Book Short: Triumph over Adversity In truth, Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, was a bit of a disappointment. I thought his first three books, Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, were fantastic, and I routinely refer to them in business. David and Goliath isn’t bad, it’s just a little light and hangs together a lot less than Gladwell’s other books. I just read a scathing review of it in The New Republic, which I won’t bother linking to, mostly because the reviewer was on a total rant about Gladwell in general and was particularly insulting to people who read Gladwell (an interesting approach to a book review), essentially calling us…
Archives / November, 2013
Debunking the Myth of Hiring for Domain Expertise vs. Functional Expertise
Debunking the Myth of Hiring for Domain Expertise vs. Functional Expertise As a CEO scaling your business, you’ll invariably want to hire in new senior people from the outside. Even if you promote aggressively from within, if you’re growing quickly enough, you’ll just need more bodies. And if you’re growing really fast, you will be missing experience from your employee base that you’ll need to augment. For years, I’ve thought and heard that there’s a basic tradeoff in hiring senior people — you can hire someone with great domain expertise, or you can hire someone with great functional expertise, but it’s almost impossible to find both in the same person, so you need to figure out which is more important…
Startup CEO “Bibliography”
Startup CEO “Bibliography” A couple people who read Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business asked me if I would publish a list of all the other business books I refer to over the course of the book. Here it is — I guess in some respects an all-time favorite list for me of business books. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steven Gary Blank Running Lean by Ash Maurya The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development: A Cheat Sheet to the Four Steps to the Epiphany by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits Profitable Growth Is Everyone’s Business by Ram Charan The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clay Christensen The Innovator’s Solution by…
Getting the Most out of Your Investors
Getting the Most out of 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. The first two posts were mine on selecting investors and Fred’s on selecting investments. This is my second one…and Fred’s post on the other side of the topic is here. Once you’ve done a venture financing and the smoke clears, you have to transition…