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  • El Arroyo Sign: Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket

    Two Types of Questioning

     Answers to questions can easily fit into two flavors: operationalized and free-form. Classify the use cases: there’s the questions you know how to ask, and the questions you don’t know to ask yet. A question that you know how to ask is operationalized. You’re looking for yes, no, or broken, or perhaps a count. The…

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  • Richard Knerr, founder of Wham-O, wears a space suit and prepares to throw a frisbee

    The Mystical Art of Getting New Things Done

    The process isn’t actually mystical: it’s selling an idea to everyone who must work together to execute it. People who would use it. People who will fund it. People who will build it. People who will sell it. Eventually, people who will buy it. Tell people what you want to do. Lots of people. Product…

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  • Movie poster for Viva Las Vegas

    A Simplistic View of Venture Capital

    I have a lot of conversations with people. 1:1’s, interviews, &c. When the opportunity arises, sometimes those who’ve done startups will talk about their experiences. There’s sometimes a flag in those conversations about startups that raises my hackles. It’s a description of the money raised as if that were a success metric. “I was at…

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  • Will Process Data for Energy by Pawel Hynek

    Data Value and Volume are Inversely Proportional

    In 2006, Clive Humby coined the phrase “Data is the new oil”. This is often misinterpreted as “Data powers the economy”, particularly by folks who sell data processing and storage, but it’s useful to see what someone who actually uses data says. In 2013 Michael Palmer, of the Association of National Advertisers, expanded on Humby’s…

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  • Timex Sinclair 1000 ad, the power is within your reach

    Product Tempo versus Deal Tempo

    Going from sales engineering to product management  was a jarring transition at first, because it represented a change in tempo. As a sales engineer, I lived by the fiscal quarter. While a given customer might be a multi-quarter job to convert, my sales partners and I had money to make and were judged on a…

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