I attended Survivor 8, the Tech Coast Venture Network fast pitch competition last night, and I thought I’d give my thoughts in case you are considering attending a similar event in the future. In keeping with the 30-second format, I’ll give you my take away now – it is worth it if you have an…
It’s been a really productive two weeks in North Dakota, installing our game in schools on two reservations, in tribal schools and public schools. I didn’t write this post to talk about that. Rather, in keeping with some of the really useful posts I’ve read about start-up failures, I wanted to share with you the…
There’s been quite a bit of discussion on twitter lately regarding generalists versus specialists. This article on KD Nuggets reported an even split in their poll numbers regarding whether companies try to hire a generalist who has knowledge of all areas required by a data scientist, as opposed to those who said that they hired…
This post is a public service to these people who tell me that they are going to write a blog and make money “from the advertising revenue”. In short, it’s a bad idea. Perhaps you have amazing things to say and you will be one of the tiny, tiny fraction of bloggers who make a…
Perhaps people wouldn’t be so hesitant to change careers during mid-life if they paid a little bit more attention to start-ups. Having been in start-up mode for the past few years, I’ve read numerous articles with titles like, “Five things you should know about start-ups” “Eleven reasons start-ups fail” “Six keys to start-up success” “Nine…
If you haven’t read this post by Shanley Kane on toxic lies about start-up culture, you should check it out. One value in this post is it reminds me of what we DON’T want to do at The Julia Group, as we start up a new venture with 7 Generation Games 1. We hire people…
My heart goes out to whoever is writing the blog, “My start-up has 30 days to live”. It’s the truest thing I’ve read about business since Paul Hawken wrote that the reason most small businesses fail is that they have too much money. It’s funny, because I was on the Forty Women to Watch over…
Do yourself a favor and read this terrific post, The 10 Biggest Mistakes I Made as a Start-up Founder. Given the miasma of bad start-up advice out there, this post is a breath of fresh air in a pollution of stupid. The Julia Group is doing well, and our latest venture, 7 Generation Games, which…
More interesting to me than the spate of articles on the decision of Yahoo to eliminate the option of working from home has been the comments on these articles. I should have followed the advice I give my children, “Never read the bottom half of the internet.” Too late – and I will never get…
When our Kickstarter campaign first started, I questioned the impact of social media. Despite being tweeted out by my darling daughter #3, who had over 170,000 followers on twitter, equal numbers of backers came from direct links (that is, people I had emailed directly) and twitter. By the end of the campaign, we had 255…