After coming off a 6-month sabbatical from Apple, I returned to work at about 5:30 am, cleared my inbox by 8 a.m. (hey, it was 1994 – this was still humanly possible, back then). By 8:30, I was sitting bright and cheery in the conference room for the regular weekly kickoff meeting that our work [...]
Tag Archives | entrepreneur
The Kick In the Pants
I felt his foot so far up my butt that I could practically taste the leather. All the way from Oakland to our end destination of Los Gatos, he went on and on. And when traffic hit us, and slowed us down to a crawl, I almost wept from the agony of more time on [...]
The Biggest Impact
It is tempting to load up our lives with commitments and projects. This allows us to express our many ambitious aims. It feels like we are being creative, and prolific, and alive. A few years ago, when I was leading a team, running a business, writing a book, keynoting at conferences, yada, yada, I embodied [...]
Are you a Rebel or a Leader?
Everyone was being so agreeable. The CEO nodded, the VPs agreed, the Directors were polished in their reviews. All the content was “good,” the timelines “reasonable,” the budgets “sufficient.” We were in a meeting to review the roadmap for the company’s new product. And it had all the hallmarks of a Potemkin village. I wanted [...]
Entrepreneurs at Heart
Most of us don’t call ourselves entrepreneurs unless we have founded our own business, and are quite possibly seeking additional investment to grow a nascent idea into a big idea. And perhaps that is a good sign. It is not our title that defines us; rather it is what we do and how we go [...]
“Bullet-Proof” Conversations
Dear friend: I realize i was quite anxious to see you last week and that surprised me a some level but as I reflected on it, I realize that I’ve wanted to show up with our conversations about what is next, with bullet-proof clarity. From many comments you’ve made to me over time, I’ve come [...]
Fem-nomics? Or Leadership?
I don’t know many women entrepreneurs who haven’t already read Penelope Trunk’s post on women entrepreneurs and how they can’t be successful because… they want to have children. The sexist title alone that TechCrunch put on the original article made it a sure read to all of us women entrepreneurs. On top of it, it plays [...]
3 Ways: Know You’re A Start-Up
Culture has to be one of the most popular topics, yet analytically hard to quantify. It thus gets relegated to the “soft stuff” because there is little evidence-based research supporting how to create a viable culture, what a good culture is, etc. And perhaps a high-performance culture is a little like the often quote about [...]
Making Money During Disruption
While failure for the high-tech entrepreneur is less likely to result in death, the parallels between the Gold Rush and the current Web-based economy are many. In both cases, participants must to adapt to a new way of life, with new rules. Or rather, no pre-existing, fixed rules.
Silicon Valley’s famous tolerance of entrepreneurial failure has its roots more than 150 years ago in the Gold Rush when more than 90,000 people made their way to California in the two years following John Marshall’s discovery of gold near Sacramento in January, 1848. By 1854, more than 300,000–representing more than one percent of the total population of the United States at the time–had come west in search of fortune.
Raising Entrepreneurs
An article in the December 2005, Inc Magazine talked about how to raise entrepreneurs. Here are a few great ideas that can be applied to kids or ourselves.