Last night the 12 TechStars Boulder teams huddled around each other at 10:10pm. I have absolutely no idea the significance of this time but I do know that the time spent was productive.

We all poured a shot of tequila & told each other our one “big rock”. The big rock is something important that you need to get accomplished in the next week. When we come back next week, if we’ve accomplished the task, we get a shot of high quality tecquila. If we don’t, it’s a shot from the plastic bottle of Mantequila.

Curious, do you have a big rock for this week? If you accomplished it every week, I’m sure you’re company would kill it. So here’s to drinkin’ the good stuff.

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1 Surefire Way to Strengthen Your Startup

Move in together. Yup, that’s right. Get your core organization & move into one house for a period of time. You’ll never fortify your team in a stronger way than by actually living with them. Here are some obvious advantages: Learn to make decisions together. You thought your go to market strategy was hard to [...]

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My Review, Startup Upstart by David Cummings

As many of you know, I’ve had the honor and pleasure of getting to work with David through a business we started together. Quite often I get asked what it’s like to work with him and my first answer is always something akin to: “he’s the best in the business”. So naturally, I’m a fan [...]

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What’s your Four Minute Mile?

Disclaimer: I hijacked the lead on this story from a recent INC magazine article by @HarveyMackay: ————————————————————- A college student arrived a few minutes late for his final exam in mathematics. The room was quiet, with everyone working hard, and the profes­sor silently handed him the test. It consisted of five math problems on the first page and [...]

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Inch Wide and a Mile Deep

It was early ’08 and times were pretty good. I had set up a meeting with my mentor & friend Charlie Paparelli; professional career growth was on my mind. We met for breakfast at the Georgia Tech Hotel after one of our early morning bible studies inside of ATDC. At that time, like I said, [...]

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The NanoLumens Story

Rick Cope broke the mold. In a town of software technology entrepreneurs, he did the virtually impossible and built something that didn’t exist. The result of his efforts was the world’s largest flexible video display. What you say, “flexible”? That’s right, a big ass tv that can curve around stuff. It was my job to [...]

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11 Things I learned in 2011

One of the things I learned this year was that long blog posts suck, so I’m going to keep this as short & sweet as I can. The top 11 things I learned in 2011 in no particular order: Corporate culture is the most important element of your business (I love this quote from David Cummings. [...]

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Your Uniqueness is what Makes your Start-up

Early in the days of starting SalesLoft, I asked a close mentor how he thought we were tracking and what I could do to adjust or improve. He said something that I really didn’t expect which has actually made more and more sense over time. He said, “Just keep being yourself. We’ll see where it [...]

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Are Entrepreneurs with Industry Experience Sometimes a Danger to Themselves?

Yesterday, I wrote a post about the concept of founder-market fit. The whole idea is that someone who has great experience in their industry or discipline will have an easier time being successful with their start-up. A friend of mine, John Peltier brought up a good counter-point in the comments section. He mentioned the challenge [...]

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The Concept of Founder-Market Fit

Product-market fit has become one of the top buzz terms this past year in the world of start-up technology. Lately, however, a few venture pundits have been writing about something different. It’s the concept of founder-market fit. The idea is that when you start a business you don’t know exactly what your product is going to [...]

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