Bob and I released Show #133 of the Startup Success Podcast yesterday, featuring an interview with Sailesh Ramasray of BizFusion, a full-featured accounting system for small businesses. My favorite insight from the interview is that most businesses should internationalize but do so by taking advantage of English as a common language. It’s not that difficult [...]
Archive for the ‘Work’ Category
SSP 133 with Sailesh Ramasray of BizFusion
Posted in Work, tagged BizFusion, Nozbe, Startup Success Podcast on February 22, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Bad ideas
Posted in Work, tagged Idea on February 20, 2012 | 1 Comment »
The most common obstacle (excuse?) I hear for someone not creating a startup is, “I don’t have a good idea.” Well … so what? Maybe you should work on a bad idea instead. Jason Cohen suggests your idea probably is bad, even if you think it’s good – but hey, you have to start somewhere, [...]
What money can buy
Posted in Other, Work, tagged Money, Startups on February 14, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
A while back, I mentioned Jacob Needleman’s Money and the Meaning of Life. One of the points Needleman makes is that for almost any problem in life there is a very specific amount of money that will solve it. If you are building a software company and have figured out how to scale, there is [...]
Learning git
Posted in Work, tagged git on February 13, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
I’m working on some startup-oriented content with teammates around the country. It’s mostly text, not code, but there are a healthy amount of code snippets mixed in. For any other project like this I’ve worked on at Microsoft, we have collaborated using SharePoint or (gasp!) email. But the guys leading this project are very comfortable [...]
Envision then do
Posted in Other, Work, tagged Conductor, Craft, Envisioning, Music, Software on February 12, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
You have to know exactly how you want the music to sound in your head, hear exactly how it actually sounds in the room, then bring the two as close together as possible. That’s paraphrasing a knighted British conductor – I read the quote at school more than twenty years ago and since then haven’t [...]
The wisdom of low quality
Posted in Other, Work, tagged Brad Feld, Email, Fred Wilson, Seth Godin, Startups on February 11, 2012 | 2 Comments »
There are some things in life where it’s important to do a great job. For example, the difference between being an OK musician and a great musician is an enormous amount of work … but it’s worth it, both to the musician and the audience. Surprisingly, there are things where it’s NOT important to do [...]
User expectations
Posted in Work, tagged Chicago, Design, hotel, Swisshotel, Users, Windows Phone on February 8, 2012 | 1 Comment »
I had work in Chicago yesterday and today (I’m taking the Amtrak home at the moment). I stayed at the Swissotel. It’s a nice hotel – great bedding, good bathroom, and one of the best views I’ve ever enjoyed in a hotel room. Whoever designed the hotel apparently wanted it to be kinda hip, so [...]
Node.js on Windows Azure
Posted in Work, tagged Cloud9, node.js, Windows Azure on February 7, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Last week, I wrote about getting a node.js hello world app running on my local machine in 10 minutes. But what if you want to run node.js on Windows Azure? Turns out that takes about 10 minutes to get running as well – and you can do it from Windows or Mac … in fact, [...]
Startup stages
Posted in Work, tagged BizSpark, Startup America on February 6, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Startup America is an organization created to help startups, and it’s funded by the likes of Steve Case (AOL), The Kauffman Foundation, Michael Dell, and many other big names in entrepreneurship. They want to sign up lots of startups, so they reached out to partners like TechStars and Microsoft’s BizSpark to help recruit. My teammate [...]
Quantity begets quality
Posted in Work, tagged Streak, writing on February 5, 2012 | 1 Comment »
Yesterday, I tapped out a blog post using the WordPress app on my Windows Phone, quoting wisdom from Jerry Seinfeld. It was a bit self-referential, and my twitter friend Adam called me out with some good-natured ribbing – he claimed that I was cheating, that I wrote a tiny blog post merely to keep my [...]
