Venture hacks always supplies gems for the entrepreneur. This post is excellent, reading and listening for anyone who wants to get a startup done.
Even more important, Mike Cassidy talks about conflict resolution within a company and how to achieve work-life balance. Plus the dude plays ultimate which is a super plus in my book.
All this from a guy who sold hundred million dollar companies twice after only a couple years of launch.
The guys over at Venture Hacks included this little screen shot of John Doerr’s [of Kleiner Perkins fame] recent talk at Stanford University.
We obviously love point 4 under Missionaries. But in truth, as Umair Haque points out often at bubblegeneration, there really does need to be a radical re-thinking of the way we do business. The dollars you hold no longer represent the scorecard at the end of the day. Economists have taken the first step with the concept of monotonically decreasing utility (i.e. not every dollar is worth the same).
In engineering classes like thermodynamics, you are almost always asked to draw a dotted line around what you perceived the system to be. I think it is obvious that for several decades, the US viewed the dotted line as its own borders where flows into the system resulted in a rapid increase in wealth. Now due to reduced friction brought on by inexpensive communication and transportation we see monetary, labor, and political flows out of the US system boundaries. If the US wants to remain relevant, we’re going to have to redraw our dotted line around the whole world.
But this is just a metaphor. If we really want to see this happen, we are going to have to embrace what John Doerr lists as Missionary attributes.