60 Posts found for Source: Medium

Markets are not infallible. Government can play a role here, as it did with the Internet, GPS, and the Human Genome Project. And government’s role is not limited just to projects that require coordinated effort beyond the capability of even the largest commercial actors. Government must deal with market failure. This can be the failure of the commons, outright malfeasance by commercial actors, or problems … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tim O’Reilly | Source: “Medium” | Subject: Economics

Because of the demands of financial markets, companies often find short-term advantage in cutting employment, since driving the stock price gives owners a better return than actually employing people to get work done. Eventually “the market” sorts things out (in theory), and corporations are once again able to offer jobs to willing workers. But there is a lot of unnecessary friction.

One of the challenges … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tim O’Reilly | Source: “Medium” | Subjects: Economics, Work

Rafe Furst of Quantitative VC uses data analysis and poker references to try to understand if VCs are good at investing in startups or if it is all just luck.

Content: Article | Author: Rafe Furst | Source: “Medium” | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

At the core of the hiring criteria for our venture capital firm, and what we see at top tech companies, is of course things like (a) acumen and talent, (b) relevant experience, (c) culture fit and often (d) domain expertise. But if you’re a rapidly growing (or hope to be) tech company or VC firm, there’s a missing element in that list. A lot of … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Craig Hanson | Source: “Medium” | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

Company organization structure defines both how and what a company builds. It is also one of the few decisions that a CEO can clearly make. Because organization (org) structures appear to be easily distilled down to simple graphs, it is frequently the case that when a company is doing well a given org structure serves as a model for others to follow; and when things … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Steven Sinofsky | Source: “Medium” | Subject: Organizational Behavior

For every “make decisions quickly” there is an equally compelling “make decisions carefully” directive. In The Halo Effect, one of the best books I’ve ever read on business, and on critical thinking more generally — author Phil Rosenzweig talks about how the same business decision can be described as “decisive” or “impulsive”, a strategy can be considered “innovative” or “straying from the core.” There are very few, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Neill Occhiogrosso | Source: “Medium” | Subjects: Decision Making, Management

While every product team I’ve worked with leverages customer feedback to inform product decisions in some way, most fall short of designing their customer feedback loop to maximize the benefits to the product team of gathering, recording, and synthesizing feedback. They also often treat customer feedback as a point-in-time activity as opposed to a far more helpful continuous process. I wanted to share some of … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Sachin Rekhi | Source: “Medium” | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

I am a huge fan of learning through cases, but I’ve also seen a lot of mis-learning through cases. In particular, learning through the presentation of business situations and discussion in order to uncover the many competing forces within a given decision is super helpful. The unique aspect of learning by the formal case method is captured in the discussion more than in the documented … [ Read more ]

Content: Article, Case Study | Author: Steven Sinofsky | Source: “Medium” | Subject: Case Related

Teams that fall in love with a problem have more successful outcomes than teams that fall in love with particular solutions. This is because knowing that a problem is worth solving continues to be motivating even when a team doesn’t come across the right solution on the first, second, or Nth try.

Content: Quotation | Author: Julie Zhuo | Source: “Medium” | Subjects: Challenge, Motivation, Organizational Behavior, Problems / Solutions, Teamwork

How you measure success is critical to the long-term results of your team because it’s the thing that people rally around. Make sure to give this exercise the proper time and attention (more, even, than you would give to thinking about “how should we do this?”).

Content: Quotation | Author: Julie Zhuo | Source: “Medium” | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Bad execution is when you try something that fails and a) you can’t really draw lessons out of that failure that would apply to a future project (because you don’t know why it failed) or b) it took you a year to learn a particular lesson when a smarter path would have let you learn the same thing in 3 months.

Content: Quotation | Author: Julie Zhuo | Source: “Medium” | Subjects: Execution, Management, Success / Failure

Three things I’ve learned from closing a candidate: 1) Get an idea of strong candidate’s dealbreakers (e.g. compensation, timing, responsibilities) early and work to mitigate these with each round of interviews. 2) Be willing to pay up for strong candidates; the short hit in budget will be paid back many times over. Furthermore, fight internally to get that candidate vetted as quickly as possible so … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tim Chen | Source: “Medium” | Subject: Human Resources

Because you may have a long list of candidates, you should batch calls as often as possible. For example, set aside 15 minute segments in a 3 hour block daily. In a first-pass, I always ask: 1) “Walk me through your resume”, to understand if the candidate is actually interested in a startup via a clear story, or just shotgunning their resume; 2) “If you … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tim Chen | Source: “Medium” | Subject: Human Resources

At the outset of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes penned a remarkable economic prognostication: that despite the ominous storm that was then enfolding the world, mankind was in fact on the brink of solving “the economic problem” — that is, the quest for daily subsistence.

The world of his grandchildren — the world of those of us living today — would, “for the first time…be faced with [mankind’s] real, his permanent … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Tim O’Reilly | Source: “Medium” | Subject: Economics

Julie Zhuo, Product design VP of Facebook, lists 32 lessons learned about what it takes to build great products.

Content: Article | Author: Julie Zhuo | Source: “Medium” | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Marketing / Sales

Figuring out the right pricing for your startup is a challenging, yet crucial, part of building a successful company. The way you price your product can make or break your startup. So, it’s important to understand the pricing landscape of your market and how your company fits into it to get your startup’s pricing right.

Dreamit recently hosted an educational panel on startup pricing for the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: “Medium” | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Pricing

Recently, I’ve been speaking to an increasing number of companies thinking about creating or redefining their innovation strategy. For those discussions, I outlined the following strategies in escalating order of three dimensions:
– level of resource commitment
– visibility & access to new technology
– potential for impact (whether development of transformative technology, new revenue streams or financial investment returns)

Content: Article | Author: Julian Counihan | Source: “Medium” | Subject: Innovation

Just because you’re a startup, doesn’t mean you won’t need it.

Content: Article | Author: Jon Westenberg | Source: “Medium” | Subject: Entrepreneurship

The somewhat vague concept of “culture fit” remains a factor in virtually every hire that is made, and a factor considered vital by both employers and candidates. Having said that, the way in which a candidate’s culture fit is typically assessed invites unconscious biases that can result in less than optimal hiring decisions. Candidly, culture fit is a vague and unscientific concept that warrants careful … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Kristi Riordan | Source: “Medium” | Subjects: Culture, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

There are not a lot of resources to help you build analytics marketplaces and other kind of networks. At daphni, we deeply believe in the platformization of the economy and look closely at these models. Several founders have asked us tips to structure their data-driven approach, so we’ve decided to publish a guide to help founders do it. We divided the guide in 2 parts: … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Willy Braun | Source: “Medium” | Subjects: Economics, Management, Strategy