Category Archives: Startups

Announcing Kindel Leadership Development

July 21, 2023
Business, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Organization & People, Space, Startups, Technology & Execution
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In 2020 started hosting my Free and Open Office Hours as a way to give back and meet more people in the space industry. As I became useful to those in the space industry and gained expertise in the space domain I discovered how fulfilling helping multiple companies with leadership and operational excellence was. To that end, I have pivoted and made Kindel Leadership Development my primary focus. Hire me for Learn more and get …Continue reading →

Engineer the Sh*t out of Errors – Everywhere

May 30, 2023
Amazon Way, Leadership, Organization & People, Startups, Technology & Execution
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Errors. They’re everywhere, but they don’t have to spell disaster. In fact, they’re an opportunity for improvement, if you Engineer the Sh*it out of them. By everywhere, I mean in all functions of a company, not just product or operations. A hallmark of a world-class organization is a mechanism that treats errors as they should be: imperfections in the systems or processes, not personal failings. One of the most famous is Amazon’s Correction of Errors …Continue reading →

Make the Routine, Routine – Blow up Dunbar’s Number

April 2, 2023
Business, Clarity of Thought, Organization & People, Startups, Technology & Execution
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As fast-growing organizations approach Dumbar’s number, they either become forever mediocre or they adapt and become excellent at scaling (in addition to being excellent at delivering customer value). The key differentiator is making the routine, routine by implementing cadence-based mechanisms, which I call Routines.Continue reading →

Torpedo Fuses: The Bane of Classic German Automobiles

June 21, 2022
Cars, Startups
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Torpedo fuses in BMW, Mercedes, Audi, and Porsche cars from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s have not stood the test of time. Here’s why…Continue reading →

I’ve Joined STOKE Space Technologies as an Advisor

May 19, 2021
Space, Startups
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In November 2020, I declared I was going to break into the space industry for my next professional chapter. My hypothesis was my experience rapidly scaling organizations that deliver results, coupled with my expertise in software would be helpful to space companies. The fact that I basically knew nothing about space wouldn’t matter. With the help of a lot of friends in my network, I was quickly connected with dozens of leaders in the booming …Continue reading →

Advising Rebel Space Technologies

April 8, 2021
Space, Startups
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I’m honored to announce that Rebel Space Technologies has asked me to join them as a Strategic and Technical Advisor. Satellites need to reliably and efficiently communicate with each other and ground stations in the face of severe spectrum congestion, celestial dynamics (these things and the Earth are always moving relative to each other), and changing mission profiles. Rebel’s first product is the Rebel Space Radio, which leverages software-defined radio (SDR) technology to allow RF …Continue reading →

I’m Advising Carv Because It Improves My Skiing

March 8, 2021
Leadership, Skiing, Startups
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Last Christmas (2019) my daughter gifted me Carv. I fell so in love with the product that I stalked the CEO and begged him to talk to me to see if I could help. I’ve been working with the company since December and last week he asked me to join Carv as a Strategic Advisor. Initially, I assumed Carv was a gimmick. The abbreviated 2019/20 ski season meant I only got 6 days using Carv, …Continue reading →

Open Office Hours with Tig

December 22, 2020
Business, Career, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Organization & People, Startups, Technology & Execution
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Last month I offered “office hours” to anyone who wanted to chat with me. It was an experiment to see a) if interesting people would reach out, b) if I could be useful to these people, and c) if I’d be exposed to domains where I could spend more of my time in the future. All three hypotheses have turned out true. Thank you to all of you who utilized this so far! I still …Continue reading →

Be Excellent At Saying No

September 11, 2013
Leadership, Startups
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Steven Sinofski has written another great post on his “Learning by Shipping” blog. In this one, titled “8 steps for engineering leaders to keep the peace” he focuses on things an engineering leader can do when his or her ‘manager’ asks for too much. Solid advice, but it only addresses half the problem (the engineering leader). #5 in his list of things is 1. As part of doing that, I’m going to sometimes feel like …Continue reading →

Have a Plan

March 2, 2013
Clarity of Thought, How To, Startups
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Yesterday someone asked me to share my thoughts on the secret to building excellent things. I summarized what I know as: “Put the customer first, have a plan, create a shared mission, get early victories, remove process, and make it fun.” – me, yesterday. This was the formula my cohorts that built the Windows Phone app platform used. It worked. This is what the small team that created www.milelogr.com did. “No battle was ever won …Continue reading →

Bubbly Time: MileLogr has its first, real, paying customers!

February 19, 2013
Startups
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When we launched MileLogr (www.milelogr.com) yesterday we didn’t know how long it would be before the first real customer actually paid us for a report. It happened today! We have monies! It is time for a serious glass of champagne! We got some great press on the launch too.  Todd Bishop of Geekwire wrote: The service, called MileLogr, works in conjunction with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple calendars, creating a detailed mileage report based on the …Continue reading →

Don’t Make Your Team Say No To You

January 9, 2013
Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Organization & People, Startups
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Leaders are often visionary “idea people”. The difference between success and failure is how good these leaders are at training their teams to say No. Idea People often forget they are disrupting their own teams by voicing their ideas. If leaders don’t learn and practice skills for controlling the flow of ideas, their teams will fail. When I was building home networking for Windows at Microsoft, I learned getting a team to a focused plan, …Continue reading →

Be as Excellent at Saying No as Saying Yes

December 3, 2012
Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Organization & People, Startups
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While in Amman Jordan last month, I had the opportunity to speak at Amman Tech Tuesdays, a local startup event held every month there. I was asked to talk about what I’ve learned in my career to an audience of about 500 geeks and entrepreneurs. I decided to talk about focus, a topic dear to my heart. The title of the talk is “Be as Excellent at Saying No as Saying Yes”. Below the video …Continue reading →

Four Things I Learned in Jordan

December 3, 2012
Startups
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I wrote a guest post for the Huffington Post on Dec 7, 2012. You can read the full post here, but here’s the TL;DR: If the Middle East can stay relatively stable for just 10-15 more years, entrepreneurship will have a major long-term positive impact on the social-economic future of the region. As the Middle East grows as a source of commerce and technology for the rest of the world, Arab women entrepreneurs will be …Continue reading →

MileLogr now Supports Outlook.com!

October 6, 2012
Startups
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On September 10, Stefan & I launched the beta of MileLogr. We got some great feedback and have just launched a major update. MileLogr is a Calendar App that Creates Mileage Logs. MileLogr integrates with your calendar and creates mileage logs for taxes, expense reports, and timesheets. Automagically. For Free! The new update incorporates the following new features: Now supports Outlook.com (Hotmail/Live) based calendars in addition to Exchange/Office365 and Google calendars. For calendar systems that …Continue reading →

Facebook is like a Brick

September 6, 2012
Platforms, Startups
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At my Future of Mobile talk at Thinkspace last week, someone asked me what I thought of Facebook’s future. I came up with an analogy for explaining my perspective, and have since developed it further. “All the big guys have potential energy. They are objects with mass at altitude. Apple, Microsoft, and Google’s altitude comes primarily from their massive profits. Facebook’s altitude results from having lots of eyeballs in their social graph. There are other …Continue reading →

Seattle Angel Conference #2

August 17, 2012
Startups
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On May 30, 2012 we held the first ever Seattle Angel Conference. It was a smashing success. Bolstered by the success of the first event, we’re doing it again on December 13. The primary mission of those of us helping to drive Seattle Angel Conferences is: “To grow the angel community in greater Seattle by creating an open environment where any accredited investor can participate in the investment of new startups.” We know there are …Continue reading →

Congrats to the Seattle Angel Conference and Illumagear!

June 1, 2012
Startups
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Yesterday we held the first ever Seattle Angel Conference. At the event, Illumagear, a scrappy Seattle startup with a vision for radically improving construction worker safety took home a check for $100K. By all measures the conference, as Bob Crimmins told me after the event, goes in the “Win Column”.  We had a terrific turnout, selling out the event. The room was full of energy and buzz. The participating companies all kicked-butt in their presentations. …Continue reading →

Use of Multiple Calendars in Google Calendar

May 25, 2012
Startups
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I don’t personally use Google Calendar but for building MileLogr, I needed some information on how others do. I decided to run a quick online survey to see if I could get some data. Tweeting this survey to my ~8500 followers on Twitter (I had to beg a few times) resulted in 120 responses over about 24 hours. This is probably not a great representation of the broad Google Calendar user base, but for my …Continue reading →

Seattle Angel Conference

May 16, 2012
Startups
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The Seattle Angel Conference event will be May 31st. Over the last two months, the investors and the applying companies have been in a due diligence and filtering process. We would like to ask for your help to spread the word about this project and invite you to the event. As I’ve written previously, a primary mission of the Seattle Angel Conference is to help people learn about the Angel investing process by engaging in …Continue reading →