Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher! Derick Thompson is the CEO and founder of Startup Runner, a virtual accelerator based in Austin, TX that helps identify repeatable, scalable customer channels that lead to sustainable, profitable growth. Derick’s one of the best minds in the startup community (by that I mean he thinks a lot like me […]
Archive | General
What to Do When Your Dev Team Misses a Deadline
It’s so common that it’s a joke in some companies. Your development team does not reliably hit deadlines. What are the most common causes, and what can you do about it? (Hint: The problem is more than likely you, not them) Most often, missing deadlines comes down to two things: The definition of the deliverable […]
The Power of Catalyzing Events
“Where there is no vision, the people perish” – The Book of Proverbs “I feel like we’re moving too slowly.” “I don’t know if my development team is performing as well as they could be.” One of the most frequent conversations I have with founders is trying to understand if they’re getting what they’re paying for […]
Moving from Startup to “Real Company”
I love it when I get emails from people who are reading this newsletter, particularly when they’re correcting something I did wrong. A few weeks back Mike Murphy of Proctor Free corrected a mistake in my post on OODA Loop. Thanks Mike! I took the opportunity to ask Mike what he’d like to see covered in […]
What is an SSL Certificate?
If you’re in the process of building nearly any kind of product, you’re going to have to buy an SSL certificate for your website or your API. Even if you’re not taking credit cards or financial information, making sure that your user’s interactions with your application remain private as they cross the internet is a […]
The Scott Barstow Show, Episode #011 – Chris Heivly of The Startup Factory and MapQuest
Chris Heivly was the co-founder of MapQuest, the company that brought mapping into the modern era in the 1990s. He’s the co-founder of a startup incubator in Raleigh-Durham, NC called The Startup Factory, and he’s the author of the book Build the Fort, which explores the journey of building a startup through the lens of […]
How Does Data Get Stored in a Database?
This question came up in my private Slack channel the other day. We had a great conversation amongst the companies involved, and I’m sharing the highlights here. For the purposes of this conversation, we’ll be talking about relational databases like MySQL, Postgres and SQL Server. There are lots of different kinds of databases, but at […]
Notes from Rusty Rueff – An HR Master
I had the privilege a while back of sitting through a presentation from Rusty Rueff, who is one of the best-known experts on human resources in Silicon Valley. He talked for about 20 minutes, and I took about 4 pages of notes. It’s all relevant for the company you’re building right now. Below are my […]
The Scott Barstow Show, Episode #010 – Aidan Cunniffe, CEO of Dropsource
Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher! Aidan Cunniffe is the CEO of Dropsource. Imagine if you could design and configure your application, generate all of the required code for iOS and Android, as well as the backend services, and have it all working in less than a minute. Sounds too good to be true, right? This […]
Why Sprints?
Why Sprints? There was a time when sprints mattered, or more precisely, where you had to break work up into logical groupings. The reason was that a team needed visibility into hitting an eventual deadline for shipping a product. Maybe it was a quarterly release, where you could work back from the release date. Lots […]