What I glossed over in Selling the first telephone is the fact that AT&T didn’t actually sell any telephones. Until the breakup of the company in 1984, telephones were rented as part of the monthly service. Renting was a choice to seemingly maximize profits. The excuse AT&T gave the government disallowing customers from owning their own phones was that AT&T was protecting their...
I saw this on Twitter yesterday: These days I spend more time with entrepreneurs who have products in the market and paying customers, rather than the dreamers who are still struggling with their minimal viable productions and first sales. In either case, what I teach entrepreneurs is that they need to not only worry about that first initial design for customers, but every incremental design...
Entrepreneurs are farmers of ideas.Farmers who are living in a perpetual drought.No matter how well we teach entrepreneurship, the drought creates year after year of failed crops. The fix has little to do with more and better incubators, accelerators, and startups labs. This drought is the lack of capital to support the existing startups. Just as we can’t solve a regional drought by...
Back to understanding money and economics, I started reading The New Lombard Street soon after serendipitously discovering the wonderful online class, Economics of Money and Banking by Professor Perry Merhling (@PMerhling). After two or three years buried under other books on my nightstand, prodded a bit by a discussion group popping up on Reddit talking about the class, I finally finished...
I just spent two of the last three weeks of my life attending big, global, virtual conferences. Quite the 2020 experience, made more so by the 11 hour timeshift for one of these plus a one-day conference a month ago. All this has me pondering what is lost in moving conferences online, and more importantly, can be gained from these early experiments. As the pandemic ends, I expect we’ll see...
My last post critiqued the pros and cons of 2020 virtual conferences. This post focused on how these conferences could be so much better. Sweating the Details Online conferences are software products as much as events. For software, every click needs to be thought through and optimized, as does every button, every bit of text, and every bit of whitespace, as well as the layout of all the user...
Before 2020 a conference was an in-person gathering of hundreds or thousands of people and a webinar was an online gathering of dozens to hundreds. 2020 begins the new era of virtual/online conferences. What is the difference? Conferences serve two main purposes: knowledge sharing and relationship building. The online tools work differently for each of these. Knowledge Sharing The creators of...
Last month I attended my first conference held in a timezone from the other side of the globe. That was a one day event, and an interesting experiment in timezone travel and virtual jet lag. This month the experiment grows, as I’m attending Sankalp Global, a week-long virtual conference, with the programming running morning through afternoon in India Standard Time and East Africa Time. That...
Normally I’d be flying around the world to attend a handful of conferences between the end of summer and end of the year. Here in 2020, we instead get the global, online, virtual conferences. Earlier this week I attended The Future Summit, hosted annually by the Segal Family Foundation. Lovely event. Only trouble was that it was scheduled for East Africa Time, GMT+3, and I live in Pacific...
Spending too many hours per day on Zoom? Finding Zoom calls far more draining than phone-based conference calls and face-to-face meetings? Yes and yes for me, and I’ve been experimenting to try and figure out how to overcome Zoom Fatigue. Over the summer (and before the unbreathable smokey air showed up), I took pleasure in any meeting that was by phone rather than Zoom, as that let me get...
