As our company grows from three guys on a door desk to something more substantial, we’ve invested a lot of time not just to running the company but about **how** we run the company. That is particularly relevant for the CEO role. In talking to many CEOs and a fair amount of research – it’s clear there is no “right” way to run a company – it all comes down to...
Beyond the commonplace tools (Google Spreadsheets, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Apps, etc) and the obvious (Contactually!) – I’ve listed out some tools that I use daily, if not multiple times daily, to assist me. Trello – We use Trello to organize anything we’re working on – from product feedback to ideas to my personal to-do list. Join.me – This is our go-to...
There’s a scene in How I Met Your Mother where Marshall imagines dropping in right at the point where his teenage self starts smoking, and slugs him. I’ve adopted a mentality that, if at any point I’m able to traverse time a year, even six months, back…. I’d kick my own ass. It has nothing to do with age or maturity – but the cycle of learning is so rapid that...
The typical startup journey involves a lot of failure, which has luckily been embraced by the entrepreneurial community as a positive experience. Beyond the obvious aspect of innovating in a way that, statistically, won’t work, the act of barn-raising a new company is fraught with it’s own issues. The product has bugs. Support times are too slow. Our metrics aren’t adding up...
Most people won’t. Which means those that do change everything. – Bryce Roberts I credit much of Contactually’s success not to having some secret sauce (at the outset), being right, hiring the smartest people in the room, or anything else that would qualify as a competitive advantage. That’s important for other reasons. We’re successful because we show up every day, and do...
After a meteoric rise, LivingSocial has had a tough go recently. Between layoffs, lowered valuations, competitor out-maneuvering, and one of the longest downtimes I’ve ever seen in a consumer site, it’s pretty hard to imagine them fully recovering from this to the grandeur that they used to be. For better or for worse, online forums have been watching, and in some cases even cheering...