Category: Uncategorized
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The first thing your customers see
I spent a week in Boston working with founders at Intel’s Ignite program, a corporate accelerator that helps deep tech startups find product/market fit and sell to enterprise. My role was to help these founders attract more customers and investors through video. I wrote this so people not in Intel’s program could benefit from what we covered.
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How I Go From Idea to Filming
A write up of my low effort, no scriptwriting, no memorization workflow for how I generate ideas and get them to where I’m ready to talk about them on camera.
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I Got Taken for a Ride in India
And it was totally worth it. I knew my trip to India was going to get weird when I got a stomach bug before I landed at Indira Gandhi International Airport. Frankly, it was a win to cross that distance without causing an international incident in the airplane lavatory.
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The Upside of Getting Screwed Over
I’m an advisor to a company that makes beef jerky. The founders are Bolivian and their product has done well down there…but the market is small. They relocated the business to Texas and I’ve been helping them get the business in motion. One of the founders shared a story that I can’t stop thinking about…
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Where Nobody Wants You to Become a Millionaire
A “one that got away” shady business deal in Russia…Nine years ago, a colleague-of-a-colleague had a connection to someone who worked under Putin. Putin wanted to beef up Russia’s economic presence in the East as a hedge against the West’s global business dominance. Putin had selected Vladivostok—a port city abutting China and the Pacific—as the next big thing for Russian entrepreneurship.
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Ask For More
MBAs, psychopaths, and natural-born salespeople are experts at making the big ask. A position outside of their experience level, the phone number of someone out of their league, free guac at Chipotle, things that others would never consider possible, they do with aplomb.
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Big Ideas Aren’t Enough
One of the cruel realities of the world is that a good idea won’t go far on its own. A good idea—especially one that is novel, original, and unproven—needs a persuasive, resourceful person pushing it forward.
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The Time We Turned Down NBC’s The Office
I took my first office job in 2001 working the customer service desk of a company called Despair, Inc. (Yes, that is an actual company name). Despair had built a nice little business making products that parodied a specific type of motivational posters.