Founders need to keep practicing compartmentatlizing their brain. At startups, bad sh*t happens all the time. Don’t let one bad thing affect the rest of your day. Lock up the bad thing in one zone, like locking up a beast in a cage, and move on. Of course this is easier said than done, but … Continue reading Compartmentalizing Brain
Soon after starting my career, I had a chance to meet a highly accomplished Taiwanese entrepreneur during his visit to our company. (My first job was at a Korean internet company – I worked there in lieu of the compulsive military service.) I was lucky enough to sit next to him during dinner (the fact … Continue reading Shine in Small Things
I often find I’m pretty bad at keeping in touch with folks. I don’t really have any good system. So what I try to do more these days is “micro check ins”: “Hey – I was reading this article/book and was thinking about you”“Just a random ping – how’s everything?”“Thought you and s/he should meet, … Continue reading Micro Check-Ins
For the so-called “roll-up” acquisitions, it’s easy for companies to only think about the horizontal acquisition model, i.e. merging with or acquiring competitors within the same industry. The goal is often to expand market share/top line revenue and reduce cost by consolidating resources and eliminating redundancies. But keep in mind that’s only one way of … Continue reading Horizontal Acquisition vs. Vertical Acquisition
A company that I recently found had a very interesting PMF journey; before building a fully baked product, they did consulting/service work for almost a year, helping 100+ clients. This helped them find common problems their clients were going through, and define the v1 feature sets to address those common problems. Another benefit was to … Continue reading Doing Consulting Work before Building Product
After a 3-way meeting (myself, a founder starting a new business, and a VC who used to be a founder himself), the VC told me: (Speaking of the amazing enthusiasm of the founder) “See the energy? I don’t have it. I’m too old. That’s why I’m not starting another company.” Well – turned out, the … Continue reading Age Is Just a Number
Quick thoughts from Consensus (late posting): Continue reading Quick Thoughts from Consensus 2023
I like how Alex Kwon is developing his current product. I call it a two-track product development. There’s the main product, Perl, which is a social journaling and microblogging tool for startup founders. (The product hasn’t been publicly launched yet.) And then there’s this awesome Telegram group he runs, where the initially invited users hang … Continue reading Two-track Product Development
“Some things just take time to build. Look at Figma and Notion. Took years to build the product first, before seeing the traction taking off.” – wise words of Kgosi Diphokwane It’s a refreshing reminder, when the world can’t have enough hackathon-style products built in 2 weeks on GPT API. Thousands of projects popping up … Continue reading Some Things Just Take Time to Build