What if There’s No Reason to Eat the Dog Food? There’s an expression in software about producing a product and market testing it — “seeing if the dogs will eat the dog food.” I’ve heard it mangled many times around the employees of a software company using the software their own company produces as “seeing if the dogs will eat their own dog food.” This is always true in consumer software and service companies. Employees are often the best users, the power users, and the source of the best feedback to the organization about the product and competition. We certainly saw this phenomenon in spades at MovieFone, where I used to work before starting Return Path. There was no more…
Archives / August, 2009
Good Meeting Behavior
Good Meeting BehaviorI've been in meetings with large groups of people at big companies where they're all on laptops the whole meeting, no one makes any eye contact with the speaker/facilitator, and it's hard to get a pulse out of the group as a result. I almost entirely stopped bringing laptops and smartphones into business meetings a few years back. There's nothing I find more irritating than when other people are using them when it's my meeting. Even if they're taking notes, I never know if they're really taking notes or sneaking a peek at email. And in my experience, people who are on laptops and phones in meetings, whatever they're doing on those devices and however good they are…
Stuck In Legal, Responses
Stuck In Legal, Responses Well, I certainly struck a nerve with my Stuck In Legal rant/post last week. As of now, there are 32 comments on the blog — my typical post generates 0-1 — and I've picked up between 50 and 75 new followers on Twitter, probably mostly because Fred tweeted about the post. Most of the comments on the blog were cheering me on; a couple were from lawyers, one well reasoned and another just a counter rant against stupid business people that had one or two good points buried in it. You can certainly click through the link above if you want to read them. But two comments didn't get put on the blog, which I thought…
Stuck in Legal
Stuck in LegalIf I had a nickel for every time I heard from someone on our sales or business development team that a critical contract, to which both sides had agreed on the fundamental business terms, was "stuck in legal," I'd be rich. Maybe not rich enough to pay all the world's legal bills, but that's a separate story. I completely understand the need for contracts and lawyers to review them — and sometimes, they do have to be long and complex. But here's what I don't understand: Why companies' legal departments or outside counsel aren't directed to be as efficient in doing their work as their other departments Why companies insist on using their standard form of agreement if…
Techstars Roundup: Why I Mentor Other Entrepreneurs
Techstars Roundup: Why I Mentor Other Entrepreneurs Yesterday was Demo/Investor day at Techstars in Boulder, Colorado. A lot of people have written about it – Fred, Brad, and a great piece by Don Dodge on TechCrunch listing out all the companies. My colleague George and I co-mentored two of the companies, SendGrid and Mailana, and we really enjoyed working with Isaac and Pete, the two entrepreneurs. I posted twice earlier this summer on the TechStars experience. My first post on this, Where do you Start?, was about whether to be methodical in business planning for a startup or dive right into the details. My second post, One Pitfall to Avoid, was about making sure you don’t create a whizzy solution…