Rich Mironov led a clinic on product management concepts for very early-stage start-ups (1 to 3 employees), hosted by Agile Entrepreneurs.
Tag Archives: startups
Burning Your Boats
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I spent 2006 consulting to small tech companies, including seven months as an interim executive. I also nearly co-founded a start-up. Come year-end, though, I find that I haven’t created a new company or joined a fledgling venture. This brings to mind discussions of commitment and “burning your boats.” Continue reading
Growing Back into Management
There’s a funny paradox about joining a tiny company and helping it grow. If part of its attractiveness is an intimacy and lack of management overhead, success creates its own challenges.
Very small companies can operate on informal communications: all ten employees know what each other are doing. The entire staff can grab lunch together, and all-hands meetings easily fit into the conference room. News is shared over the cube wall. Job descriptions and titles are afterthoughts. Decisions are made in the aisle. Continue reading
Girls Getting a Head Start(-Up)
Most founders of VC-backed start-ups tend toward technical degrees, MBAs and forty-something gray hair – with a strong male bias. Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, though, there’s a group of seventh-grade girls who are doing it all: writing business plans, raising venture capital, manufacturing products, and running their own profitable companies. Ten years from now, you may be working for one of them. Continue reading
Why are there Serial Entrepreneurs?
From the outside, it might seem that joining a fledgling start-up should only be about economics and the big payoff: the popular business press always has stories of farsighted technologists, instant millionaires, and thirty-somethings coping with Sudden Wealth Syndrome. And there are certainly enough folks in the Valley who have made it that most of us know one.
This strikes me as too narrow a view, though – and leaves out the important emotional aspects of start-ups. Deep into my fourth adventure, I’m less occupied by eventual exit strategies than by the day-to-day challenge of managing chaotic growth. Continue reading