Cash is king: why I'd rather grow slower than give up control
The bank wouldn't lend Gradwell two million dollars on a Monday. By Friday, after we'd raised a million of VC, HP's internal bank was suddenly delighted to lend it at 1%. The lesson about capital stacking took years to sink in.
The two-year cost of a bad senior hire (and how to fail faster)
Six months to find them, a year to figure out if they're any good, six months to replace them. Every senior hire you get wrong costs the business two years it cannot get back — and the fix is rarely more process.
Don't ask customers for a better elephant: making the Steve Jobs leap
Customer interviews are great at telling you what to fix and terrible at telling you what to build. The trick is knowing when to override the research — and when the research is overriding you for good reasons.
Flat and wide beats the quick buck: the customer base that survives a bad day
In the dot-com domain-name rush it was tempting to chase the high-margin, high-risk deals. I didn't — and twenty years later I still prefer a wide base of small customers to a narrow base of big ones. Here's the risk-management argument for boring.
Stop selling your time: why I build products, not hours
After a year writing a system that Orange mobile then cancelled, I realised consultancy is a treadmill. The leap that built Gradwell.com was from hours to products — and the arithmetic behind it is simple, but non-obvious until you run the numbers.