I find it weird when I make people nervous. I’ve had people shake and stutter so much that I thought they had some sort of disability, only to find out later that it was a reaction to meeting me! My family and friends say I’m intimidating, which I also find bizarre. I am, literally, a…
Every day, every week, I face the same question that all entrepreneurs ask themselves – “How do you know when you are done?” Most days, I start work around 10 am and finish about 14 hours later. Usually, I take off an hour for lunch and an hour for dinner, or take a few hours…
I’m pretty certain that I’m a woman in technology. Last night, I was using SAS on a virtual machine through a remote desktop connection to prepare data from the National Hospital Discharge Survey for use in examples of MANOVA and multinomial logistic regression. Today, I was working on improving animation in the Javascript for a…
Yes, I do realize that I’m probably far more excited about our new website coming on line than is normal. Several points here on a Friday night: I completely disagree with those entrepreneurs who say, “You sell the sizzle not the steak” when what they mean is that they really don’t have a good product…
I read an interesting post by Heidi Roizen with the title, “It’s different for girls.” Ms. Roizen is an admirable person. A successful entrepreneur, venture capitalist and mother. (The latter is relevant as you’ll find if you read her post) This is a quote from her post: Wine was brought and toasts were made to…
I read some poorly done research the other day that showed a very small number of start-ups that became billion-dollar companies were started by people over 50. As someone else pointed out in the comments to it, that was lacking a key number, the denominator. That is, if people over 50 only started 20 companies,…
Lately, I’ve been a terrible person. I have told many people, “No, I cannot help you.” After six happily profitable years, we’re winding down The Julia Group consulting division. We are not taking any new contracts and not adding on to any existing contracts. As contracts expire, we are not replacing them with new business….
Most start-up events waste my time. Founder Friday Women 2.0 was one of the few exceptions. Generally, at start-up events, the people who have an actual company make up a tiny fraction of the attendees, being out-numbered at least 5 to 1 by people with “an idea for a company”. The remainder of those in…
Yesterday, I did the Happy Dance in my office when we finished version 2.2 of Spirit Lake. I said that despite taking me away from virtually every other interest in my life, being obsessed with a start-up is worth it. WHY? In thinking it over today, I realized that 7 Generation Games meets every possible…
Really useful advice for start-ups on How Not to Die from Paul Graham emphasized The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with “but we’re going to keep working on the startup,” you are in big trouble…. We’re taking on some consulting projects, but…