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That's the problem with so many organizations around entrepreneurship. They're driven by metrics that don't matter.
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My initial desire to blog came from something that's always been my approach to investing - I'm a nerd, and I love to play with the technology, and part of my approach has really been to understand things both at a user level and at a reasonably deep tentacle level.
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Anyone who knows me knows I'm a strong advocate for diversity across all dimensions.
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I don't read newspapers or watch the news on TV, deliberately to avoid the noise.
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I love using a targeted acquisition approach in conjunction with a business that has a clear strategy and strong organic growth.
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I'm very comfortable in the U.S. and Europe, but I feel completely out of place in the rest of the world, mostly because I never spent time outside the U.S. and Europe until I was in my 30s.
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If I have a golden touch, I'd also say that I have the opposite of whatever a golden touch is, because I've had a lot of things fail. I think part of the experience of being successful is that you have to have a lot of stuff not work.
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I can now check Oregon off the 'marathon in every state list.'
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I'm a venture capitalist. I like to say my job is to help and support entrepreneurs. I can play a leadership role, but my organization can't be the leader.
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I'm usually an excruciatingly happy person.
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I hope more cities engage with immigrant entrepreneurs the way St. Louis has - it's a great model.
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Think about it for a brief moment. Suspend disbelief. Wind the clock forward 100 years. Do you think, as a species, we will still be struggling with the things that vex us today? Will we still be arguing about the same stuff? We will still be eating Cocoa Puffs? We are at the end of the beginning.
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As I continue to believe that innovation and entrepreneurship are the key drivers to our economic future, it's frustrating to hear such little cogent discussion around it.
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Q1 is the easiest quarter to make. If you miss your Q1, regardless of the type of revenue you have, you aren't going to make your revenue plan for the year because your budget process isn't accurate.
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One of the consistent characteristics of the tech industry is an endless labelling of technology and approaches.
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Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.
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Stress on fast growing companies comes from a lot of different places. The one that is often the largest, and creates the most second-order issues, is the composition of the leadership team. More specifically, it's specific people on the leadership who don't have the scale experience their role requires at a particular moment in time.
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I've been using email since 1983. I started with MH and Rmail, then cc:Mail, then Microsoft Mail, with Compuserve mixed in. Eventually, I ended up using Pine for non-Windows stuff and Outlook for Windows stuff. For a while.
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There are two great fictional TV series about technology and the computer industry that each have now had three seasons. The one everyone knows about is 'Silicon Valley.' The lesser-known one is 'Halt and Catch Fire.'
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Twitter has always been that refreshing place where I can quickly find out what is going on in my tech world. I follow mostly entrepreneurs and VCs - some who I know and some who I don't know. I have a few companies in my feed. But no newspapers, no magazines, and no mainstream media.
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I have several close friends who are insomniacs. Over the years, I've heard their stories about being up in the middle of the night, completely awake. I see them yawn at 11 A.M. and know that, regardless of what they are doing, they'd probably rather be in bed sleeping. I've always had sympathy for them, but I've never really understood it.
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For those trying to protect the past, it is a way of retaining power, status, money, a way a life, predictability, comfort, control, and a bunch of other things like that. It is a struggle against the inevitability of change.
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I have a long history with Kansas City.
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I often get asked how I write so much. As any writer knows, the answer is to write a lot more than you actually publish.