In 2005, I followed in the footsteps of many other Los Angeles-based entrepreneurs. I moved our internet startup, Insider Pages, from Southern California to Silicon Valley. While we knew it would be a huge disruption to a fledgling company, we did it for some good reasons – access to capital, engineering talent, and a bubbling ecosystem of ideas, energy and innovation. It was the right move — Silicon Valley turned out to be everything we’d hoped for and more. In a few months, we’d built a top tier engineering team, attracted successful product and marketing people from other Silicon Valley companies, and had started building a network of business development relationships with other Silicon Valley firms. Continue Reading »

As we all know, creating a successful start up is much more of an art than science. While classic business disciplines may be helpful, there is a tremendous amount of intuition that distinguishes truly great entrepreneurs from the rest of the pack. While I could discuss many of these dimensions, I’d like to focus on one in particular: when and how to systematize your product development process. One venture capitalist friend coined a terrific phrase that is the title of this post: “From Cowboy to Machine.” Continue Reading »