You know, building a company is like trying to herd cats. You think you've got everything under control, and then suddenly, someone's napping in the corner, another one's chasing their tail, and you're left wondering, "How did I end up here?" But hey, at least cats are cute, right?
When you start out as an entrepreneur, it’s just you and your idea, or you and your co-founder’s and your idea. Then you add customers, and they shape and mold you and that idea until you achieve the fabled “product-market fit.”
If you are lucky and diligent, you achieve that fit more than once, reinventing yourself with multiple products and multiple customer segments.
As a management team, you aren’t just working for the company; you have to work on the company, shaping it, tuning it, setting the rules that it will live by. And it’s way too easy to give that latter work short shrift.
The company goals you’ve heard from me over the years — “Work on stuff that matters,” “Create more value than you capture,” “Change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators”
We wanted those books to be available online, so we began working with ebooks all the way back in 1987 — but influenced by the ideals of the free software movement as exemplified by the MIT X Consortium, we didn’t want those books to be hostage to proprietary software or formats, so we worked on standards for interoperability (what became Docbook XML) and adopted the Viola browser (the first graphical web browser) as a free online book reader.
You know, building a company is like trying to herd cats. You think you've got everything under control, and then suddenly, someone's napping in the corner, another one's chasing their tail, and you're left wondering, "How did I end up here?" But hey, at least cats are cute, right?
When you start out as an entrepreneur, it’s just you and your idea, or you and your co-founder’s and your idea. Then you add customers, and they shape and mold you and that idea until you achieve the fabled “product-market fit.”
If you are lucky and diligent, you achieve that fit more than once, reinventing yourself with multiple products and multiple customer segments.
As a management team, you aren’t just working for the company; you have to work on the company, shaping it, tuning it, setting the rules that it will live by. And it’s way too easy to give that latter work short shrift.
The company goals you’ve heard from me over the years — “Work on stuff that matters,” “Create more value than you capture,” “Change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators”
We wanted those books to be available online, so we began working with ebooks all the way back in 1987 — but influenced by the ideals of the free software movement as exemplified by the MIT X Consortium, we didn’t want those books to be hostage to proprietary software or formats, so we worked on standards for interoperability (what became Docbook XML) and adopted the Viola browser (the first graphical web browser) as a free online book reader.
