Selecting Your Investors Fred Wilson has been a venture investor and director in Return Path since 2000, first with Flatiron Partners and then with Union Square Ventures. We’ve been through a lot of wars together. In a couple of weeks, he and I are team-teaching a class in Entrepreneurship at Princeton, and the professor gave us the assignment of writing two pairs of blog posts to tee up discussion with the class. This is the first one…and Fred’s post on the other side of the topic is here. Next week, we’ll address the topic of building a successful CEO-VC partnership once it’s established. If you’re fortunate enough to have built a really strong early stage company, you will find yourself…
Archives / October, 2013
Lean In, Part II
Lean In, Part II My post about Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In a couple months ago created some great dialog internally at Return Path. It also yielded a personal email from Sheryl the day after it went up encouraging me to continue “talking about it,” as the book says, especially as a male leader. Along those lines, since I wrote that initial post, we’ve had a few things happen here that are relevant to comment on, so here goes. We partnered with the National Center for Women & IT to provide training to our entire organization on unconscious bias. We had almost 90% of the organization attend an interactive 90 minute training session to explore how these biases work and how…
Who Controls the Future of Technology?
Who Controls the Future of Technology? I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today, then got to my inbox to find both it and its opposite forwarded to me by Brad. The Journal says that the consumerization of technology wins out in the end, and that: In the past, CIOs and their staff had a reputation for being snarky, geeky guys who were always looking for ways to tell employees what they couldn’t do. Now, at the most progressive companies, the tech department’s main job isn’t to say no. Instead, it’s to find a way to let employees safely run any device or program they like. The thinking goes like this: Employees are most productive when they’re…
Book Short: Alignment Well Defined, Part II
Book Short: Alignment Well Defined, Part II Getting the Right Things Done: A Leader’s Guide to Planning and Execution, by Pascal Dennis, is an excellent and extraordinarily practical book to read if you’re trying to create or reengineer your company’s planning, goal setting, and accountability processes. It’s very similar to the framework that we have generally adapted our planning and goals process off of at Return Path for the last few years, Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage (book, post/Part I of this series). My guess is that we will borrow from this and adapt our process even further for 2014. The book’s history is in Toyota’s Lean Manufacturing system, and given the Lean meme floating around the land of tech startups…