The Complex System

I believe pitching is as much art as it is science. Last week I attended the Tech Coast Angeles fast pitch competition at UCLA, an event I won in 2007. As I was listening to the pitches, I realized that the quality of the presentations were dramatically better than when I was on the stage [...]

Much has been written about the ups and downs of the startup lifestyle. It’s not an easy road and not everyone is built for it. But, no matter what the path ends up looking like, most startup junkies will tell you there is something addictive about the experience you can’t give up. I’m one of [...]

I’m not a professional networker like Jason Nazar is. I don’t really care for it that much. I can do it, and I even enjoy it sometimes when I do it, I’ll pretty much always take the alternative path. My role at Amplify requires much more networking than I did at the Leads. There are [...]

So last week I wrote about building features vs. businesses, read it here. Josh Smith from coder.ly turned me on to a post from David Cohen back in 2007 where he gives his opinion on the subject, read that here. David’s opinion is that people who dismiss companies that are building what are clearly “features” [...]

If you aren’t asking yourself that, then it’s probably the latter. I see way to many features these days at Amplify. Initially I started being soft on my feedback when someone pitched me a feature. I was like “hey, that’s pretty cool”; but now, I’m like “hey, that’s a cool feature that Foursquare should do, [...]

One of the things I hated the most at Leads360 and pretty much every other company I’ve worked at was recruiting. First off, I suck at it. It’s a total pain in the ass. You can spend ½ your time combing resumes, having phone interviews, meeting people and so on to end up hiring someone [...]

A few weeks back I read a great post from Hiten Shah on mentoring. In it he calls out that 99% of mentors are doing it wrong. At first it got me thinking about how I go about mentoring. At Amplify I’m in a position to do this on a regular basis for the first [...]

So it’s been just about three months since we launched Amplify. I can’t fully express in words how fulfilling the experience has been, but I’m going to try. I’ve started and built several companies; some have succeeded and some have failed. I’ve learned a lot over the years. I’ve come to know what I’m good [...]

One of the interesting things about sitting on the receiving end of lots of Amplify applications and pitches is that I get to see trends unfold in real-time, on a micro level. Looking across the 100+ applications we’ve reviewed thus far, I’ve seen a handful of commonalities among companies; many oft them trying to solve [...]

#4 of the 10 part series on Docstoc and it’s about running lean. When it comes to getting far on a little, most of it is common sense. But when you’re in the thick of things, you need to be deliberate about it. Remember, it’s not just you building things, it’s your team. The key [...]