Do Well

During the first year of leading the Startup Leadership Program, we included the obligatory class on marketing. In the second year, we broke that down into acquiring buyers (entrepreneurial selling) and acquiring users (more akin to traditional marketing). We talked about SEO, retargeting of ads, and virality. It was good stuff, but somehow didn’t seem…

As corny as it sounds, I already have my dream business mentor: my father.  He runs a small family business in Rockford, IL. He makes metal parts, which is far from my traditional interests or ambitions. However, there’s commonality that I relish. He doesn’t have a love for formal financial statements; instead, he understands that…

Jason Freedman has it right. He wrote a post recently about 42 Floors vacation policy – which consists of a mandatory two weeks of vacation on your first day. Wait, wha????? That’s right, they start paying you and ask you to show up two weeks later. The premise being that we don’t really take vacation…

For most people, the idea of driving any significant distance is daunting. Stuck in a car, with hundreds of mindless miles stretching ahead of you, and no matter what radio station you manage to pick up – it always seems that the newest Taylor Swift song is playing. It’s not hard to imagine that would…

People Have Money but Feel Glum—What Does That Mean for the Economy? from the WSJ. A great summary of the juxtaposition between the general malaise in consumer confidence which is contrast to all the strong metrics of the economy (hiring, unemployment, etc). How To Pass On Price Increases Without Alienating Customers – from Forbes Business Council. My favorite quote…

I read a great article on how to reshape the traditional bonus. I can’t find the original article, but the study it was based off of was summarized in the Wall Street Journal. The article went something like this: a bonus is designed to incentive improved performance, and is paid only after certain milestones are…