Notes by OliverTaco: "Well, not actually eat since there wouldn’t have been an receipt for their expense report, but they did try to hire them. I’ve talked to other entrepreneurs and they have reported similar experiences. You go in and do your pitch. You know the dril

Notes by OliverTaco: Whatever your company does there is someone doing something fundamentally similar (from the perspective of a VC building a portfolio of companies). So, ceteris paribus, VC's will always invest in the management team that is willing to sign the worst contr

Notes by OliverTaco: Many entrepreneurs view their first round of funding as the end game for their startup. They’re so excited by the prospect of “big money” that they don’t look at the long term implications of selling their soul.

Notes by OliverTaco: Stackranking is a valuable tool, simple to use, and it helps you concentrate on the very specific parts of a project. I do it because it helps me decide what criteria use to identify what to concentrate on. I like to stackrank pieces of my project by impo

Notes by OliverTaco: Ryan recently posted three reasons why he prefers working with girls, er, women. My wife came into my home office (she needed a break from working on her book's index, I guess, so I was voted to take a break from what I was working on.) and read the artic

Notes by OliverTaco: Yep, that makes no sense at all, yet that is what you have to have to be successful in a small business. Eyes in the back of your head and the ability to predict your competitors moves in advance are handy too. But Focus is really the only thing you have

Notes by OliverTaco: Ah, plans are wonderful things - if only reality were more sensitive towards the tender ego of the planner! In twenty five years of planning projects I’ve never had anything with a horizon longer than three months and three people actually work. So why

Notes by OliverTaco: Ok, that is a broad statement, but ShutterFly has an MBA driven feature that has made me so mad I got up out of bed early on a Saturday to write about it: Once you load your pictures in you can’t get them back out.

Notes by OliverTaco: It may seem very Ah-nold to manage a company that way, but killing a project is better than killing your company. From Valdocs (yes, I am that old) to the FAA’s almost killing us all with 12x over budget software - we all can tell stories, and we’ve a

Notes by OliverTaco: We came up with several domain name options for our new company and surprisingly, Promote-My-Site.com was available. So we grabbed it. But no Google love after a month. We took a look at the wayback machine and we found that this was pretty much a sponso