joshuago’s business Bookmarks

11 JUN 2010
[Harvard Business Review] How to Challenge Your Industry Dogma

What does it mean to be a revolutionary? To challenge an existing dogma, instead of complying with it: to reject its tenets, highlight its flaws and improve each of its shortcomings.

10 JUN 2010
[Dan Shapiro] Your company culture is a meaningless platitude

The great corporate cultures are a simple mix: a few polarizing decisions or excesses, with a handful of quirks mixed in. Preferably quirks that reinforce the rest of the culture.

10 JUN 2010
[Steve Blank] You’re Not a Real Entrepreneur

Who is an entrepreneur really? It turns out that there are four distinct types of entrepreneurial organizations; small businesses, scalable startups, large companies and social entrepreneurs. They all engage in entrepreneurship.

10 JUN 2010
[Chris Ashworth] My 2 Bucks on Pricing

They looked at my prices, and they knew: if this guy doesn’t raise his prices, he’s not going to be around long. They saw this problem clearly, and they saw it long before I did. So they told me.

10 JUN 2010
[The Atlantic] The End of Men - Magazine

For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women?

07 JUN 2010
[Steve Blank] When Big Companies Are Dead But Don’t Know It

It is a rare company that realizes it is time to fire the CEO when the financials are good but the business is fundamentally heading for a cliff.

04 JUN 2010
[The New York Times] Financial Regulatory Reform News

Excellent backgrounder on the U.S. financial reform bill of 2009-2010.

26 MAY 2010
[Reddit] How real-world corruption works

In the public sector, the "consumer" often has little choice... so-called "market discipline" is a lot more diffuse when you have a former-schoolteacher-or-real-estate-broker-turned city councilman whose job it is to disburse a multi-million-dollar street-paving contract. And neither the schoolteacher nor the real-estate broker has any clue how to write or evaluate a road-paving contract.

19 MAY 2010
[Redeye VC] Shrink a Market!

An interesting case study and example of businesses that shrink markets through newfound efficiencies. First Round Capital wants to invest in companies that take five dollars of revenue from a competitor for every dollar earned.

19 MAY 2010
[Redeye VC] The Penny Gap

Scaling from $5 to $50 million is not the toughest part of a new venture - it's getting your users to pay you anything at all. The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny.