While back in Toronto for my grandma’s 90th birthday I swung by my alma mater, the University of Waterloo, to catch up with friends, professors, and students. Fantastic trip. Caught up with classmates Dave (founded Aeryon), Prem and Jay (at Tangam Gaming), Ryan and Dan (doing corp security and display hardware at RIM), Melanie (Maxtech) ...
When I was an undergrad at the University of Waterloo, I went back and forth on whether an MBA made sense for me in future. Tuesday 6/15 at 4:30pm I’m back on campus via the Computer Science Club, eight years later, to give the talk I wish someone would have shared with me on the ...
Friends asked me recently what I thought of Apple exceeding Microsoft in market cap recently ($230B vs $224B): In the five years I spent at Microsoft from 2004-2009 the stock essentially yo-yo’d between $20-30 despite increasing revenues (now at $58B, up from $44B in ‘06) so it’s difficult to say much is different. That said, ...
A number of classmates are in NYC for their MBA internships this summer. Undoubtedly space will be scarce, so thought I’d offer this video on doing more with less furniture: Some knock-offs of these ideas are available at Costco, though the nicer stuff will likely remain more high end. Part of me can’t wait to ...
I cancelled my consumer reports subscription a year ago. Now I want to unsubscribe from their “we want you back” spam and I get this totally bogus exit survey question: I want to unsubscribe and am not comfortable receiving any more emails from ConsumerReports.org. Below is the page I get after clicking “unsubscribe” link at ...
People ask if I enjoyed my time at Microsoft—and the answer is YES! Smart people, exciting work, ultra-high impact. Would I go back? Probably not soon, as I left the company to venture into the startup world. That said, I’m excited to see some of the last projects I worked on finally launching, perhaps most ...
Many thanks to Tom Byers, Phil Lin and Emily Cox for a great quarter in MS&E 276. Great crash course in Entrepreneurial Management and Finance. Recommended resources include: http://venturehacks.com/ http://www.avc.com/ http://altos.typepad.com/ http://bhorowitz.com/ http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/ http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/ http://redeye.firstround.com/ http://onstartups.com/ http://steveblank.com/ http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html Plus clips from eCorner: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/userFavorites.html?uid=63 Enjoy responsibility, ...
Per tradition, the GSB Canada Club hosted the final Stanford MBA happy hour of the academic year—also known as LPF or “Liquid Preference Refreshment” on campus (As some of you may know, I’m one of the three GSB Canadian Club co-presidents this year, and had a lot of fun organizing). Many thanks to everyone who ...
Michaela Draganska gave a talk at Stanford recently on market research for entrepreneurs, found some tips useful: Market research tools by development stage: Stage Tools Identifying markets Secondary data on macro trends Syndicated industry data Understanding customer needs Observation Depth interviews Finding solutions Lead-user analysis Designing product Conjoint analysis Survey on attribute preferences Testing Concept ...
Saturday night, time to read xkcd. When recruiting at McKinsey, candidates get “aptitude tests” to gauge basic reasoning. That data, along with interview results, gets compare against performance of hires over time to help McKinsey figure out how good a predictor their interview processes are of future success. I don’t know what a “fair” software ...