred Wilson’s post where he compares funding a start-up to walking up a flight of stairs. When building a company, it’s smarter to hit each step on […]

How to stay nimble as you scale

I recently spoke with a founder and CEO of a start-up that had just crossed the 200-employee milestone. Like so many others lucky enough to reach that level, he was complaining about how progress was coming to a halt as the organization grew and became more complex. I myself experienced this as COO at AbeBooks. […]

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 […]