I make product teams go fast.
I work with product teams and innovation leaders. I've written a book and contributed to several others.
This is my garage where I keep my portfolio of random projects.
I keep a personal blog is in my living room.
I run and work in my office.
I volunteered with BUILD to teach entrepreneurship to high school students at Oakland Tech and help them get into college. My team designed and sold lanyards with the Oakland Tech colors.
Gregarious Narain and I put together this event to help entrepreneurs learn how to pitch investors in a workshop setting with venture capitalists, angel investors, and other experts giving honest feedback.
At the suggestions of Jonathan Nelson from Hackers and Founders, I created a wiki to help people moving to Silicon Valley to start a startup. Then link spammers took it over.
Originally in Vietnam for a two month period to restructure the marketing department, I was responsible for managing a team of 32.5 staff during the departure of the local GM and global CTO. Local operations included the R&D department for our Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Single Sign-On (SSO) products as well as the marketing department responsible for worldwide marketing support.
KissMobs was a Startup Weekend project. To the best of my knowledge, it is the only Startup Weekend Project that ended the weekend cash flow positive.
Unfortunately we didn't continue, but there are some posts about it here and here.
I like startups. I like karaoke. Great things go great together.
'nuff said.
I ran two events with Startup Weekend. Chris McCann from StartupDigest said of the last one, "That was the highest quality Startup Weekend I've ever been to!"
I also currently hold the speed record for organizing a StartupWeekend in 14 days. We had 9 days to sell tickets and managed to sell out.
Building lean leaders at Lean Startup Circle.
I help setup new groups, create a world wide network of lean startup organizers, help existing groups find their sustainable business model (even if non-profit), and hack a little bit on leanstartupcircle.com
I worked in various positions in the music industry. I recorded, produced, and edited three full length CDs and an EP (1997, 1999, 2001, 2003) as well as managed all aspects of CD manufacturing, graphic design, and layout. I established digital and retail distribution outlets, developed marketing campaigns (including print advertisements, CD release parties, and reviews), and booked national concert tours.
I worked with the sales team to develop and implement marketing campaigns for the North American market focusing on Single Sign-On for the SAP market. This included creating sales collateral including white papers, presentations, and product flyers. This work was done concurrent with advanced studies.
I was responsible for the profit and loss of our Full Disk Encryption product. This included making all business decisions including alliances and acquisitions. I also worked with the marketing and sales teams to create the marketing plan and draft the marketing/sales collateral, white papers, presentations, and website material.
I was responsible for the profit and loss of our Full Disk Encryption, email security, and file/folder encryption products. This included making all business decisions including alliances and acquisitions. I also worked with the marketing and sales teams to create the marketing plan and draft the marketing/sales collateral, white papers, presentations, and website material.
I coach startups and intrapreneurs on adopting innovation principles into practice.
I've worked with companies as early stage as $0 revenue to larger enterprises with >$50B in revenue. While the situation changes and tactics must be adapted, the principles remain the same.
I coach using hands on techniques including workshops and ongoing coaching, not theories and 2x2 business school presentations. I don't send lengthy reports as deliverables from a consulting engagement. So if you're looking for that, keep looking elsewhere.
To supplement this work I spend some time working with various organizations giving talks and advising their startups. I also author the blog GrasshopperHerder.com
Some of the organizations I've worked with include:
Teachers don't scale. Peers do.
This thing is a litte buggy. But we can fix it!
Just in case it hasn't been done yet.
I'm hitching a ride off this rock!
I designed and organized a curriculum for a one month entrepreneurship bootcamp based on lean startup methodology. The program brought entrepreneurs from Mexico to the San Francisco Bay Area for education, networking, and exploring business opportunities in the United States. The work included recruiting speakers, managing knowledge transfer during mentor handovers, and on-site supervision of the program.
The ultimate goal of the program was to help bolster an entrepreneurial eco-system for technology startups in Mexico, and I'm happy to say it was successful. If you visit Monterry, Hermosillo, or Mexico City today and find the local StartupWeekend or Hackers and Founders meetup groups, you will likely find some TechBA graduates.
Speakers included:
I ran LUXr's accelerator training program. This involved working with accelerators and enterprises in a train the trainer program and helping them design their curriculum. Accelerators learned how to implement and train startups in lean startup methodology using LUXr's core curriculum as a basis.
I've had the opportunity to do this with accelerators such as:
...but since LUXr was a small company and a startup itself, I also wound up coaching startups, building LUXr's eCommerce site, evangelizing lean startup methodology, creating new learning frameworks, measuring progress through metrics, and always learning, learning, learning.
Working with the product and growth teams to drive experimentation.
The Warren (Pete) Musser Professorship in Innovation and Entrepreneurship was endowed to bring leaders in the field to the Fox Business School. I worked with faculty and students to bring modern innovation practices from the field (lean startup, agile, and design thinking) into the entrepreneurship curriculum.
I served as the external member to the global Ice Cream Innovation Board overseeing investment on innovation projects. We met monthly (and ad hoc) to review experiment data generated by projects, discuss global strategy, and allocate investment to those projects. I also supported the board's portfolio management to ensure that actual investment aligned to the innovation strategy and supported the teams directly. That included tracking and analyzing the data on innovations and their results.
I served as the external member to the global Foods Innovation Board overseeing investment on innovation projects. We met monthly (and ad hoc) to review experiment data generated by projects, discuss global strategy, and allocate investment to those projects. Particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, I am focused on supporting needed changes to strategy to adapt to the current situation and plan for various recovery and emergency contingencies.
This is an experiment in the media. Can the crowd tell which news articles are politically biased?
(Yes, I reuse the same logo a lot.)
Advisor to a mobile app company in product development, user experience (UX) design, and marketing. Their first product was PowerVocab, an iOS app to help students prepare for the GRE. The product line was acquired.
Ongoing consulting and coaching for product teams on lean startup, metrics, organization, and product management.
I worked with the Head of Product to embed lean ways of working into the product organization.
I worked with the Innovation Center of Excellence to
TweetHerder is a plugin for Wordpress that allows you highlight phrases in your post and turn them into one-click tweet buttons for your readers to tweet. I developed it for my blog.
AdHerder is a Wordpress plugin for A/B testing ads. I use it on my blog.
After much pontification, I have created an equation to fully explain the effect of hiring rock stars and ninjas for your startup.
Bringing lean startup innovation methods into Swisscom by coaching innovation teams for Business Voice, Swisscom Cloud, and others.
I coached several Sam's Club innovation teams within Walmart Labs.
This was an experiment for the LUXr.co program with Janice Fraser.
Coaching an innovation team within Fujitsu in order to improve entrepreneurial skill sets on lean startup, agile, and design thinking. The team members went on to train others in modern entrepreneurship methodologies.