This is Jamie Quint's blog covering technology, entrepreneurship, economics, and anything else interesting.
The feeling of starting a company full time is difficult to define, your feelings from day to day, hour to hour run the gamut from excitement to despair, certainty to anxiety, gloom to happiness. I think that there is no better advice than if you are thinking about starting something, you should just do it. […]
I have heard a lot of discussion lately among the young entrepreneur/techie crowd (Mostly on news.ycombinator.com) about the difficulty of finding a co-founder, but is finding skilled and like-minded people really that hard to do? I would argue that it comes down to how good you are at networking. Networking is all about relationships and […]
LinkedIn claims to let you “stay in touch with your network”, but what does that mean? If keeping lists of names and numbers is staying in touch with your network I’d say most people do an excellent job, but lists of names and numbers are meaningless. Valuable personal networks are built on meaningful relationships. You […]
I came across this video of Steve Jobs yesterday, its a sort of tribute to his most used phrases in his keynotes. What I found most fascinating was the second to last one, “Wouldn’t it be great…” Apple has embraced this to great success. How can your business make people’s “wouldn’t it be great if…” […]
I read Made to Stick last week, an excellent new book by Chip and Dan Heath about why some ideas stick and others do not. There were a lot of great takeaways on a practical level of how to make ideas stickier but one larger concept really stuck out. It is a recurring theme they […]
“Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion” ~Hegel
Go after what you want with everything you have and you will be more likely to achieve it. Don’t be ashamed about wanting to be the best. This is not the same as being arrogant. Arrogant people think they are the best but don’t put […]
I usually don’t talk about myself on this blog directly, but today I have some especially exciting personal news that I wanted to share. I’ve incorporated for my consulting business. All the papers have been filed with the State of Oregon and the IRS, and I should be a legal entity by sometime next week. […]
Here is another great quote, this one is from the legendary Michael Jordan.
I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I […]
“great new things often come from the margins, and yet the people who discover them are looked down on by everyone, including themselves.” ~Paul Graham
Change rarely comes from the inside. In technology, the chasm exists in because the mainstream hates change. Environmental problems increase because of our resistance to change. Just as “old habits die […]
What would happen if companies set a lowest common denominator skillset, and then hired based on enthusiasm rather than experience? How would this effect the entrepreneurial nature of the work environment, would productivity go up or down?