Articles
How fast can you hire?
Five years ago, when Amazon started its hyper-growth employee count, I wonder how fast a company could hire new employees without causing more harm than good. No matter what kind of business you have, hiring too fast can hinder growth. [...]
A journey of four Marathons: Chicago, New York, Paris, and London.
Last Sunday, I finished my fourth Marathon, London. It was my personal record at 4:21. It was also the most beautiful course of all races I’ve done. And, it was by far, the most beautiful finish place just in front [...]
A 12-step program to eliminate Facebook from your life.
[UPDATE: Dec/2019 — I deactivated my Facebook account] Despite Facebook run-ins with Privacy, I believe most people don’t care (yes, those who care are loud but they are in the minority). However, people care about their needs, and more and more people [...]
An NHS glossary for Americans (consumers amp; entrepreneurs)
I’ve been living in England for over a year now and the entirety of 2017 working in HealthTech. I’ve collected a list of words, terms, abbreviations, and other bits about the NHS. I created this list for my reference. As [...]
A new way to define Product Vision: In the form of a question.
We all know the entrepreneur who’s doomed to fail. The one that has a solution, but the problem doesn’t exist. So over the last decade, there was a valuable shift in defining the problem first in the form of a [...]
Don’t quit your job to do an AR/VR Startup yet
Every few years a new building block of technology starts to take shape and with it comes a wave of enthusiasm, not only from early-adopters but early-builders. Early-builders are the entrepreneurs and developers who just can’t resist the appeal of [...]
How to be the worst CTO that you can be
You are the smartest person on the team and, likely, the founder. If not the founder, you are the one that was brought in to build the tech. You have total control of the infrastructure, the code, the engineers, and [...]
London needs to think bigger, faster.
I’ve spent the last thirteen years of my life building technology startups in the US, and I moved to London just under ten months ago. In the first few months, I was here, I’ve met with several VCs and investors, [...]
When the technology becomes morbidly obese
Last week’s massive ransomware cyber attack (WannaCry) is the consequence of technology becoming morbidly obese. Not different from its cousin, human morbid obesity, it happens because people decide to postpone things they know they should do in the short-term because [...]
What if you had unlimited capital to build a business?
The Lean Startup methodology taught us to build something small, measure, learn, re-plan, and repeat the whole process until you find product-market fit. That’s a great process, and it serves to find something that works. But what are we losing [...]
And I thought I knew what diversity in tech was
Funny things happen when you make a drastic life change. The life change on my case was relocating across the world from Seattle to London. The funny thing was this epiphany about what diversity is. I always considered myself a [...]
Why code rots?
It’s not uncommon for non-tech entrepreneurs or MBA-grads to think of software as a one-time-and-done solution to a problem. In other words, once you “solved” that problem you don’t need to do anything else, like adding a door to a [...]
Running gives me audiographic memory
I was one of those geeks. I had my recurring fitness schedule of going to the gym once a quarter. I sat all day in a chair in front of a computer and did some more of that at night [...]
quot;I need a free developer for my brilliant ideaquot;
If you’re part of an online group about startups, entrepreneurship, founders, or CxOs on Google Groups, Facebook, Slack, Meetup, or any platform, I bet you’ve seen a post like this come by: “Hi, I have a brilliant idea, and I’m [...]
You know you lack diversity when…
Here is a handy checklist to measure your team diversity by the output it produces. The more checks a company/product/event gets on this list, the worst it’s regarding diversity. Events are scheduled to start at 8 AM, exactly at school [...]
Everything is broken… 👍
If you read the news in the last few years, you might have seen headlines as such: … Our Healthcare system is broken. … Our Education system is broken. … Our Democracy is broken. … Our Financial system is broken. [...]
Sorry. You have no unfair advantage amp; no differentiator (with cheat-sheet)
Point 1: In the last decade, I started noticing how some TV ads were so generic, particularly for banks and insurance companies. It plays out like this: They feature happy people, eating, playing, studying, or working, in a cozy home, [...]
You are screwing up your Beta Email List
I see this anti-pattern so often that I just need to write about it in the hope of helping fellow entrepreneurs do it right. The story goes like this: You are building a new product but not ready to have [...]
My first Demo Day in London: Entrepreneur First (#ef6)
Yesterday I had the opportunity of attending Entrepreneur First’s Demo Day here in London. It was my first exposure to such an event here. I found it to be very different from Demo Days in the US. First and foremost, [...]
A month living in London. How it compares to Seattle.
Last week marked a month we are living in the UK. It’s the perfect time to look at the previous 30 days and point out some differences to the US. In reality, I’m just comparing Seattle to London, not USA [...]
