Domain Expertise at the top — This is the 1st part of a 4-part series on why early-stage tech startups can fail their first few years trying to get into business, due to common and unfortunate circumstances created by their founders, that should, in this day and age, be easily avoided. In this first part, we…

Why aren’t they interchangeable? — Do you know the actual difference? As a result of a talk that I delivered to the NZ SaaS community, on Founder SuperPowers, I was asked to clarify why I thought that developers (working in Enterprises and in Solution Provider businesses) were not suitable to be working as founding engineers…

Here’s how to tell — Most people doing tech today, whether they have a technical background or a business background, probably have a services mindset rather than a product mindset. Not everyone of course, but I’m going to estimate a ~1:50 ratio of those in tech today who have never worked in a services business…

You hired the wrong people — This is the 4th and final part of a series on why early-stage tech startups can fail their first few years trying to get into business, due to common and unfortunate circumstances created by their founders, that should, in this day and age, be easily avoided. In the first, second…

You made a Services Business — This is the 3rd part of a 4-part series on why early-stage tech startups can fail their first few years trying to get into business, due to common and unfortunate circumstances created by their founders, that should, in this day and age, be easily avoided. In the first and second…

Thinking that you know your customers — This is the 2nd part of a 4-part series on why early-stage tech startups can fail their first few years trying to get into business, due to common and unfortunate circumstances created by their founders, that should, in this day and age, be easily avoided. In the first part of…

“No scene from prehistory is quite so vivid as that of the mortal struggles of great beasts in the tar pits. In the mind’s eye one sees dinosaurs, mammoths, and sabertoothed tigers struggling against the grip of the tar. The fiercer the struggle, the more entangling the tar, and no…

4 biases your founders may have that might be preventing your company from scaling — There are many origins to tech startup business ideas, there is no doubt about that. New business ideas come from many places. I’m going to focus on one of the more common origins of new tech businesses, which conveniently helps me illustrate a certain set of biases that can be…

Make good choices — You are a tech startup Founder. You are either a technical founder, or you are a non-technical founder. Either way, you know that software is the gateway to your future success. If you are a technical founder, you already know that there is a difficult choice to make from day…