joshuago’s business Bookmarks

A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.