Articles
Couch to Marathon
The science of physical activity is exceptionally good — particularly if you compare to less understood lifestyle sciences, like sleep, stress, addiction, behavior, and nutrition — so there isn’t much that a non-expert like me can add to the conversation. But since I’ve done [...]
The Art of Forgetting Your Own Product
File this under “Ignorance is Bliss” — As product builders, we have a deep understanding of how our product works, from a functional point of view (i.e. how to get a task done) to the value proposition (how to use it right [...]
The Unmet amp; Unspoken Needs of Customers
Identifying big opportunities is part science, part art. If someone pitched you in 1999 that we need to create a fully open micro-blogging platform that each person can post up to 140 characters for anyone to see, your reaction might [...]
Attention Cannibalization
If you come from a business or marketing background, revenue cannibalization is something you are familiar with. It’s the concept of a business launching a new product line that is creating revenue by taking revenue away from another product line [...]
Are you the user or the product? The tale of Parents Night Out vs. Kids Night Out.
You might have heard the phrase “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product” as a way to describe tech consumer companies where their business model is advertising. It’s a very limited — and wrong — way to explain the [...]
Would you be OK if your employer told you how to spend your salary?
We live in pretty interesting times. On the one hand, we have employers that are treating their employees more and more like adults by giving them a lot more flexibility on how they do their work. This movement, sometimes referred [...]
10 Tips for Recently Laid Off Microsoft Employees
Let’s get this out of the way. It sucks. It’s like being dumped. Even if you were unhappy with the relationship, you wanted the break up to be on your terms, but it wasn’t. If you are reading this, likely [...]
“8 Pet Peeves of Health Apps amp; Sites”
I didn’t pick the health industry to build my next company. The health industry picked me, by chance. On my first tech-health conference I attended after co-founding EveryMove I felt like an alien looking at all these people and their [...]
The End of Software
I take it as a sign that I must write a blog post on this topic, after seeing the same thread discussed in three different contexts: The end of the software business as we know it. My first interaction was [...]
Thoughts on my first Marathon (Chicago 2013)
When you run for 26.2 miles you have time to think. A lot of time to think. I realized that a Marathon is just like the opening ceremony at the Olympic Games. You spend months “rehearsing” for the big show. [...]
10 Reasons Your Startup Will Fail
Great entrepreneurs are not risk-seekers. They are risk-mitigators. If you eliminate every possible risk for your startup, you succeed. Of course, you can’t eliminate all risk, but you can mitigate, control and eliminate a lot of them and let “luck” [...]
A day in the life of a startup CTO
I’ve thought it would be cool to write a blog post about the randomness and full-stackness of being a CTO at a small startup. So here is a summary of my day today, which started at 6:45 AM and it’s [...]
My Half amp; Full Marathon Training Plan for 2013
Last week I put my training plan for my Half-Marathon in June (Seattle Rock-n-Roll), and my first full Marathon in October (Chicago). Training plans are a hard thing. Everything on the web is OK, but it’s not for you, or [...]
Google is about to learn a tough lesson
A common mistake entrepreneurs make is to assume a feature is not necessary because it doesn’t have a lot of usage, thus it can be safely removed from the product. Sometimes that’s the case, but sometimes, not so much. Google [...]
Holy sh*t, my first Marathon ever!
I just registered to run the Chicago Marathon in October 2013. This will be my very first Marathon. I think this is the first time in my life I’m starting something I don’t know I can finish. I actually don’t [...]
Why your first hire should be a designer and not a developer?
You kick off your startup and you start generating revenue or you raise seed money to get things going. You are in a position that you decide to hire the first employee of the company. If one of the founders [...]
Which feature you’re going to remove next?
We have a problem. We think that more is better. We say that less is more, but we don’t act on it. We say we want less, but we pick the product with more. We say we’ll build a simple [...]
My LinkedIn Connection policy (a.k.a. Why I haven’t accept your connection request)
I feel it’s that time of the year again. No, not spring, the LinkedIn Connection policy time. By that I mean to tell people who I accept and who I don’t accept connections on LinkedIn. I fear some people might [...]
The Future of Software Development Will Be Online
In 2008 a senior person associated with a VC in Seattle was helping advice this VC firm on an investment. He asked me what I thought about developing software on a browser. Yes, instead of a full-fledge IDE, a browser-based [...]
Seattle 2.0: From humble beginnings to a new home at GeekWire.
Today I’m ecstatic to announce that Seattle 2.0 has a new home: GeekWire. It’s a perfect match and you can read more on the GeekWire blog post. This is a 5-year chapter on my life, and as such, I feel [...]
