What is it I do?

I cure pain.

And for that, I get paid very well.

I gauge how foamy the entrepreneur ecosystem is by number of NDAs I receive per month.

Foaminess leads to bubbles.

“My start-up is in stealth mode” is a euphemism for “my invisible company that doesn’t have a product.”

Unsophisticated clients are the bane of any consultants life. “I want an eBay clone. I have a $5,000 budget.”

No. Just… no.

Entrepreneurs that try to get me to invest probably shouldn’t approach me with their “limited time offer” and “an exclusive round” pitch.

I have been in business a very long time and I have written long-form sales letters for a very long time, I know how this game is played.

Take your amateur scarcity tactics and go home.

“Will you introduce me to Elon Musk?”

Uh? What? We just connected on LinkedIn and you want me to just professionally introduce you to Elon Musk.

“Hey Elon, we’ve met a few times at some gatherings and you probably don’t remember me in the slightest. This is a guy I don’t know that wants me to vouchsafe for him and make an introduction.”

Awwwwkwaaaard!

That invisible line you cross as an entrepreneur when your mindset moves from “I can do this for free, it would be cheaper than having her do it” to “having her do it would be cheaper than my time.”

Every time I’ve lowered my prices to be the cheapest, to win the contract by any means and beat out the other guy, I’ve let someone down.

My client.

My vendors.

My employees.

Myself.

At the end of today, if you were asked to sign the work that you did, for all the world to see, would you be proud of it?

Everybody wants to be the boss. Nobody wants to do the actual work.

A “boss” should be willing to do most of the work, it’s how you earn that title. That isn’t to say you should be doing most of the work, that’s why you’re the boss.

“I’m the boss. My job is to tell everybody else what they should be doing.”

It is amazing how many people are willing to declare “I’m the boss and you have to do what I say” merely because they said so.

With the mainstreaming of LinkedIn most of the “influencer” content is banal.

Personally, I think it is time for a little revolutionary disruption. Who is with me?

Politicians make for great project managers.

Patriots make for great makers.

A “great place to work” is never true.

It can’t be.

A company might be a great place to work if you are a designer. But that same company probably sucks if you’re a software developer.

A company might be a great place to work as a marketer. But that same company sucks if you are the billing department.

Find out what type of employee you are building your company to attract, then build the company so it is a really great place for that type of worker. Then, make it a really good place to work for everyone else.

“We need a rock star [full stack, senior developer] with at least 5 years of Word and Excel.” said the internal company recruiter at the networking gathering. “You know anyone like that?”

“Are you developing plugins?” I asked.

“I don’t know what those are.” responded the recruiter.

“This person with five years of experience, they need to know how to develop custom software, macros and addons for Word and Excel?” I pressed.

“No,” the recruiter replied, “they just need to know how to use Word for writing emails or documentation. We use Excel for tracking everyone’s time.”

When people in Silicon Valley talk about diversity, they really mean gender.

And sometimes they mean colour.

But they never mean age.

I predict that chatbots and chat interfaces will be all but dead inside of a decade with only a few outliers that “did it right.”

Do you pick your nose?

Everyone picks their nose.

It’s not the fact that we pick our collective noses, it’s what we do afterwards that separates us, and is also what counts.

The same can be said when it comes to creation of your mobile app. What you do with it after you have developed the app is what counts.

One of those two things, you want it to be as sticky as possible.

I will leave it up to you to decide which one.

As an entrepreneur, every task you’ve ever undertaken has an invisible boundary layer around it held in balance by the cost of delegation and the desire to do it your way.

Whether you have no money at all or all the money in the world, the forces at play never change, only the direction they are being applied.

You want to perform due diligence on me to make sure I can do the work, but you don’t want me performing due diligence on you to make sure you have the ability to pay for the work.

*head scratch*

I like big bottom lines and I cannot lie.

If *YOU* are going to introduce *YOURSELF* as “I am a visionary entrepreneur” to a group of people at a networking meeting, I expect you to be able to actually spell both “visionary” and “entrepreneur” correctly on your self-printed, tear along the perforated edge business cards.

The misspellings were not a joke, I know, because I asked.

“Would you like to be Wozniak to my Jobs?” asked the entrepreneur trying to put a ding in the Universe via his “Uber for weed but also with cookies and pizza!” idea.

“No, I don’t think I am up for that.” I replied politely.

“I guess you’re not as good as you say you are.” responded the entrepreneur.

I nodded, smiled, and separated myself from him within 30 seconds, sure that the future-Jobs had dismissed me from his list of potential “partners” by the time I had sat down with a bowl of cereal.

In other news, Sunday’s entrepreneur brunch, just like Saturday’s breakfast, was a blast.

Ever had really bad toothache? So bad you cannot think straight?

Intense pain takes away the person. Organizations pay handsomely to have pain cured.

Great.

I just had group breakfast with an entrepreneur who has filed a patent on a state machine.

Someone is going to be very disappointed in the near future.

Which isn’t quite as absurd as the one I spoke with last year who had filed for a patent on storing a text string in a variable.

“But it’s encoded!”

If you were willing to hire good enough last time, don’t expect to hire great next time.

Attempting to hire a talented individual to an organization optimized for mediocrity is a fruitless pursuit.

Build an audience that wants to listen and you will never have to say very much about your product.

There are two types of Chief Technology Officer.

There is the “maker” CTO and there is the “executive” CTO.

Unfortunately we use the same acronym to label both types which leads to confusion and expensive mistakes.

Sat in office at co-working space and vague entrepreneurial acquaintance wanders in to say “Hello.”

His phone rings, and he states: “Yeah, could you step outside for a minute? I need to take this.”

I sit there, blink a few times, and say “You do realize this is my office, right?”

And without missing a beat he replies “Yes, but I need to take this call in private so you need to leave.”

Anybody want to guess what my response was?

Happiness is a choice.

You choose what you pay attention to.

If you pay attention to the wrong things, you’ll never be happy.

Simple logic.

Building great products that are successful makes me happy.

So that’s what I pay attention too.

And I am happy.

Now you need to figure out what will make you happy, and pay attention to that.