NEWS AND NEWSREADERS
My niche news reading had turned into unmanageable manual link-wrangling, so I set out to evaluate the apps. Pocket failed at sign-in, Flipboard has locked itself into manual curation, Feedly buries an ordinary user in upsell, and Instapaper is fine for long documents but generic for articles. Inoreader won on curation. The wider point is that this whole category has drifted a long way from filling the hole Google Reader left.
RISK ROADMAPPING 101
Six frameworks for identifying and managing startup risk: the Lean Startup method, ISO 31000 and COSO, the Business Model Canvas, SWOT, Agile and Scrum, and Stanford’s venture design. None is a complete answer on its own, and all of them need tailoring to the specific startup rather than adopting wholesale. Written with ChatGPT, which made putting it together super simple.
PODCASTS AND PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
A list of the podcasts and resources I use for personal development in tech and startups — leadership and management, product, startups, engineering, and a random pile that runs from 99% Invisible to No Such Thing as a Fish. Posted here mainly so it stops getting lost in the giant email pile.
ALL THE REASONS YOU'RE UNEMPLOYED
A post about why you are single despite being a hottie landed in my inbox while I was job hunting, and the parallel was too strong to leave alone. Companies will not commit, your self-assurance intimidates them, you are focusing on yourself, and you will not settle for less than you deserve. The job search is a psychological grind in precisely the way the dating market is. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
STAR WARS PRICING
Han Solo asks for ten thousand in advance; Obi-Wan offers two now and fifteen on arrival. That exchange is the entire argument between agencies and founders. An agency wants a derisked transaction against a known brief. A founder needs someone to share the risk, and the upside, of reaching a destination that might not survive the journey. It is why most agencies do not make sense at the founding stage.
GETTING STARTED WITH HUGO
I moved my long-neglected personal blog onto Hugo, and it took a few hours rather than the weekend I had braced for: quickstart, a theme, a GitHub repo, Pages hosting, and a build action documented a level above my understanding. The genuinely hard part was never the tooling. It was porting the old content, which is exactly where I stalled.
WORKING FROM HOME, 2H 2020
In the second half of 2020, I helped build a business that turned over £2 million. Everyone involved was doing it from a bedroom or a kitchen table while their lives were being genuinely disrupted. Working from home stopped being a productivity question and became a human one.
STARTUP YCOMBINATOR VIDEOS
Another list of resources for early stage founders
TOP 12 RESOURCES FOR EARLY-STAGE STARTUP FOUNDERS
A list of resources for early stage founders
HARDWARE? HARD LUCK.
I bought a Yamaha receiver with internet radio built in. Then vTuner, the service behind that feature, changed its business model, and the feature died on a long list of devices including mine. Yamaha’s press release is a triumph of modern truthiness PR. This is why legacy electronics firms are being eaten by the modern players: the strategy is shipping more boxes rather than shipping fewer sustainably — and the fix here would have been cheap.