Writing

Continuing the theme of case studies for MBA Mondays, I want to use a milestone that was passed last night to make a bigger point about startups. I have known Scott Heiferman since the late 90s. He was one of [...]  Read more

My partner Albert shared this line on his blog almost five years ago now.  I find myself using it all the time. And it is an important lesson that I have learned in my career. When something goes badly in [...]  Read more

I recently had lunch with Mark Leslie, a successful entrepreneur and CEO, who now teaches at Stanford and works with startups, often as a board member. He told me about a paper he and a colleague published in Harvard Business [...]  Read more

I have been writing MBA Mondays every week since January 2010. There have been roughly 160 MBA Mondays posts to date. It is a substantial body of work. I have no clue how many words I have written on this [...]  Read more

When I got into the venture capital business in the mid 80s, software was sold. You would pay a large sum to acquire a license to the software and then a much smaller annual fee for maintenance and support. Today, [...]  Read more

Commerce has to be the oldest business model. Sell something to someone. Or maybe it was barter back then. In any case, ecommerce revenues topped $200bn in the US in 2011 and are growing at close to 10% annually. Global [...]  Read more

My friend Darren Herman helped me think about this post. He sent me this deck along with some thoughts. This slide from Darren's deck is a good place to start this discussion: It is true that the vast majority of [...]  Read more

A revenue model is "the system design by which a business monetizes its services". That comes from Wikipedia. I like that definition. Short, sweet, and to the point. I am going to spend the next couple months talking about revenue [...]  Read more

So I messed up bigtime yesterday.  I created a "final version" of the revenue model hackpad and locked it down so hard that nobody could even see it.  What happened is I am using a product, hackpad, that I don't [...]  Read more