Posts for "Startup"

I am a voracious reader of tech nonfiction, and so it will come as no surprise that I bought Dan Lyon’s Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-up Bubble this week. While it was a quick and entertaining read, with all the news coverage of HubSpot’s Lord of the

I have a simple classification mechanism for things I do: passion, interest or job. Passions are things that consume me, for which I can sustain long periods of directed thought. Interests are things that hold my attention for short or medium periods of time (e.g. hobbies). And jobs are

While in truth there is no singular moment in which you start a company, I still mark the official start of CloudHealth to a Lean experiment that took place three years ago. It’s a story that reveals the power of experimentation, the value of taking managed risks, and the

I'm a big fan of listening to startup founders tell the stories of how their companies came to be. These narratives often read like tightly written short stories, with a protagonist, a conflict, unexpected plot twists, and always some kind of resolution. Founding stories can give you insight into the

One of my favorite chapters of Peter Thiel’s Zero To One is called “Secrets”. It reads like a late night revelation, that wanders from the Unabomber to HP’s business failure in the 2000s to Fermat’s Last Theorem. Thiel outlines the premise that secrets about nature and/or

For those who haven’t heard of “tulip mania”, I’ll give you a short recap. The time is the 1630s, the location the Netherlands. While the tulip had been imported to Europe in the mid-1500s, the interest in the flowering plant had only really started to grow around the