Before I start a company, I typically write a couple of founding documents. One of them is very outside-in: it's a scenario-based document, describing the high-level challenge that I'm trying to address and the end user scenarios that we are trying to solve. This attempts to explain what we're trying to accomplish to anyone who joins the company or

... See more

Taking an idea from concept to business means moving through a series of gates. In the Silicon Valley model, the gates look something like this:

1. Develop an initial product concept and launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).


2. Iterate on MVP to reach product/market fit.


3. Scale up.


4. Cash-out.

In any complex effort, communicating a well-articulated vision for what you’re trying to do is the starting point for figuring out how to do it. And though coming up with such a vision is difficult, it’s unquestionably more difficult to complete the entire circuit, to come up with an idea, a plan to realize the idea, and then actualize the plan at

... See more