Blog
The technical differentiation recession
Technical differentiation. I can recall 10 years ago when that was nearly all I heard from colleagues, customers, bosses and potential partners. There was good reason to care a lot about technical differentiation. “Tech diff” was the single largest moat one could build around enterprise software. Back then, the rise of the consumer Internet was [...]
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Spend on scarce talent and borrow the rest
Spend your money on scarce talent, and borrow the rest. Scarce Talent: the most transformational talent a business can acquire that propels it to greatness. Traditional Talent: important team players that perform a critical, but common craft necessary to build the business. We prefer entrepreneurial teams that are comprised of truly scarce talent. It’s our [...]
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The road to nowhere: a roadmap based on features
Product roadmaps focused on features alone never helped me win. In fact, they got me into semantic arguments and created cultural upheaval. Here’s why: people ascribe biased value to a feature based on whether or not they believe it will benefit them personally. In the beginning, features don’t count In the earliest days of an [...]
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Taking a fresh perspective in Pittsburgh—beginning with thoughtfulness
We believe that the most important thing for Pittsburgh is to grow the entrepreneurial community—and we believe that starts with growing entrepreneurs. Pittsburgh has plenty of innovative business ideas, but we need to develop those business ideas into investable startup opportunities. We need to create content tuned for this region and make it available to [...]
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A reminder to address customers in their language, not yours
We just launched a new version of our website, and you’re on it now. I’m proud of it; it’s an important step forward for us. There are two primary reasons to publish a new version. 1. We need more specific messaging to address market growth. One of our marketing challenges is to effectively walk the [...]
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A bubbling pot in Pittsburgh
A couple weeks ago, Thinktiv was lucky enough to be a host, sponsor and mentor of the second Startup Weekend to take place in Pittsburgh. For those of you who don’t know, Startup Weekend is a global network of passionate leaders and entrepreneurs who assemble in rooms over three consecutive weekend days to invent businesses. [...]
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Brand Creation Through Venture Acceleration
Somehow, in a business built on the backs of premiere design talent, we managed to build a crappy user experience for Thinktiv. A little over a year ago I realized the way in which we performed our acceleration services was sub-optimal – borderline broken. Our results, or market performance, were satisfactory, sometimes very good. The [...]
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Three Must Have’s and Must Not Have’s of a Great Software Product Manager
There are so few excellent product minds / product managers. I’ve been working with consumer and enterprise technology companies for 15 years. I’ve had the privilege of working with hundreds of businesses that have achieved varying levels of product success. I’ve only come across a handful of great product minds – and it’s a small [...]
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The Importance of Talent Inside a Venture Firm
We call ourselves a venture accelerator and sometimes refer to ourselves as a specialized accelerator. We’re very close to calling ourselves a specialized venture capital firm. Our model is different than others using similar nomenclature, and there are two reasons why: We provide and recruit capital to infuse into our portfolio companies throughout their development [...]
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Specialization and the evolution of the seed accelerators
There is a tremendous amount of money flowing into new models for venture backed corporate development. The explosion of incubators, accelerators, angels, super-angels, AngelList, seed funds, startup camps, startup crawls, etc. have created new rules around piles of money available to entrepreneurs. There are social rules, like those AngelList applies to identifying and filtering startups [...]
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