If you’re an entrepreneur thinking about going to graduate school to learn how to grow your business, you have hundreds of options. Beyond the many schools to choose from, there are numerous degree types. One of the most well-known is the MBA. Others include master’s degrees in fundraising, finance, sales, marketing, innovation management, and many […]
My wife Sharon and I recently experienced a day of customer service hell. This arose from our interactions with six different businesses. While none of them is a startup, our experiences provide some great customer service lessons for entrepreneurs. Here’s our tale of woe: The management company for our daughter’s college apartment told us they […]
I’m on the board of a venture-backed startup that sells software-as-a-service. At a board meeting a while ago, the CFO enthusiastically announced that the company’s customer retention rate was 96 percent. I didn’t want to be a killjoy, but commented that, in my opinion, this was actually a bad sign. If customer churn was really […]
Successfully founding a startup is hard. One of many challenges is the necessary shifting between your long-term vision for the business, on one hand, and rigorous short-term testing of critical hypotheses about it on the other. I call these different perspectives the telescope and microscope. The telescope represents the big-picture vision for a startup. It’s […]
