Steve Denning, a business professor whose work I mostly value for it's reminder that focusing on the customer is the only route to value creation, has been touring France and visiting Michelin starred restaurants. He observed the following management … [Read more]
Everyone should be a writer
Blogging has been great for me over the last eight years. It's helped build my profile, get to know many great people, stay in touch with many others, and maybe most importantly sharpen and deepen my thinking on numerous topics. These benefits are … [Read more]
Assessing businesses’ viability requires careful attention to the fundamentals
Bill Gurley just published a good post about the $100m rounds that are going on. His overarching point is that the rounds are dangerous for investors who don't understand the companies as well as IPO investors coming in at similar valuations and for … [Read more]
Selling benefits not features – explained
The graphic above is from an awesome post from Buffer titled People don't buy products, they buy better versions of themselves which sums up how businesses should sell. It's a cliche, but customers don't care about features, they care about what what … [Read more]
Digitisation shrinks markets by two thirds – music industry data
I pulled this chart from Business Insider. As you can see it shows that adjusted for inflation US music spend per capita has dropped 64% from $71 to $26 since the beginning of the century, a change largely driven by digitisation. It's become a bit … [Read more]
When partnerships should pursue partnerships (hint: rarely)
I wrote about the challenges of partnerships last year and I'm going to have another go at it today. Over allocating resources to partnership deals is one of the easiest and common mistakes that startups make. This is from the A Founder's … [Read more]
Silicon Real interview – good intro to Forward Partners
Last night Brian Rose was kind enough to interview me for Silicon Real, embedded below (although not up on the site yet). He's a great interviewer, really natural. The first twenty minutes are a good intro to Forward Partners and then we discuss … [Read more]
Emotional resonance: the essence of great product
As I ran this morning I was imagining a conversation with a good friend of mine about us investing in his next startup. He has a technical background, but like many great techies has taken commercial roles to broaden his knowledge base. I think he's … [Read more]
Critical thinking and hope in startups
There are some people at startups who are cynics. They see everything that might go wrong and assume it will. Sometimes they even list all the things that might go wrong and assert you would have to be crazy to believe that their company might … [Read more]
Good startup hypotheses must be falsifiable
Karl Popper was perhaps the pre-eminent philosopher of science of the 20th century and central to his work is the notion that for a theory to be useful it must be falsifiable. Benedict Evans posted this quote on Twitter yesterday in a debate about … [Read more]
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