Join us for the final presentations of our two Stanford classes this Tuesday June 4th and Wednesday June 5th. Tuesday = Hacking for Defense Wednesday = Lean Launchpad The presentations just get better every year.  Attend in person or via Zoom. This year AI seems to be part of almost every team. Zoom link and RSVP for Hacking for Defense here...

Gordon Bell passed on this month. I was a latecomer in Gordon Bell’s life.  But he made a lasting impact on mine. The first time I laid eyes on Gordon Bell was in 1984 outside a restaurant in a Boston suburb when he pulled up in a Porsche. I was the head of Marketing for MIPS Computer, a RISC chip startup. The entire company (all of five of us)...

Ilya Strebulaev at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Director of the Stanford Venture Capital Initiative just came out with a book that should be on your reading list – The Venture Mindset. The books premise is that Venture Capitalists (who were responsible for the launch of one-fifth of the 300 largest U.S. public companies) have a different...

This part 2 of the Secret History of Polaroid and Edwin Land. Read part 1 for context. Kodak and Polaroid, the two most famous camera companies of the 20th century, had a great partnership for 20+ years. Then in an inexplicable turnabout Kodak decided to destroy Polaroid’s business. To this day, every story of why Kodak went to war with Polaroid is...

The connections between the world of national security and commercial companies still has surprises. December 1976 – Vandenberg Air Force Base, U.S. military space port on the coast of California As a Titan IIID rocket blasted off, it carried a spacecraft on top that would change everything about how intelligence from space was gathered. Heading...

One of the most exciting things a startup CEO in a business-to-business market can hear from a potential customer is, “We’re excited. When can you come back and show us a prototype?” This can be the beginning of a profitable customer relationship or a disappointing sinkhole of wasted time, money, resources, and a demoralized engineering team. It all...