The simple answer is NO. Same excitement, same communal spirit, same partner advantages and gripes. In my case, we even had a food scientist who could easily have been a lead programmer or architect in a different setting. Same personality characteristics.
I guess this shouldn’t be surprising. People, after all, are still people. All startup founders I’ve known work long and hard. The early days are like a honeymoon – everyone is still getting to know each other, and everyone is amazed at how much they love working with their partners. But even at the beginning, if you’re watching you can just make out seeds being planted and germinating. I’ve always said that people eventually become caricatures of themselves, and this is especially true in startups. Those seeds become BIG weeds. Continued…
Posted in Management thoughts, Startups.
Tagged with Management, Startups.
By Walter Feigenson
– August 17, 2010
Picture by Mike Dierken
Having just left a startup in which I was a founding partner, I’m going to shift the emphasis of this blog – at least for now – from branding to startups. This is the first in a series of articles I plan to write.
…And I’m changing my personal branding statement to “I put the start in startups.”
In my long and varied career, I’ve spent more time in startups than in established companies. Let me relate an experience I had in my first post-graduate school job – I think you’ll understand immediately why I hated big companies. Continued…
Posted in Personal branding, Startups.
Tagged with Startups.
By Walter Feigenson
– August 11, 2010
Almost one year ago, I got found. Getting found is what I had been blogging about for the previous year. In fact, my personal branding statement was “I help you get found on the Internet.”
And then it happened to me.
One of my articles caught the attention of an entrepreneur in Los Angeles who wanted to start a beverage company. He was looking for information on Google Reader, and he got to my blog through a Google search. (Isn’t that what getting found is all about?) He spent some time on my blog, and liked what I’d been writing about, and asked me to join the company.
So the past year has been a real roller coaster. An experience of a lifetime. And it has taught me many lessons.
I left the startup this week. It had consumed me, as most startups will, 24 x 7 for almost a year. But for personal reasons, it was time to move on, so I’m back to writing on my blog! If you’re curious about what we were doing, you can look at the website here. (I expect the site to change over time since I only got the first page implemented. So if you are reading this post some time after I published it, the link may not make sense.)
I’m not clear yet about the direction of my blog going forward: I’d like to write about some of the collaboration tools I implemented for our startup, but I may come back to personal branding at some point. Do you have any suggestions?
Posted in Personal branding.
Tagged with blogging, Personal branding, Startups.
By Walter Feigenson
– July 28, 2010
An awful lot of information passes out of Twitter into obscurity every day. Contrary to most sites, where what you write exists forever, tweets are temporal. That’s usually not a bad idea – who wants to keep a history of somebody else’s bowel movements?
Aha! But there’s also a valuable stuff getting lost. So, if you want to keep a record of tweets, you can easily do it in Google Reader. Continued…
Posted in Job seekers, Personal branding.
Tagged with Google Reader, Marketing, Twitter.
By Walter Feigenson
– September 29, 2009
That title sounds a little weird, I’ll admit. But I’m going to describe a simple technique I use that makes talking on the phone much easier. You can use this for phone interviews, telephone conferences, or just when you’re talking to somebody.
If you can find a picture of the person you’re talking to, and if you’re using Outlook, this is really simple. Essentially, you just grab the person’s photo, and stuff it into a contact record in Outlook. Then, while you talk, you can have the person’s picture on your desktop. I find that it makes it much easier to talk to somebody else that way – especially if you haven’t met the person. Continued…
Posted in Job seekers, LinkedIn.
Tagged with LinkedIn, Microsoft Outlook.
By Walter Feigenson
– September 29, 2009
When I first started writing my blog, I never expected to find the incredibly warm and friendly reception I’ve gotten from other bloggers. In a world where hostility often seems to reign, it’s been a blessing to find a dedicated, friendly, and seemingly innocent (which is to say not yet fed up with the nasty world) cadre of participants. For those of you who lived through the 60s and 70s, this is like going back into the hippie era where peace and love were the words of the day.
Today, I found that the comment system of my blog wasn’t working. This area demonstrates both the best and the worst of the Internet today. The worst: I get dozens of spam comments every day. Can you believe people waste their lives doing this? Most get caught in Akismet, the WordPress spam filter. But I found a nifty way to make it work even better at stopforumspam.com. Continued…
Posted in Reviews.
Tagged with blogging, WordPress.
By Walter Feigenson
– September 25, 2009
You should keep a backup copy of your LinkedIn contacts, and since it’s easy to do, you should do it now!
Why?
First, because LinkedIn isn’t perfect, and sometimes they lose accounts. Sometimes they decide you’re violating their rules and close your account intentionally. You really need that contact list on a local storage device just in case.
Second, you may want to use your LI contact list to send emails to your contacts. For example, I create and send quarterly newsletters (you can sign up on my home page – the grey box on the right side). While I don’t use my LinkedIn connections for this, it’s probably something I should consider. Continued…
Posted in Job seekers, LinkedIn, Personal branding.
Tagged with LinkedIn.
By Walter Feigenson
– September 16, 2009
Should your LinkedIn profile be the same as your resume? I think so – but only if you have a good resume. I’m going to explain my reasoning in this post.
Brand, brand, brand
One of the most essential components of any branding effort is consistency. That’s why every Coca Cola product has the same logo. It’s a simple concept really, seeing the same thing over and over cements the image you have of that product (or here, person).
That’s why it’s important to have a picture – the same picture – on all your social networking sites (and on your business card!). The same argument applies to your resume. Your resume – Word version and LinkedIn version – will be more effective if both are the same. And in case you didn’t know it, you can actually download a PDF version of your LinkedIn profile and recommendations that’s pretty nice. I’ve written about how to extract just the recommendations (to send with a job application) here. Continued…
Posted in Job seekers, LinkedIn, Personal branding.
Tagged with Job seekers, LinkedIn, Personal branding.
By Walter Feigenson
– September 15, 2009
Don’t know about you, but I’m naturally curious. So I’ve just installed WordPress on a USB thumb drive. Now I can hack away at it to my heart’s content without worrying about how stupid I’ll look to anybody who stops by my blog.
It’s non-trivial, but if you follow the instructions precisely, you’ll get there. Check out the wonderful instructions I found by searching WordPress.org. This points to videos by “Figaro” (I’d like to tell you his full name, but he doesn’t say what it is…). So if you’re interested, go to the WordPress.org page, and then go watch Figaro’s videos. Continued…
Posted in Reviews.
Tagged with WordPress.
By Walter Feigenson
– September 8, 2009
Recent Comments