February 2012
2 posts
Listen...until it's time not to listen
“I want you to be nice until it’s time to not be nice.”
- Patrick Swayze as Dalton in Road House
you hear it so often that it has become cliche. to be an entrepreneur you have to listen. listen to your customers. listen to your employees. listen to investors. listen to the experts. and of course, it is the right thing to do. first, its just good manners. second, when...
January 2012
8 posts
why entrepreneurs don't sleep well
imagine the perfect night’s sleep. For me, it involves sliding into cool bedsheets, closing my eyes, marveling briefly at how tranquil and undisturbed my thoughts are, and fading into a deep and restful slumber. Maybe I wake up once, around 2am, marvel at the fact that I have 4 or 5 hours more hours of rest ahead of me, and fade gently back to oblivion.
In the roughly 7 years between the...
the downside of optimism
when i first started investing capital in startups someone told me - “be careful, successful entrepreneurs usually make terrible investors because they are too optimistic.” naturally, i scoffed at this. i know business, i know what’s going to work and what’s not - i’ll be a great investor.
turns out my friend was right…and wrong also.
i think entrepreneurs...
when all hell breaks loose...
i love startups. sometimes it’s in hindsight, cause they can be a real pain in the ass, but if you’re a real junky you wind up looking back on a lot of the painful times fondly. like when you get together with your college friends and talk about the really bad hangovers.
one of my favorite stages of a startup is the part I like to think of as “when all hell breaks loose”...
a longtime dream...
i grew up working in restaurants. dishes, busboy, waiter, bartender, manager, cook - i pretty much did every job there was to do in a lot of different place. i’ve always dreamed of being owning a restaurant.
i also love Montauk. i fell in love with Montauk on my first trip, and over the last 5 years as a part-time resident that feeling has only deepened.
this week i finalized plans to...
ready, fire, aim
if doing business is like shooting at targets, and winning is hitting them, then there are a couple ways of going about hitting targets.
large companies tend to aim very carefully before firing any bullets. my experience working at a large company often felt like this. ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim…fire…maybe. when you do fire, you’re much more likely to hit the target, and...
