Age of Product food for thought for September 20th, 2015 on the missing European unicorns, how to create a new Silicon Valley, and why managers hate Agile:
Category: News
Food for Thought #6: Scaling Startups, Unicorpses, Culture Hacking
Food for thought for September 13th, 2015 on management lessons from scaling startups, dead unicorns and corporate culture hacking:
Food for Thought #5: Funding Unicorns, Bubble, Success & Discomfort
(via This Week In Startups): Investing legend Ann Winblad on funding software unicorns, finding talent & auditioning the future
Hummer Winblad Venture Partners was founded in 1989 as the first VC fund to invest exclusively in software companies. Today Jason sits down Ann Winblad, technology investing legend and the firm’s Co-founder and Managing Director. Jason and Ann discuss Ann’s journey as an entrepreneur and a wide range of riveting topics.
Food for Thought #4: Mobile Internet, Story of Pocket, What Are We Doing?
: Forget about the mobile internet
For as long as the idea of the ‘mobile internet’ has been around, we’ve thought of it a cut-down subset of the ‘real’ Internet. I’d suggest it’s time to invert that – to think about mobile as the real internet and the desktop as the limited, cut-down version.
Food for Thought #3: Inside Amazon, Startup Failures, Leadership
(via The New York Times): Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace
The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions.
SEATTLE — On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult them into Amazon’s singular way of working. They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs, one employee recalled. When they “hit the wall” from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: “Climb the wall,” others reported. To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards.
Food for Thought #2: Zirtual Implodes, Startup Halo Effect, WeChat
(via Business Insider): A startup dissolved overnight and laid off its 400 employees via email with no warning
Zirtual shut down with no notice — only an email at 1:30 a.m.
In the middle of the night, a startup that had raised $5.5 million dissolved and disappeared. It deleted its Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, and Google+ profile. It changed its website to say it was “pausing operations.”