I love working in bigger companies, and I want to explain why. This week a blog post popped up on my radar which expressed very well why people love working in tiny companies like startups, so I thought it would be good to add a “yes, and…” for larger, more established, companies. The background Victoria … Continue reading
I was confounded the other day by Andrew Ross Sorkin’s criticism of Facebook’s IPO figures, which he wrote up in the New York Times. On the face of it he looked naive and distinctly non-digital when he wrote: On the first page of Facebook’s prospectus for its sale of stock to the public, it pegs … Continue reading
In a discussion today about innovation many wise words were said, but one thing in particular stuck with me: that an organisation’s innovation is almost always limited to being a particular kind of innovation. On the one hand innovation is about change. On the other, you need a reliable — and therefore pretty fixed — … Continue reading
Here are the answers to last week’s quiz of the year — along with a reminder of the questions. If you still want to do the quiz then jump over to the original now, and don’t look below. Here goes… Question 1: “Zeebox is now live” said PaidContent in October. “Appearing initially as a TV … Continue reading
If you’re like me then this is the time of year you love to gather your family together and look back fondly at 12 months of dodgy flotations, me-too launches, and fired CEOs. So here is a quiz of the tech world in 2011. It’s entirely partial, with all the questions coming from links I’ve … Continue reading
As well as running a workshop at How to Web 2011, I was also able to attend many of the sessions. Here are some very brief notes from just some of those… Doug Richard, School for Startups Doug spoke at length about a particularly painful buying experience he had with PC World. It seemed a … Continue reading
Bill Taylor has an article on HBR that introduces some very misleading ideas about developer effectiveness, which I’d like to address. Here I set out some reasons why excellent developers are actually disproportionately more effective than average developers, despite what Bill might lead us to think. Here’s his starting point: Last month, in an article … Continue reading
Paul Clarke has an excellent post in which he talks about the importance of having a purpose when trying to measure things. That’s not quite the point of his post, but it does nevertheless provide a really telling concrete example of why it can be meaningless to try to measure something if there isn’t a … Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago I poked fun at Flipboard for seeking to raise $50m on the strength of a free product and zero revenue. At around 8.30am yesterday morning I did a 180 degree turn and now believe it could be an absolutely unbeatable product. What happened at 8.30am yesterday? I read Erick Schonfeld’s … Continue reading
It seems it would be helpful to elaborate on my earlier points about acting like a startup in an established company, and one point in particular. I said “you can’t just take the idea of a startup and drop it into an established business”, but it looks like that was interpreted too broadly. A couple … Continue reading
