Send to Kindle In 2006, I was part of a team that was presenting to VCs to raise money for our startup, and those meetings were some of the most stressful in my career. I get nervous when I have to present in front of a group, and this is especially true when I’m speaking [...]

Send to Kindle When people read my blog, sometimes people email me in response to something I post, or to ask me about ideas.  I generally don’t mind this because it makes me think about problems (and like puzzles, solving problems can be a lot of fun), and it allows me to connect with the [...]

Send to Kindle While this post is about managing your manager, a better title might have been how to get your manager to invest in you without them knowing. I am leaving my current role in a couple of months, and the unfortunate part of that means leaving lot of wonderful people.  With my departure [...]

Send to Kindle So a few weeks ago one of my friends who is a CTO at a very successful consumer facing startup was talking to me about how they do vendor selection.  We were discussing this as my team was pondering an upcoming vendor selection for a new project.  It was apparent almost immediately [...]

Send to Kindle Recently a friend of mine suggested I take a look at a slideshow Netflix put together on their culture.   The slide show is long (128 slides) but I definitely think it is worth the pass through as it embodies and codifies a lot of traits most organizations would like to adopt. Some [...]

Send to Kindle So recently I came across this blog post on customer service that said: Make it easy for your people to serve customers…Instead, be the Ritz-Carlton. Each employee is given an individual, daily budget to create a wow experience for a customer, or for “service recovery.” (That’s to fix, or even over-fix, an [...]