Opinions and Thoughts on Venture Capital, Investing, and Startups
lindsey.a.elliott Every day -- silently, and without notice -- we cross invisible thresholds to who we are becoming. It explains that feeling of waking up and not recognizing your life, or how you got there. A disorientation I often feel in the craze of entrepreneurship. These words from David Whyte reminded me to take notice -- … Continue reading “Every Day we cross invisible thresholds to who we are becoming.”
You think you are the superstar sales guy. Or you are the CEO and are telling me that you have a superstar sales team. This is what I would expect from you: Run our play. if the play doesn't work we are changing the play. But you have to run the play. You have to … Continue reading Superstar Sales: Run The Play.
As an investor, I am more interested in finding out where knowledge ends and where a discovery process starts. It's astonishing in how many pitches entrepreneurs avoid "I don't know" and instead suddenly change topics or point to a statistic where when asked they cannot explain how that would be relevant to the question. "I … Continue reading “I don’t know.”
Deals seem to fall apart last second. Investors step away from their commitment. A large customers is having some hiccups just when you're closing the round. A partner leaves the venture firm just when you're trying to get the signatures. A clause with the employee stock options pool confuses a corporate investor and they put … Continue reading It’s not done until it’s done.
Most DevOps centric startups are focusing on the Dev, not the Ops. Many tools and startups start in Test & Dev (versus "production" or "in-revenue" applications). But really hard problems in DevOps are often connected to in-revenue, critical applications. These applications have real-time and high-availability requirements and "exactly-once" execution of commands. I have the privilege … Continue reading Developer-centric Startups for Critical Applications