This is the third in a series of posts where we’re talking about some of the most common pitfalls that un-technical founders face when starting a technology company. I’ve called this the Un-Technical Founder Death Spiral because once you get started, it’s very hard to pull out and course-correct. You can read the first post here […]
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The Untechnical Founder Death Spiral – Stage 1
In my previous post entitled The Un-Technical Founders Death Spiral we talked about three mistakes that many un-technical founders make in the early stages of starting their company that, when compounded, usually put a company out of business. As a quick review, we identified three stages: Stage 1 – The “Find a Friend to Do Work For […]
The Untechnical Founder Death Spiral
You’ve got the next great idea for a killer app, but you’re not a developer and you’ve never built a technology product before. However, you’re in luck because you have a friend who has a friend who’s a developer, and he’s willing to help you build the first version of your product. For free! Wow! […]
It’s Time To Go
This past Sunday night I was working on a bike with my son. We’re disassembling an old bike and are going to build a new one from scratch on the existing frame. We needed to take the chain off, so I went to pop off the side of one of the links. The piece of […]
What is DNS?
If we were driving in New York City and we wanted to get to the Empire State Building, we wouldn’t say “Let’s go to latitude 40.74844, longitude -73.98566.” We would instead say “Let’s go to 350 Fifth Ave, New York NY.” If we were using our phone to navigate, it would use a combination of […]
Another (Better?) Take on Technical Debt
In a previous article entitled “What Is Technical Debt?“, we talked about nuts and bolts of technical debt. I’ve since come to the conclusion that, although what I presented is the classic definition of technical debt, I believe the label is inaccurate and causes more harm than good in development organizations. Here’s why: By assigning […]
Three Legal Mistakes That Can Sink Your Company
Every now and then I like to bring in guests to address topics that I consider to be as important as the nuts and bolts of building your product. I was having a drink with my good friend Jesse Jones, who is a kick-butt startup attorney here in Raleigh, NC a few weeks back, and […]
Always Be Hiring
This post originally appeared on Linked In. A good friend of mine recently published a book on raising money called Get Backed. One of the core principles of the book is that in order to be successful at raising money, you first raise friends, then money. What does that mean? Investors invest in people, and they invest […]
The False Religion of Process
There are lots of ways to manage the process of building software. Some of the more popular ones today are Scrum and Kanban, both specific implementations of the Agile methodology. It used to be back in the day that we used a process called waterfall, but using waterfall today is like saying you drive a 1982 […]
Auditions – Assessing Growth Potential
This is the last in a 4-part series on using auditions, or test projects, to hire technical talent. In the first article we introduced the idea of auditions, why they are so valuable, and how to run a successful audition. In our second article, we focused on testing for technical competency. In our third article, we […]