cyberlaxamana

by Jennifer Hepworth I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the notion of control. I’m generally a person who feels most comfortable in the driving seat, having decided on a destination, figured out the best way to get there and chosen the sound track. This attitude has gotten me a lot of places, and I think a strong sense of personal responsibility for outcomes is an important quality and a Good Thing. However. There’s a line. On one side of the line is being in control and on the other is being a control freak. I’m not saying I’ve been there and made large and messy mistakes and learned the hard way that control-freakery must be avoided, but I’m fortunate enough to have met some very smart people with relevant things to say on the topic which will hopefully prevent me from heading down that path. 1. Great entrepreneurs know what they’re bad at, and hire awesome people to do it for them (Mike Cassidy). In some ways, Steve Jobs was the consummate control freak (just check out A...

by Aunim Hossain Baller.  You’ve spent months running around, talking to everyone you know (or don’t know), attending conferences, scouring the online job resources…all with the goal of building your dream team that will take this from a great idea to a company that will change the world.  And you rocked it.  You have the team you need: one product manager (you), three developers with front-end and back-end skills, and one artist/UI guru.  You feel like you’ve arrived.  You say to yourself, “now, it’s all about getting it done, but that should be pretty simple with the team of ninjas I assembled, right?”  But this is where many promising founders stumble.  Even with the right team in place, success is not guaranteed.  While there are many variables that determine success, one of the most important variables that founders can control (and often don’t) is building the right culture.  Culture is created through the processes that founders...

By Mosbah Kahaleh In the process of learning and practicing entrepreneurship, I have been wrestling with the question on whether entrepreneurs should start with good ideas and then build teams around them, or if they should start building the ‘right’ team that will eventually find the right idea. In the context of lean start-ups methodology, my hypothesis is that the later approach (i.e. starting with teams) is more consistent with the lean startup methodology.  The rationale behind the hypothesis is the following: when entrepreneurs start with ideas or industries, they tend to build teams with relevant experience or skill set related to an industry or technology that their idea is based on. Their main objective is to find people who are excited about their idea and can contribute value in transforming that idea to reality. In so doing, however, these entrepreneurs are building up higher transaction costs if they choose to pivot to new industry or technology that would require a ne...