Category: Business Life
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When free wasn’t the deal you thought it was
His heart was racing as he glared at me across the long conference table. I could see from the artery pulsing in his neck, the veins in his thick biceps keeping rhythm. As his hands balled up into fists, the arms of his short sleeve dress shirt stretched to the point of bursting. The VP…
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How long does overnight success take?
Early in the life of my latest startup, I had to take a wild-assed guess as to how much product we’d sell, over what timeframe. One must do this. VC’s don’t give you a few million dollars so you can run along and see what comes of your idea. That’s called a Seed round. On…
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A go-to market cheatsheet
The great thing about working in an engineering driven company is the focus on the core product–aka ‘The Code.’ As a sales guy, I’d rather bring a product to my customers that does what’s promised, is well-architected and solidly designed. But, even when the engineering team has checked in the fixes for the last showstopper bug, the QA team’s…
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Big bad data
A few months ago, I noted that LinkedIn seems to have a simple and not very thoughtful algorithm for recommending job opportunities to me. Ebay similarly seems to be using their Big Data capabilities like a blunt instrument. Blunt Instrument – …it was 3:30 in the morning, and he thought he heard the opening of…
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Hello LinkedIn, “Have we met?”
Sometimes, the use of profiling and big data on the web can be kind of creepy. Like this morning when I happened to search some news about a class action suit against Coach for demanding customers’ email addresses. Googled “Coach lawsuit” and followed a link to an ABC Local News article, and there was…