Home » entrepreneurship
Category Archives: entrepreneurship
Task and Management Update
I haven’t written a blog article in about seven months. It has been about a year since I optimistically wrote “The Great Untasking“. Here’s an update of that graph. Big-picture, little has changed: The “total queue” seems to be on average 280 items. “Days overdue” seems to be on average a month. Both series are […]
How Upwork Hobbled the Business Elance Started
Upwork was created from the merger and rebranding of Elance and Odesk, two remote-work behemoths. At the outset I was concerned. Part of it was just my usual aversion to change. Elance had allowed MassLandlords to be born and worked very well. Why change it? But now almost four years after the announcement, it’s clear […]
The Great Untasking (aka Truck Number ~1)
This update gives a little insight into a GTD fail and recovery. Last November MassLandlords hired a key full-time employee. Before then, we were already heading into task-trouble. The graph below shows the terrible climax. On March 6, 2017, I had 617 items overdue. The oldest was 84 days late. Most of these items were […]
Bootstrapped Startup Update: Leveraged Management vs Individual Contributions
Starting 18 months ago, I began more detailed timetracking for MassLandlords, which is a bootstrapped startup. I started noting the difference between what Andrew Grove called “high leverage” activities and what Pratt and Whitney called “individual contributor” activities. This is the first time I’ve made a graph of the results. It’s a prime example of “what you don’t […]
How Should Cofounders Split Equity? A Cofounder Vesting Riddle
Here’s a cofounder riddle: Cofounders A and B start a company around A’s idea. There are 10 million shares authorized. A gets 2 million unrestricted for the “idea.” A and B each get 4 million subject to vesting. Due to unforeseen circumstances, A immediately quits. A’s unvested shares return to the company. B presses forward […]
My Favorite Part of the Work Week is Saturday at 7:30am
Saturdays at 7:30 am (5:00 or 6:00 pm India time depending on daylight saving) I call the MassLandlords bookkeepers in India. I love it. I actually get up at 6:30 to prepare for the call and to review our “treasury dashboard.” I love getting up early on a weekend. It feels so productive. Plus, this phone call represents […]
The Worst GTD Backlog Since Tracking Began
This afternoon I’m at the worst backlog of “things to do” since GTD tracking began in late 2014. I have 333 items in my inbox, on my desk, and in my task list that all demand attention yesterday. What’s astonishing is that “days overdue” is only 8, which means none of these things really originated before the last week. […]
One thing I carry every workday
It has been over nine months since the last update. I have been busy. I may write an update soon. In the meantime, it occurs to me to share this strange fact: every workday, everywhere I go, I carry the final pages of Andrew Grove’s High Output Management. Lame but true. High Output Management is a soft skills […]
The Political Bottomless Pit
An Update on my Time as Entrepreneur Next week marks three years since I left Terrafugia, which was the last time I worked as an employee. Since then I’ve wandered through various entrepreneurial roles and projects. In January 2013 I started tracking how I spend my work time. I now have 32 months of data (critics take note: […]
MassLandlords.net Outgrew WildApricot
In late 2013 we switched our membership management system from a Google spreadsheet to WildApricot. It was so good I got giddy. I could search specific fields across all members. It would send automatic renewal reminders. We could have members-only forms, event registration, and a directory. I was over the moon. Alas, all good things… The same time we chose WildApricot as our […]
