dylan tweney

27Nov/11Off

Working hard is overrated

Caterina Fake: "Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on."

via Caterina.net: Working hard is overrated.

23Nov/11Off

Dylan’s Desk: The time to start a company is now

In my latest column for VentureBeat, I wrote about my experiences as an entrepreneur during the dot-com boom, and why it's so important not to delay if you think you've got a startup in you. The only way to learn how to start a company is by going out and actually doing it. There are no books, no websites, and no schools that can tell you everything you're going to need to know.

Things you wouldn’t ordinarily think twice about, like incorporating and taking care of our nearly nonexistent finances took up a huge amount of time, as we realized that we were out of our depth. We then spent too long talking with lawyers and accountants who cost way too much. Eventually, we realized we didn’t really need such heavy-duty firepower helping us, but by then we had spent thousands on them.
We were convinced we needed to raise a lot of money, and quickly, so we could “get big fast” and then figure out our revenue model. In reality, that was exactly backwards: For our kind of business, we should have stayed small, kept the company simple, built a product that we understood and could sell, and then grown the business once we had some idea what we were doing.
Eventually, we ran into one too many roadblocks including the dot-com bust and wound the company down. We didn’t make ourselves or our investors rich, but we did return more than half of what they’d invested to them — which is more than you can say about Pets.com or Boo.com.

Read the whole column: Dylan’s Desk: The time to start a company is now | VentureBeat.

Tagged as: entrepreneurs, startups No Comments

22Nov/11Off

One simple change to make hiring more fair

This @ericries piece from last weekend is one of the smartest things I've read on race & meritocracy. He discusses how the gender makeup of major symphony orchestras changed radically after implementing a simple change: Making people do their auditions behind black screens, so the auditors can't see gender or race, but can only hear the music they're playing.

I previously described on my blog one simple change I made to the hiring process at my last company. I asked all of our recruiters to give me all resumes of prospective employees with their name, gender, place of origin, and age blacked out. This simple change shocked me, because I found myself interviewing different-looking candidates – even though I was 100% convinced that I was not being biased in my resume selection process. If you’re screening resumes, or evaluating applicants to a startup school, I challenge you to adopt this procedure immediately, and report on the results.

Related anecdote: When I set up a blind submissions system for tinywords, the result was an almost immediate diversification in the number of authors. Instead of reading bylines first, we had to concentrate on the poetry itself. It turns out that even people with respected names can write bad poems -- and people with no name could write poems that would blow you away.

Now, many hires are made through recommendations and social networks, so the implicit bias problem won't go away overnight.

But I think I am going to implement something like this the next time I make a public call for job candidates or interns.

via Racism And Meritocracy | TechCrunch.

Filed under: Notes No Comments

16Nov/11Off

Dylan’s Desk: How the Internet is dividing publishers into two camps

Glam Media founder Samir Arora thinks he knows the future of media.

The secret, he is betting, is brand advertising displayed against high-quality, premium content.

That stands in stark contrast to the advertising model that’s worked best for the past decade online, in which increasingly specific text advertising is targeted at potential customers’ immediate desires, largely via search engines.

Glam Media aggregates content from a large network of vertical publishers. And Arora paints an alluring picture that might appeal to many print publishers, that are wondering where their profits have gone in the move to the web.

Read the whole column: Dylan’s Desk: How the Internet is dividing publishers into two camps | VentureBeat.

Filed under: Published Work, VentureBeat No Comments

15Nov/11Off

Norwegians take top prize in startup competition, with a killer presentation

I was a judge at a startup competition recently. It was great fun and all of the 8 contestants were brave enough to make a 2-minute presentation in front of a room full of people -- not to mention four cranky judges. One presentation in particular really stood out though.

When Halvor Gregusson got off the stage, an audience full of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors was cheering and the moderator was giving him a high-five.

Pretty good for a two-minute pitch about a time-tracking tool from a Norwegian startup.

Gregusson’s company, Yast, took the top prize in the Fast Pitch competition today at Under the Radar, a conference held in Microsoft’s Silicon Valley headquarters. The competition, co-sponsored by VentureBeat, gave eight startups (selected from a field of more than 100 applicants) just two minutes to make their case before a panel of four judges, one of which was me. The judges then had two minutes to give their feedback. We showed our votes by holding up one of three pictures of David Hasselhoff, ranging from “Oy vey!” to “Awesome!”

Gregusson’s pitch won the near-unanimous approval of the panel. How did he do it? Impeccable timing, a sense of humor and a continuous soundtrack (taken from the movie The Rock, he told me) that was perfectly integrated into the points of his slides, which auto-advanced as he spoke.

Read the rest of the story: Norwegians take top prize in startup competition, with a killer presentation | VentureBeat.

Filed under: Published Work, VentureBeat No Comments

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