Tim Berry has a recent post on MyVenturePad that is highly worth reading. He takes issue with a VentureBeat post that essentially recommends to entrepreneurs that they sacrifice their life until they get their business successfully built. Tim hits the nail on the head right out of the gate: the absurdity of that recommendation is [ Read More ]
I’ve been feeling nostalgic this week. After so many years in ecommerce, supporting catalogers and retailers whose year entirely revolved around the Christmas season, I am almost at a loss for what to do if I’m not running around putting out fires from Thanksgiving weekend up until the week before Christmas. Strange as it seems [ 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 ]
People who did not meet me until at or around my 25th birthday would never believe it, but in school, I was the Queen of Slackers. Truly. School was too easy, too routine and I spent too long doing it to be able to breath new life into the experience. I could dodge classes, do [ Read More ]
I had a couple of discussions this week that got me thinking back to the early days of my career. Aside from leaving me feeling older than I care to think about, it did spark a pleasant memory or two that I’ve been mulling over since. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how early career choices [ Read More ]
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 ]
I really hate working from home. A lot. Aside from the whole ‘building revenue’ issue (hardly insignificant), this is undoubtedly the thing I find the hardest about starting a new business. I miss being in an office. I miss the routine of a schedule. I miss interacting with people who are working on the same, [ Read More ]
As with most major life lessons, it has been many years of gradual recognition that have allowed me to finally begin to understand the full impact of growing up in a family-owned small business. As with most other major life events or conditions, the lessons I thought I was learning at the time often evolved [ Read More ]
As I have been looking for new employment as part of our relocation to Austin, I have found myself having to explain (over and over and over again) why it is exactly that, after a decade of working as a project manager, I still have yet to be certified as a Project Management Professional. Unfortunately, [ Read More ]
I hate the phrase “work-life balance.” I truly can’t stand it. I think it’s a b.s. phrase that is one of those organizational design notions that sounds really, really good, but in truth is so vague that everyone has their own definition, leaving no consensus on any kind of standardized meaning. Implications of Being “Even” [ Read More ]
I am a member of Generation X, otherwise known as “the Slacker Generation.” Anyone who knows me would laugh at that designation because I am, without exception, a ridiculously unapologetic workaholic. This week Forbes published an article by Dr. Steven Berglas asserting that a recent study suggests that Generation Y (otherwise known as “The Millennials”) [ Read More ]
Long ago I observed something very interesting about the types of organizations that different people are attracted to and why. And then, even more interestingly, about how those people behave — what types of projects they tackle, what types of changes they promote and how much bitching they do — once they get there. This [ Read More ]