Sean on Startups | Thoughts on startups, products and venture investin...

I recently attended a discussion on startup company culture hosted by Ridge VC. I have always thought that company culture is important, but before this discussion I had never considered why it is important. I suspect many founders haven’t either, and...

Almost all advice for early stage startup companies focuses on product-market fit, which is the point at which it’s clear that your product is meeting a market need in a reproducible way and your business can scale.
While I agree with that advice, it takes quite a while before you can even determine if you have product-market fit. You need to identify the market, define the problem, build a product and test it with customers. After that process, it’s unlikely you...

Starting a company is like entering a tunnel. There is so much for you to do that you have no time to look around, so your world shrinks. You are so busy moving from problem to problem that it gets harder and hard to think about your company objectively...

Not all of your customers will love you. In fact, many of them won’t even like you. In my career building products and services, I have been referred to as: idiot, moron, incompetent, joker … and many, many more offensive terms involving profanity which...