Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 11, 2022

2001–2007: THE BUILDING YEARS The dot com bubble had burst. I wrote a post in 2015 that memorialized at the time how I felt about all of this, titled, “ Why I F **g Hate Unicorns and the Culture They Breed.” In the past 7 years we built cultures of quick money, instant wealth and valuations for valuations sake. Until we weren’t.

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Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 29, 2010

Don’t get me wrong, I do think an important sign from startups is their ability to keep a startup culture going for as long as possible and one sign of this in the early days is scrappiness. It was probably true, but I created the wrong mindset – the wrong culture. I love this saying and what it implies and I use it often.

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Gust

SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

Amid the remembrance of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks this past weekend, much was made of the voluminous 9/11 Commission report, which described in excruciating detail countless ways in which the United States homeland security and emergency response infrastructure failed to respond adequately to a disaster of unprecedented proportions.

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Unvalidated Learnings

OCTOBER 5, 2016

Such is the company’s current scale and standing in popular culture that it’s hard to imagine it once was nothing more than a scrappy upstart with chronic cash shortages. Their growth naturally slowed down with scale but maintained a remarkable consistency over time: $3bn of revenues in 91, $9.5bn in 2001, $21bn in 2010 and $32bn in 2015.

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TechCrunch

JANUARY 29, 2021

In my experience, many founders have a hard time delegating, which can quickly create cultural and operational problems. Also, we’re adding a new feature to Extra Crunch Live — our guests will offer advice and feedback on pitch decks submitted by Extra Crunch members in the audience! Image Credits: Acquia.

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TechCrunch

APRIL 6, 2022

Really, it’s finally fulfilled the vision we’ve all had of it becoming a leading city around innovation, tech, and culture,” Whurley said. But most of all, he will go out of his way to help newcomers (as well as veterans) of the Austin tech scene whenever they need help or advice or counsel,” Forrest said. “We

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Both Sides of the Table

MAY 7, 2011

Blogs weren’t popularized yet so it was an oddity for me to read the founder of a software company spewing out advice. While that happens sometimes, it was a challenge for Google because it frequently had trouble adapting from an engineering driven culture. Lesson: Joel had been building a community of readers since 2001.

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