A pioneer in text messaging, Stephanie Lashley is responsible for the operational, financial, and strategic management of Bandwidth’s text messaging products and leads a team…
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One Expert, One Topic — Stephanie Lashley Talks The Importance of Sharing Data to Create a Meaningful Feedback Loop
Mobile operators charge companies to access their SMS networks. These charges, commonly known as pass-thru fees, are immune to the sender's purchasing power. In fact,…
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Pass-Thru Fees & the Asymmetric SMS Market
An award-winning salesperson Nitya Kirat is also the author of the Amazon bestseller, “Winning Virtually: 10 Tiny Habits for BIG Virtual Selling Success.” His client…
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One Expert, One Topic — Nitya Kirat Talks Tiny Sales Habits
Last week Beeper was acquired by Automattic in a deal valued at $125 million. We don’t know what this means for its FCC petition, but…
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Beeper Gets Acquired
“Interoperability” is a long word to write and say. Yet it’s at the heart of any David vs. Goliath tech story. The success of any…
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The Three Kinds of Interoperability Every Startup Needs to Know
There is a classic adversarial interoperability play happening in messaging right now. It involves Beeper (the maker of Beeper Mini), Apple, and the FCC. Android…
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Beeper Asks the FCC to Make iMessage a Utility
Not only did Dallas native Lance Dacy train me to become a Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), he helped me train some of the smartest…
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One Expert, One Topic — Lance Dacy Talks Product Ownership
In Messaging and Growth in the Pandemic, we unpacked the drivers of pandemic-led growth. We discussed why it was a one-time event, with little to…
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Messaging and Growth in 2024
When Tata Communications acquired Kaylera, I thought it would be a simple swap and a way to introduce a more global perspective. This was naïve.…
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An Update on Tata Communications
Much to the relief of industry insiders, Twilio is keeping its Segment business. Some feared that Twilio would bow to investor pressure, and that would…
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Twilio’s Spring Surprise
The five companies I watch—Bandwidth, LinkMobility, Sinch, Upland, and Twilio—ended 2023 with $9.2 billion in revenues. Collectively, they are projected to end 2024 with a…
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The Four Growth Investments You Must Make
In a series of posts I call ‘the Klaviyo papers’ I wrote about Klaviyo’s business model. Klaviyo, like Attentive before it, and Twilio before it,…
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The Klaviyo Papers
ICYMI, T-Mobile announced fines on senders of spam content that went into effect in January and an update (thanks, Glenn Richards) that went into effect…
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T-Mobile Fines Unwanted Content
Salesforce made “as-a-Service'' a noun. Attach it to the end of any category, and the business model is self-evident. Not only has Salesforce a SaaS…
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The Not-So-Secret Salesforce Playbook
For almost 30 years, Alex Bobotek has dedicated himself to safeguarding mobile communications integrity. As a pivotal figure in the Messaging, Malware, Mobile Anti-Abuse Working…
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One Expert, One Topic — Alex Bobotek talks Pig Butchering
By March 2020, the pandemic had shut down the world. Its effect on businesses was swift and brutal. Airlines, hotels, restaurants, manufacturing, retail, health, and…
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Messaging and Growth in the Pandemic
Upland announced its Q4 results. While it beat its Q4 guidance, its 2024 guidance gives no clarity about the company’s future directions. The company will…
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Upland Shares Lackluster 2024 Guidance
She once bicycled 3,000 miles cross-country just for fun. Some would say Somos Chair and CEO Gina Perini has always shown a penchant for the…
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My Best Advice — Gina Perini
Twilio, Sinch, and LinkMobility together brought in a total $7.6 billion in revenue for 2023, and there are three learnings from their earnings reports. Efficiency…
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Three Key Learnings from Twilio, Sinch, and LinkMobility Earnings
Munz Bharde started as a Y2K programmer in 1997 before venturing into the dynamic world of e-commerce. This transition marked the beginning of a diverse…
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One Expert, One Topic—Munz Bharde Talks Number Intelligence
Watch, as I geek out like a Trekkie at Comic-Con. I’ve been attending the Wireless History Foundation’s (WHF) Hall of Fame dinner for several years…
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The Wireless History Foundation Hall-of-Fame Nominations
New in 2024, Caitin Long and Zach Kunkel are cohosting a new series, The State of Business Messaging. I had the chance to share my…
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The State of Business Messaging Podcast
The seventh week of the year kicks off the earnings season for the messaging space. On Valentine’s Day, within twenty-four hours of each other, Twilio,…
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Growth and Valuation in 2024
With Verizon’s announcement last week, the US support of RCS is now at 100%. This, combined with Apple’s Thanksgiving surprise, means that RCS will work…
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The Dog Caught the Car—Now What?
The FCC will adopt new rules that codify in law how senders should deal with opt-out requests. Last summer, on behalf of the MEF, I…
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The FCC Enforces Opt-Outs: Slippery Slope on a Melting Iceberg
A competitive weightlifter who recently took first place at an Orlando deadlift open, Bradley Partner Alexis Buese is a commercial litigation powerhouse. With a wealth…
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One Expert, One Topic—Alexis Buese Talks Telephone Solicitation
Niklas Heuveldop, Ericsson’s North American CEO, has been appointed as CEO of Vonage, marking a significant leadership change. The head-scratching acquisition has been an ongoing…
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Vonage Gets a New Boss to Solve an Old Problem
Industry conferences, like the Pacific Telecommunications Council’s (PTC) conference, are hotbeds of collaboration. They often have a festival-like atmosphere, with multiple stages serving as focal…
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PTC ‘24—Infrastructure Meets Messaging
Glenn Richards, once a Brooklyn city boy and now a horse farm owner, has many facets beyond his role as Partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw…
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One Expert, One Topic—Glenn Richards Talks VoIP Regulation
Last week we discussed the first three FCC rulings from December. This week we examine the final ruling and its industry impact. The FCC ruled…
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An FCC Ruling puts a Spotlight on Customer Data Platforms
Ariana Huffington, Bill Gates, Ben Chestnutt, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, Michael Dell, and Steve Jobs changed entire industries and, in some cases, the world. HuffPost…
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Twilio Announces a Transition
Last year I shared the most popular emails as per Substack. Here are my most-clicked blog articles as per my WordPress plugin: 1. My Best…
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My Ten Most-Clicked Posts of 2023
I envisioned the idea in 2022 and one of my most exciting projects of 2023. Both contributors and readers have told me I’m onto something.…
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My Best Advice—The Inaugural Cohort
At the last meeting of 2023, the FCC enacted four new rulings around text messaging: Require blocking of texts upon notification by the Commission Declare…
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The FCC Continues the Spam Fight
It would make sense for me to reach out to my EZ Texting co-founders for a guest post. Not only were we born within a…
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My Best Advice — Vijesh Mehta, Punit Shah
From Sinch’s headquarters in Stockholm, Laurinda Pang leads 4,000 Sinchers around the globe who empower brands to connect with their customers across messaging, voice and…
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My Best Advice — Laurinda Pang
Welcome to the third edition of the annual book recommendation list. The rules are simple: 1) The books cannot be current-year books (there are two…
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2023-Ten Must Reads for the Startup Leader
Jay Patel is the VP & GM of Cisco's Webex CPaaS business, a role he assumed following Cisco's acquisition of his company IMImobile for $730…
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My Best Advice — Jay Patel
As a behavioral design expert and the author of two bestselling books, Nir Eyal has a lifetime of training for his role as a guide…
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My Best Advice — Nir Eyal
In the latest round of Q3 earnings in the CPaaS sector showed a steady march towards profitability and responsible growth. Growth and the CPaaS Market…
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A Look into Q3 Earnings of Twilio, Klaviyo and Others
Huggy Rao, the Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, has spent over forty-five years shaping the minds of…
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My Best Advice — Huggy Rao
Just a quick one today, pointing you towards this morning’s newsletter which covered the FCC’s latest initiative, led by Chairwoman Rosenworcel, on understanding AI’s impact…
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Newsletter: The 5 Questions the FCC has about AI and the TCPA
In this morning's email, my thoughts on the recently concluded Somos, Inc. summit, including:1. clarifying my first-ever on-the-record future predictions,2. KYC is good friction (ask your car…
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Newsletter: The SOMOS Summit Reflections
John Lauer is your archetypical serial entrepreneur. While most famous for founding Zipwhip—sold to Twilio for a whopping $952 million (based on the closing date…
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My Best Advice — John Lauer
Barbie Brewer boasts a prolific career in people and culture. For six years, she championed the HR initiatives at Netflix, overseeing a team dedicated to…
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My Best Advice — Barbie Brewer
Terry Hsiao is an entrepreneur, advisor, and investor with extensive experience in cloud software, mobile apps, wireless networks, and fintech. He has founded multiple companies…
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My Best Advice — Terry Hsiao
As a daughter of a career diplomat, Junga Kim has a lifetime of training for her role as Partner at Reed Smith’s Global Commercial Dispute…
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My Best Advice — Junga Kim
Curiosity and patience are the bedrock to good storytelling. They have been integral tools to Stacey Estrella's approach, aiding her clients in discerning their own…
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My Best Advice — Stacey Estrella
Communicating with clarity is a core skill of leaders, and Matt Abrahams has been teaching leaders how to communicate for almost thirty years, eleven of…
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My Best Advice — Matt Abrahams
Even before Pray.com, Steve Gatena had a storied career. A former NCAA champion and USC football player (and winner of a Rose Bowl championship), Steve…
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My Best Advice — Steve Gatena
A mechanical engineer with an MBA and the daughter of a master electrician, Sheila Stafford has both the quantitative chops and the intuitive understanding of…
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My Best Advice — Sheila Stafford
By any yardstick, Brian Frons is a trailblazer. As the former head of Disney's ABC daytime television, he is one reason daytime talk has become…
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My Best Advice — Brian Frons
In text messaging, consent is the golden ticket to outreach. If there is implied consent in subscriber-initiated communication or in emergencies, then outbound communication, especially…
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Coauthored Blog: Do You Really Know Your Customer’s Number?
Every brand needs to have an RCS strategy, even in the US, where interoperability issues and sub-25% device penetration have CMOs questioning whether the investments…
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Why Every Brand Should Have an RCS Strategy
Fred Hillebrand, a Wireless Hall of Fame inductee and SMS inventor, is the editor of a scholarly work on the history of SMS. This compact…
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Three Lessons Learned from Implementing SMS
A spam-free network exists solely in marketing copy. All networks, regardless of size, experience spam. Every network operator recognizes this and relies on feedback loops…
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How to Solve Texting’s Spam Problem — Feedback Loops
Recently, I had the opportunity to organize the content for the Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF) leadership conference in Miami, an event that brought together some…
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Miami in March: A Survey of a MEF Event
UCLA Anderson School of Management has a Business Creation Option (BCO) as part of its MBA program. Students can elect to take two quarters (twenty…
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How to Start a Business Successfully
Today, recipient feedback is a blunt instrument. You can either entirely block a number on your device, or submit the offending message to 7726 and…
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How to Solve Texting’s Spam Problem – Inbox Upgrade
"In many deals, people get so focused on the wedding, they forget about the marriage.", says Huggy Rao when describing why 50% of M&A deals…
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When to Call Off a Wedding
There are 7 billion textable cell phones deployed on 750 mobile networks. This ubiquity and diffused oversight makes SMS spam impossible to stop and unwieldy…
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How to Solve Texting’s Spam Problem – Standardize KYC
I did not consent to any of the political text messages I received in the last election cycle. Not one. It didn’t matter whether I…
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Why Controlling Spam is a Tough Job
Editor's Note: Thomas M. Johnson Jr. was the General Counsel of the FCC from 2017-2021. As general counsel through most of Ajit Pai's tenure as chairman, Johnson…
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Guest Blog: 3 Reasons Startups Need a Regulatory Strategy
"Unprecedented," "never before," "for the first time" are some of the terms used when describing current times. But when every unforeseen event is catastrophic and…
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2022-Ten Must Reads for the Startup Leader
I blog on Software, Startups, and Simplicity, where I make the case that building software and running software companies has gotten unnecessarily complex. It doesn't…
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Living on the Margins
With nine weeks left in the year, many SaaS leaders are looking at their revenue dashboards rather nervously. If you foresaw how tough Q4 would…
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When Hard Times Make Easy Growth Tough to Find
One of the highlights of my September was the recently concluded Mobile Ecosystem Forum’s MEF Connects USA conference. I helped bring together a lot of…
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September 2022: Chat with Ajit Pai and other Discussions
Micromanagement is the antithesis of autonomy. You can’t run an autonomous organization and be a micromanager. And yet attention to detail is critical to a…
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A Simple Plan to Conquer Your Internal Micromanager
Be a manager long enough, and you'll either initiate a staffing cut or be asked to execute one. There is plenty of literature about who,…
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The Confidential Layoff Spreadsheet You Keep to Yourself
The goal of onboarding is to make the new employee a contributor as soon as possible. It is crucial to get it right, and yet…
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A Simple Plan to Keep Your New Hire Excited
I knew writing about Twilio's ZipWhip acquisition would take time. I didn't expect it would require over 6,000 words across six posts. Of all the posts,…
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The Exclusive Untold Story Behind Twilio and ZipWhip
Some books provide unexpected insights into our professions. The source of the wisdom is just as surprising as the insights themselves. Through various points in…
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Uncommon Insights: 5 Books that explain Text Messaging in New Ways
Bessemer’s 2022 State of the Cloud report is a must-read. Three insights stand out: Startups need to show high Sales & Marketing efficiency: “For every dollar a SaaS…
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3 Reasons to Read Bessemer’s State of Cloud Report
Wireless networks are universal, pervasive, and heterogeneous. They are a fertile testbed for interoperability-driven innovation. Text messaging is but one example of how complex event…
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Why We Need Interoperability and How to Protect It
I was tagged on LinkedIn with a request to share a list of recommendations for someone who, due to a medical issue would be spending a lot…
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11 Leadership Books for Those With Plenty of Time
In the payments industry, your leverage is your proximity to the payment providers: Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. In the messaging industry, your leverage is…
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How Interoperability Created a Unique 800 Million Dollar Acquisition – III
In 2016—the year it went IPO—Twilio had 36,000 customers paying it $270M to transmit messages. This was an eight-fold increase in revenue and a three-fold…
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How Interoperability Created a Unique 800 Million Dollar Acquisition – II
Twilio paid $800 Million to acquire ZipWhip. At 10x revenue, the valuation was high for the asset. As deals go, it wasn't the biggest in…
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How Interoperability Created a Unique 800 Million Dollar Acquisition – I
US customers sent 2.2 trillion text messages in 2020. In other words, the wireless operators have created a big party—one which application developers, marketers, and software companies…
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How Interoperability Made Texting a Big Deal
A startup is a lonely endeavor that never works alone. It works with a dominant player, whether in an app store like a marketplace or…
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Know Whose Party You’re Crashing
A Startup accrues technical debt at a breathtaking pace. It is inevitable, expected, and painful to watch for even the most pragmatic engineers. If you're…
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Three Steps to Deal with Technical Debt
The moment working source code is live, it is legacy. The code is "in production" and has forever documented the decisions that created it. These…
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Can Skills Gap Create Tech Debt?
For any software business, the online signup is the lifeblood of customer acquisition. The new tooling available to developers makes it easy to build and…
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Three Signup Mistakes SaaS Companies Make
I stumbled on the questions I wrote about last week circa 2013-14. Fresh from our first round of funding (Series A to fund EZ Texting's acquisition), I…
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How to Score Your Budgeting Mindset
The best managers are superb capital allocators. They take expensive investor money and assign it to the proper growth initiatives. Accountability for a team or…
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3 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Asking for Budget
Building a shared sense of purpose is easy when the company is young. There is plenty of work to do and not enough people to…
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Protecting Selflessness in Startups
At 75 books read a year, Stephen King considers himself a slow reader. By his scale, my reading speed would be closer to a sloth.…
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2021-Seven Books for the Startup Leader
Once it has won over the geeks and early adopters, new technology needs to win the heart of the everyday user. You do that by…
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The RCS Killer App
Smart founders are comfortable with perpetual ignorance and combat it with tireless learning. The preceding Twitter-friendly headline would aptly summarize this article, but outside of…
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A Founder’s Ignorance
All Founders are arrogant. How's that for a polarizing statement? If you're a founder and disagree, it means you haven't been rejected, denied, denigrated, ghosted,…
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A Founder’s Arrogance
A startup, like any risky endeavor, requires the persistence of a punch-me doll. As long as a Founder is a principal in the company, they…
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A Founder’s Passion
Step 1: Don't be like Steve Jobs. Down Memory Lane The first iPhone came out in 2007. Whether or not you were part of the…
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How to be like Steve Jobs
If a product is only as good as its feedback loops, then only the feedback of the customer matters. There will be many stakeholders, but…
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What to Build and Why
Building a culture of belonging in a company is hard. Stanford's Huggy Rao says that the best cultures create a sense of mutual ownership, where "I own…
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Culture & Belonging
A recent filing in a TCPA case uses source code to back up claims made by the plaintiff. The filing is interesting because it shows how hard…
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When Code and Law Collide
Introduction If you've spent any time in a strategic planning exercise, you might hear SWOT thrown around like a verb, like a needed activity to…
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Have we been SWOT-ing all Wrong?
Tesla Autopilot, Boeing 737 Max, and the US Supreme Court decision on the TCPA make an odd group. But, they all rest on the increasingly fluid boundary…
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Aviation, Automation & Human Intervention
For a few years now, I've had a rule: I never read a book the year that it comes out. I initiated it a few…
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Rules to fight FOMO (and their Exceptions)
Summer is upon us, and so are the many recommendations of books that one should read. I’m a big fan of reading lists—they keep my reading queue…
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5 Business Books I wish I had read sooner
If genius results from untiring work over long periods of time, then every founder building a company is a genius. They know the customer, the…
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The Genius with 1000 Helpers
Tucked in The Checklist Manifesto, an already quick read, is a little manifesto for any learned profession. The author—Atul Gawande—calls them the four expectations of…
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On Selflessness
When it comes to bandwidth, 5G is like having your cake and eating it too, in this case the cake is double chocolate, no fat*.…
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Security and 5G
Things have to be simpler than the alphabet soup of three and four letter acronyms that are used to gauge a product's usefulnes. The argument…
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On the Money Your Product Makes
A robust, vibrant, living company culture needs strong feedback loops. It’s pretty easy to accomplish this when it’s you and your co-founder in a garage, a team…
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eNPS & Company Culture