Did you know that on average, every single one of us wastes 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings? I’m going to show you how to prevent that.
Very early on at Stride Consulting, I searched for a process to help me scale. This was my 4th company and I had my heart set on scaling in a way that I had never scaled before.
I’ve never raised any funding. All four companies I’ve run have been bootstrapped. So leveraging a pile of cash to scale has never been an option for me. I was searching for a process to enable scale.
Inbox is less annoying than Gmail, and you can always go back.
Photo credit: Martin Heller
Online email systems perform the valuable service of filtering out spam at the server before it can clog up our local Internet connection. But even Gmail has its issues, mostly in the design of its web and mobile clients, which tend towards cluttered displays and unnecessary notifications. Who needs an alert that you just got 10 new emails, when none of them are of actual interest?
The concept of Lean Coffee originated in Seattle in 2009. The concept is kind of like Open Space: a group of people gather and have a structured, yet agenda-less meeting. The outcome: ideation that truly originates from the employees.
At Stride, we’ve adopted and adapted the concept of Lean Coffee. The idea was born out of our desire to get together in frequent intervals for short, effective discussions. We knew we didn’t want the time to be PowerPoint driven, and we also didn’t want it to be all about one, or a handful of people doing all the talking. What we were seeking was a way for any individual in the entire company to be heard. Here’s a peek into Lean Coffee at Stride:
We need a new financing model to build new, better companies
Two decades into a software career, I’m still moved by its potential to improve people’s lives through connection, automation, and access to information, yet I’m less convinced than ever that our financial systems are built to get the most out of it.
This is the first post in a series I’ll be writing on the structural problems in venture capital. These problems aren’t a condemnation of the industry, they’re an attempt to outline where the industry fails the market. This failure helps to explain people’s experiences, but I think also helps to outline the opportunity and need for other ways of funding companies. These ways will also have flaws — they’ll likely not be great at building unicorns — but they’ll be finding people and markets ignored by the current environment.
Like the general financial industry, the world of venture capital has become adept at using money to create more money, but it does not consider of the wisdom of its actions. It chooses easy answers, thus leaving harder but better questions unexplored, and accepts high collateral damage to the employees, customers, and industry that at best is painful and at worst is pure exploitation.
Excuse the rant, but I am tired of getting this question. Every couple of months somebody seems to ask it. It’s always someone outside of the product development team. Usually, it’s somebody from Operations or Marketing (no offense!) who is anxiously awaiting for their pet project to be finished.
It plays out like this… The co-worker walks over to tech side of the office one day at 6pm, sees some empty desks, and then assumes the team is not working hard enough. Okay, I get it. From your perspective, “butts in seats” has been a good proxy for productivity. Here’s why it doesn’t quite work that way for the technical team.
It’s easy to become overwhelmed when trying to find, evaluate and select online software for your business. That’s why I’ve created this six-step guide.
This process uses your specific business needs as a filter to cut through the noise and distractions so you can focus-in and find the right online software solution time-and-time again. Check it out…
It’s great to depend on Google’s authentication system to confirm your identity on an online application’s website — until it doesn’t work. If you’ve ever been locked out of your own life, here’s how to work around that conundrum.
A great new online tools for creating cool attention-grabbing graphics for social media is Adobe Spark Post — and it’s free to use. Here’s how it works — and how easy it is to create a graphic suitable for sharing on social media.
When you’re heads-down working and want to avoid the distraction of your incoming email, you can use this tip to send outgoing emails without entering your inbox. The trick: create a browser bookmark that takes you directly to Gmail’s “Compose Email” window without first passing through your inbox.
Next paste the copied link into the your browser’s address bar (1).
Then, hit the enter or return key and it will open the Compose Email page.
Finally, add that compose page as a bookmark. To do so in Chrome, click the little “add bookmark” star at the far right of the address bar (2). You can see that I have mine on the main bookmark bar (3) for easy access:
We asked the team at Google to give us their best tips for making your year more productive using Google Calendar. Click here to discover some lesser known tools that they shared with us and how to get started using them.
Keeping track of expenses is a hassle, plain and simple. You can buy special scanners or box them up and ship them off to different services to scan. Or, you can just sign up for Evernote.
