Building a startup is like building a family. You bond with people in ways drastically different to a normal job. One of the thing that saddens me the most is when some of those early members of the family depart. It needs to happen, its part of the growing up process, people ‘graduate’ just like in school, but its one of the toughest things for a founder to watch. continue reading »
The best businesses scale faster than their people. Learning to be a better CEO is crucial for entrepreneurs who don’t set off to me managers, they just fall into it by virtue of their creation. Below are my Top 20 learnings
1. Be fair
Fairness comes first. You can be tough and even brutal at times but be fair in your judgment, give credit when credit is due. No one wants to work for someone who is unfair. Even when you are let down, hold people accountable to it, but when push comes to shove swallow your pride. Be the bigger Man, after all you are CEO.
2. Show empathy
Show empathy not sympathy. Sympathy is letting emotions rule you. Its feeling sorry for people. Empathy is getting under other people’s skin to understand them. As a CEO its your job to get under the skin of your customers, your staff, your stakeholders and figure out what makes them tick. Keep it human. Don’t let your success go to your head. Emotional intelligence is as important (if not more) than analytical intelligence in running a business.
3. Be the benevolent dictator
True democracy does not work in business (if anywhere). Drop the ‘decisions by committee’, the never ending conversations. It will slow you down, create bureaucracy, indecisiveness, and will eventually kill you. Listen to everyone’s opinion, create healthy debate but then take a firm and binding decision. Show decisiveness and conviction. Align everyone to your decision and march forward relentlessly. It matters less to be right all the time. You never will. You will be wrong some times. Its OK- learn to fail fast and realign. The benevolent dictator is the one who is decisive, takes action with best intent at heart.continue reading »
Put a few entrepreneurs in a room and you’ll find the topic of conversation will inevitably gravitate to who’s done more screw ups than the other. I’ve been in that room enough times to know that after a while it’s the same record all over again. I share with you below the 10 most frequent, which also reflect my experience:
1.Hiring too quickly
As an entrepreneur you are naturally eager to move fast and build a big business. Not only that but you are by nature impatient, no matter how fast you’re moving. That’s partly what makes you who you are; and why you don’t fit into the normal routine of a corporate job.
Inevitably you make the mistake of hiring someone too quickly that you shouldn’t have. Not only that, you hire them against your instinct. That niggling hunch that there’s something about them you don’t like, but you are conscious of being too fussy, too slow, too much in pain to say no.
Every one of these cases backfires multifold. And in some cases can bring your business to a grind. Just don’t do it. Listen to your hunch. Take your time on hiring – it’s the single most important investment you make. Do it carefully. continue reading »
Marketplaces are remarkable entities. As they growth they develop a mind of their own. Like an ant colony. They develop their own behavior and set of rules. And as they grow the entrepreneur has less and less power to giver it.
But fundamentally what drives marketplaces is their failure to do what is their exact purpose: to create a ‘match’ between the two parties, supply and demand. It’s their imbalance that drives them and creates the rules of engagement.
Am architects of a marketplace has 3 main levers to pull; and these main levers are all aimed at constantly trying to rebalance and imbalanced marketplace. That’s the name of the game.
By skillfully maneuvering these three, and the many moving parts within each of them, a successful marketplace emerges and grows. And as it grows the network effects get stronger until at some point it overtakes the architect’s power to do very much.
Here I analyse these three levers and I draw on one very interesting analogy which – though seemingly wacky – has a lot of truth in it and has always fascinated me. The behaviour of marketplaces has stark similarities to dating. Why dating as an analogy? There’s probably more analogies to be made to surface the power of these 3 levers, economic policy making is another. But far more people relate to dating than policy making. Plus its far more interesting Jcontinue reading »
To capture how much the web has evolved picture the first Mosaic or Netscape browser page on a dial up connection. (Sadly I am old enough to have witnessed that first hand). Fast forward to today, a world dominated by ever growing in-browser capabilities on a growing number of ever more mobile devices. The web is not just more mobile and more powerful. It’s a damn lot prettier. (I cant resist to pimp our Pinterest page here as its so so cool
Design is in many ways at the driving seat of today’s technology. Innovation is increasingly turning outside in rather than inside out. And by that I mean they start from an idealistic interaction with the customer – a dream experience, an imagined world, and we walk backwards to execute on the imagined dream.continue reading »
Yet another inspiring story of how PeoplePerHour allows people to start a business, follow their dreams and passions and build up their business one hour at a time.
And contrary to common perception: its not all in high tech and digital. Lisa Moncur’s story – featured in the Scotsman this weekend – reminds us that there is still life in manufacturing, and you can start a business on the side from your bedroom and build it up.
Thats our mission at PPH. That’s what we do best. And thats what gets us up every morning.
Thanks Lisa for sharing your story! Full article here
This is Lisa’s profile on PPH