Category Archives: Business

More Startup Employee Thoughts

Here’s another fascinating article about working for a startup: Candid Advice For Those Joining The Startup World: Sleep With One Eye Open

This is long, but worth the read if you are considering working at a startup.

The author wrote an ebook, which is currently priced at $85, titled How to Engineer Your Layoff. The idea is to get a package that is worth something awesome. My package was pretty lame, and I know my company would not have done anything more than what they did.  But I bet this $85 is a terrific investment if you work for a company or people with integrity.

Open Salary, Open Equity, Transparency

From Friday’s article, I clicked through and started reading these posts which are fascinating. They talk about how to come up with employee compensation in a startup, and sharing those numbers with complete transparency.

Introducing Open Equity: Buffer’s Equity Formula and Full Individual Breakdown (April 14, 2014)

Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer: Our Transparent Formula and All Individual Salaries (Dec 19, 2013)

Buffer’s compensation and equity spreadsheet: fascinating!

Joel Spolsky post which inspired Buffer on this (on GitHub)

MVP: Product Management

Great conversation on Quora about lean company/product development. I continually have stuff my developers work on that I refer to as Phase I or Phase II, etc.  Here’s a visualization of what I really need:

mvp_lean

As a product manager, the message is that each phase of developing a minimum viable product (MVP) is a functional step towards the end goal.  So each phase is usable.  Super important.

Sales Statistics: Power of follow-up

This reminds me of a technology vendor that used to call me again and again and again. I was a Dell guy… always buying my stuff from Dell. But this lady that called me, she wanted my business.  She was a bit on the aggressive side, but she asked for my business, she asked for a shot.

And one day, she got it.  And for the stuff I bought from her, I didn’t go back to Dell.  She earned it. She won it.  She wanted it. She persisted.

sales_stats_ja_blog

Josh James Startup Rules

Two or three years ago I saw Josh James present at some networking thing in Salt Lake.  I think we walked away with a little book with his startup rules, which I found really interesting.

I recently found the rules online: My Startup Rules

Some of this might be offensive, but considering his success (1.8B sale to Adobe, and I’m guessing he’ll sell his next company for over a billion), you gotta admit, he knows a thing or two about business!