I love startups. I love the chaos. I love the insane hours. I love the energy. I love the types of people who are attracted to work on high-risk ideas with long odds. I love the culture that evolves around them. I love it all. I have spent my career hopping from one startup to [ Read More ]
Entrepreneur-turned-VC, Mark Suster, recently posted an article on his blog, Both Sides of the Table, highlighting what he considers to be the essential qualities of entrepreneurship. At the heart of his post is a very, very simple philosophy: entrepreneurs just do it. For some people, this is easy. Moving ahead, pulling the trigger, motivating people [ Read More ]
Last week I wrote an opening rant about “strategists.” In the comments that ensued, I am now inspired to clarify what I mean while I continue to write this series. I am not talking about consultants who are hired to help hone and build out a strategic vision for an organization; nor am I talking [ Read More ]
Strategy is sexy. Operations is not. This is often a problem in the modern business world: everyone wants to be a strategist. Aside from being seen as the best place to get to experiment with the new, fun stuff, it’s also usually seen as the side of the business with all the perks — travel, [ Read More ]
Job hunting is rough for oh-so-many reasons. One of the things that is hardest about it, though, is managing your own attitude and spirits. If there is one thing that is liable to get you into trouble during a job hunt, it is unmanaged anxiety. I’ve written before about some of the things that I [ Read More ]
I’ve had an interesting few weeks. My husband and I have been dealing with a lot of things at home, hence my absence from blogging for much of the past month, and I have started a new project with the New Media (a.k.a. “web”) team at KXAN-TV here in Austin. Between getting settled into the [ Read More ]
This is something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently. The fact that we started off as a services company is what allowed us to get started and to avoid having to rely on outside funding. But it was transitioning to a product company that allowed us to grow and scale, and to ultimately [ Read More ]
Over the past few months, I’ve been more closely aligning myself with the Enterprise 2.0 community of professionals. Though I have been in technology for my entire career, and in Web 2.0 for at least part of that time, and implementing Enterprise 2.0 solutions quite extensively in recent years, I had not previously made a [ Read More ]
At South by Southwest, Brazen Careerist author and CEO Penelope Trunk was quite emphatic that, when starting a new business, having a geographically distributed team is rarely possible. She said this on her panel, as well as again when we spoke in person. She was a strong advocate of the notion that, for the first [ Read More ]
It’s probably a weird thing for a vocal atheist to quote, but there is something about the famous prayer that has been resonating with me more and more lately. Well, maybe not the “God” part of it, but the recognition part. Grant me strength to accept the things that I can’t change, the courage to [ Read More ]
Representatives from Google, Microsoft and Amazon gathered for a panel at SXSW to discuss the value, the future and the changes in cloud computing.
Accomplishment-oriented people often share a very common character trait: we hate to quit. More often than not, this is a combination of our own need to conquer whatever mountain we have set our sights on, and our belief that others are counting on us to succeed. In both cases, those assumptions are frequently over-estimated. Our [ Read More ]