In his confessional expose, Ramit Sethi (@ramit) publically admitted and explained why he killed a $2mln product. It seemed to be doing well on the surface. There were hundreds of meetups around the world. People were getting value from the product. But the product’s churn hovered around 10%. Which meant that they would lose all…
Richard Branson, the billionaire adventurer, has a complicated relationship with risk. On the one hand, he loves trying outdoorsy stunts and attempts to break world records. For example, he managed to cross the Atlantic, Pacific, and then circumnavigated the globe in a balloon. He even succeeds at doing so, despite the occasional crash: On the…
“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.” Nicholas Klein commenting on a strike at the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America conference in 1914 This quote is often misattributed to Ghandi. In fact, there was a festering conflict between thousands…
In The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses, Amar Bhide reported that 2/3 of the Inc 500 company founders he interviews pivoted away from their original concept: More that one third of the Inc 500 founders we interviewed significantly altered their initial concepts, and another third reported moderate changes. In other words, it’s best to assume…
“There were only an estimated two to five thousand humans alive in Africa sixty thousand years ago. We were literally a species on the brink of extinction! And some scientists believe (from studies of carbon-dated cave art, archaeological sites, and human skeletons) that the group that crossed the Red Sea to begin the great migration was a mere…
In my last post, I explored the implication of a shift in importance and value of resources. Given increasingly shorter time frames for product life cycles, I think time is an increasingly undervalued resource. Zooming in to a sub-micro level, I think we’re also looking at a paradigm shift with resource allocation within high technology…
Last week, I pulled out the critical thing that Steve Jobs did, upon returning to an Apple computer with a sagging stock price. He went after a major systemic factor that was holding back release dates: too many priorities. If you are really going after top performance, you need to look at all factors, including the…
After a nasty battle with Apple shareholders, Steve Jobs, then the original founding CEO, was ousted. He went on to create NeXt computers (later acquired by Disney). In the meantime, Apple drifted as a company. It proliferated product lines. Lost focus. And the share price entered a death spiral phase. A few years later in…
The contrast between ideal and real is powerful. Makes you focus. By not paying enough attention to the gap between the ideal and real, you may end up with a complete blowout like Fyre Festival founder McFarland. I heard of it only long after it happened by watching the Netflix documentary. Clearly I’m not the…
While “agilefall” has many well documented downsides, I’ve found a counterintuitive bright side to the following aspect of it: “We have a product backlog with priorities, but we start working on a release with a long list of features already committed to the business.” In this case, we have a pretty detailed view of scope…