Here is a great article from The Mercury News on VCs going to start-ups. This quote from the article pretty much sums it all up:
“I think they’re will be a place and time when I’ll be a VC again, and I’ll remember the clueless things I did before,” including asking a struggling entrepreneur to meet him at his expensive hotel during a cross-country trip, rather than drive to the startup.
“You don’t have to be in the trenches with them, but a lot of entrepreneurs resent VCs because they think they’re disconnected from reality. Now, I see why.”
In general, there are so many people that want us to come up with more products, have a website like Nordstroms, or hear their “great new idea” for us. We love to get feedback and their intentions are good. It’s just interesting how most people just can’t imagine all the things one has to deal with when doing a start-up. Strategy, ideas, and fun are luxuries.
Le Grand Noir has been my favorite staple wine for a while now. I particularly love the brand. Here is what it says on the back of the bottle:
In a world where so many things increasingly look the same, we’re delighted to offer you a wine that doesn’t sheepishly follow the herd. When we blended the blackcurrenty Cabernet grape with the spicy Shiraz, we weren’t following tradition or anybody else’s recipe. Like a chef marrying compatible ingredients to create exciting new flavours, we simply wanted to produce a wine that tastes deliciously different.
We have, in the past, referred to KOYONO as a virtual company. From now on we will want to refer to our structure as Bedouin. We don’t have a central office where all our employees drive every morning. We are a collection of muiti-project entrepreneurs using an IP infrastructure to deliver real products to people all over the world. A recent and brilliant blog post by Greg Olsen, CTO of Coghead titled Going Bedouin | Coghead lays out a clear and concise vision of how we at KOYONO believe the future of companies and innovation look. Greg talks primarily about software companies, but for us, we think the same principles apply to most industries. Any one day, we have over 200 people doing KOYONO work. Other days we might have just a handful. You don’t need to construct a huge infrastructure to accomplish something. The infrastructure is already all around you if you look.
The culture of KOYONO has kept us struggling between the traditional route for clothing designers (make samples, sell to store buyers, manufacture, ship wonder if customers like the stuff, wait for payment from stores, etc.) and a route much more in keeping with our outlook on the world. Web 2.0 and it’s adherence to open standards, open data, and social networks, appeals to us deeply. We have focused the bulk of our attention to serving customers directly and acting as a conduit for other designers as well as a feedback loop for the opinions of customers through out our history. Web 2.0 is, of course, about many of these same principles. This article, The Habits of Highly Effective Web 2.0 Sites (Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 Blog) provides a great and brief (should I say efficient) overview of Web 2.0 as a principal.
As a start-up you do not always have the luxury of hiring an assistant to, well assist you. There are several aids and alternatives out there that can really help with your workflow and productivity. The one I have been using lately is the “Speech” function built into all Macs. You can find it by going to the application in the top navigation bar and clicking “Services” and then “Speech” (e.g. Mail>Services>Speech).
Now that you know where it is, go to any application and highlight the text. Then go to “Speech” and select “Start Speaking Text.” You can choose from a variety of voices and speaking rates through System Preferences>Speech. I use Vicki at one notch above “Normal Speaking Rate.”
You can use it to read long e-mails and website content when multi-tasking, proof read a letter or just have a conversation with you when you are lonely. But seriously, I use Speech everyday and especially to proof all blog posts. With the new OS X due out in the near future, Speech is supposedly far better and much more clear. Give it a try.
