Tag Archives | entrepreneur

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Kill the Meetings

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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.

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