Communication Best Practices

24th March, 2015 No Comments Blog , CoVenture , Fundraising

Communication is one of the most important skills in business; perhaps in life.  Recently, I saw David Tisch talk about communication best practices in a lecture at Cornell Tech.  I agreed with nearly everything he said and made me think someone should write a blog post on the topic.  He was kind enough to let […]

Staffing an Experiment: Selling Before Hiring

2nd March, 2015 No Comments CoVenture

Steve Blank, Eric Ries and others have observed that a startup is a fundamentally different type of organization than an established company.  Paraphrasing these observations:  an established company exists to deliver a product to customers as efficiently as possible, while a startup exists to determine what product to deliver, to whom and how.  I believe […]

Joining CoVenture

19th February, 2015 No Comments Blog

Today I am excited to announce that I have joined CoVenture as a Managing Partner.  CoVenture is an early-stage venture capital firm with a twist:  we develop software in exchange for equity.  We also invest small amounts of capital, around $25,000, in selected portfolio companies.  At the same time, CoVenture today announces the closing of […]

Assembling Your Board Dream Team

30th December, 2014 No Comments Blog

In a previous post, I wrote about how to have productive board meetings.  As noted in that post, a board is only as useful as its constituents.  This post provides some food for thought for those who are constructing a board.  It’s obviously not always possible to select all one’s board members, but I hope […]

Big Red Scrum

30th November, 2014 No Comments Cornell Tech , NYC

As noted in an earlier post, I started spending a day a week at Cornell Tech this fall.  One of my responsibilities has been to help teach the Studio class for Masters (Computer Science (MEng) and Business (MBA)) students.  The format of that class is unusual, perhaps unique, for graduate programs, so I thought it […]