Five years ago this week I left an incredible job at a great company to co-found my own business with Jenny and Walter — Jackson Fish Market. Leaving the security of a big company and a job that most people would kill for was incredibly counter-intuitive. And building your own business is way way harder [...]

I have always considered myself a video game nerd. I grew up with an Atari 2600, an Atari 800, a Sega Genesis, a Dreamcast, a Playstation, and both Xboxes. I also played games on Macs, PCs, and even spent many hours of my youth playing games in actual arcades. Pretty typical for many guys my [...]

Jared Spool recently posted about “Why the Valley wants designers that can code.” Basically, he makes the good point that hiring managers at startups are always looking for ways to get more value for their dollar. And so based on that understanding he recommends “If you’re a designer, you don’t have to learn to code. [...]

I just happened upon an article by Matt Marshall on Venture Beat: “How HTML5 will kill the native app.” Ugh. This article reads like an HTML5 marketing document. There’s good reason to be excited about HTML5. But I believe there are a couple of key things missing from this discussion: 1. The value of cross-platform [...]

I’ve been management at various companies, and I’ve certainly been subjected to management at the same companies. I’ve been a victim of this disease and I’m not proud to say that I’ve also been a vector for it. That said, management is the disease in almost every fucked up company. It comes down to management’s [...]

As part of my job here at Jackson Fish Market when I’m working on our children’s book service, A Story Before Bed, is to license books for our library from children’s book publishers. (BTW, I recently read an article where Netflix has at least 80 people doing this job for them for movies. ) Getting [...]

I love being in the software industry. So many things are being reshaped right now and I get to participate in my own small way. Here’s a vision piece from some European newspapers describing the newspaper of the future. News+ concept live from Bonnier from Bonnier on Vimeo. The problem is, there’s really nothing new [...]

I’m one of the lucky few people to have a female co-founder of a tech startup. And I have long known that working with senior women can often be a significantly more valuable experience than the traditional sausage fest. (Yes… I just said “sausage fest”.) It’s not that women are inherently better or worse… it’s [...]

Check out Anita Hart’s awesome sketchnotes from my Web 2.0 Expo talk on aesthetics in software. Thanks for taking such “expressive” notes Anita!

The first is Startup Day happening in Seattle put on by Seattle 2.0. I’ll be speaking there on why to do a startup. To be clear, I have no idea why anyone else should do a startup, but I can tell you why we’re doing one. Startup Day is on Saturday, September 26th in Bellevue, [...]

John Cook over at TechFlash was nice enough to ask me to do a guest post on bootstrapping. This one is on how much runway you need to get your business over the hump. “The single biggest enemy of an indeterminate amount of time needed for success is a deadline. And nothing gives you a [...]

I wrote three posts over the past while: A new definition of “lifestyle business”. The reality of your life as a founder once you take VC Your odds of making money if you take VC Thanks to Rajat for pointing me to this video of DHH giving a talk last year. It’s not that I [...]

The fantasy goes something like this: come up with an idea take venture money align with the VCs to grow the business as best you can with the firm target of an exit hold on to enough equity so that when the exit comes you and the VCs both get rich maybe some of your [...]

…albeit I haven’t said it nearly as well as well as Georges van Hoegaerden over at Venture Company. I’ve been saying, by the time many venture funded startups have gone through their rounds of funding, even the founders are lucky to make any money. And that’s in the rare case that they actually make it [...]

Conan was interviewed in the New York Times about his shift to the Tonight show. The following quote is about entertainment, but I think it applies to any creative endeavor, or possibly, any human interaction: “In entertainment, you have to stake out what you think is right, you have to put out that signal, make [...]

One of my favorite things about working at Jackson Fish Market is that we don’t have performance reviews. I suppose it’s easy cause there are three of us and we’re all founder/owners of the company. But i believe that even once we do have more traditional employees we won’t have performance reviews. Mainly because I [...]

The popular and prolific Malcolm Gladwell writes about underdogs in the New Yorker: “What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s [...]

Lifehacker linked to an article on the top workplaces in Australia: “A recent poll in Australian business magazine BRW set out to find the 50 best workplaces, and while the results are Australia-specific, one thing stood out: Companies with great perks consistently topped the list.” When you’re a part of the tech startup community it’s [...]

So funny. I saw this blog post titled: “Who Cares About Majority Ownership Anyway?” We’ve always insisted on strict control of our business which is why we constitute a majority of ownership of our company – roughly 100% majority. However, I don’t think our way is the only way. I thought the gist of the [...]

David Heinemeier Hansson over at 37 Signals re-picks up the torch for people annoyed with the term “lifestyle business”. Their original post was back in 2005. Our twitter-sized definition was posted last month. Some goodness from the latest post: “When the lifestyle card is pulled from its tired deck, it’s usually meant as a pat [...]

Red Gate, a software company, has issued a challenge looking for small (or “micro”) ISVs to purchase. I think that’s great. If we had a bunch of cash lying around we’d probably buy some cool tiny software enterprises as well. That said, I did catch this little nugget in their announcement. Among the criteria of [...]

In many ways, our aspirations for Jackson Fish Market are modeled after Pixar. Pixar isn’t the biggest in its industry, but it is among the best. It stays focused, it tries to do what it knows best, it worries primarily about creating something loved by its creators (as opposed to its demographic). Pixar also slowly [...]

Our little firm was founded with a healthy dose of engineering and design DNA. And it’s not as simple as pairing up an engineer and a designer. Walter loves creating beautiful usable things, and Jenny loves the power of software. We have shared values around a balance between tech and design, and we try to [...]

There is a simple lesson that all conferences should learn from TED. It’s not to charge thousands of dollars. It’s not to bring celebrities to your conference. And it’s not to only have one speaker at a time. Those may or may not be good things to emulate, but they’re not the most important lesson [...]

The way the term “lifestyle business” is bandied about has bothered me for some time. I’ve decided to try and come up with a new definition. Twitter friendly version: “Lifestyle business” is the patronizing term for businesses unwilling to grow at the expense of the quality of their product or workplace. Twitter unfriendly version: “Lifestyle [...]

Paul Graham publishes a series of essays, and i often find myself agreeing with them or inspired by them. His latest talks about the characteristics he thinks startup founders must have. “I was writing a talk for investors, and I had to explain what to look for in founders. What would someone who was the [...]

What is it about some big companies that once they get successful, they immediately forget how they got there (innovating, meeting customer needs, moving quickly), and start engaging in all sorts of brand-suicidal tactics that usually involve lawyers. This TechCrunch post shows correspondence from Intuit to Mint (and back) with Intuit lawyers basically calling Mint [...]

A few months ago we wrote about (and were quoted in) an article in AdAge lamented the lack of support for branded apps (and widgets) from big advertisers. Here at JFM we have always believed that brand sponsors, looking for engagement, will ultimately realize that software is the single most cost-effective way to engage users [...]

There’ve been countless posts on how trying to make something perfect usually ends up not only with nothing perfect, but often with nothing at all. In my limited experience, this “common sense” is not so common. I love when this precept is illustrated so plainly: “The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was [...]

I caught this article in Slate, and thought it was a good wake-up-call for anyone starting their own small business — especially in industries that are oft-romanticized. Like, say, cozy cafe’s or consumer tech startups. “The dream of running a small cafe has nothing to do with the excitement of entrepreneurship or the joys of [...]