Monthly Archives: May 2011

26
May

What would I look for in a co-founder?

Published by adil in Entrepreneurship 1 comment

Tweet One of our investors asked me an interesting question recently: If you had to do it over again, how would you describe the background that you would have loved to have coming in as the technical co-founder of Modcloth? What technical skills as well as soft skills do you think would be helpful to have in the initial stages and as you scale as you have done? This got me to thinking. If I → Read More

23
May

The importance of employee recognition

Published by adil in Entrepreneurship Reply

Tweet I think employee recognition is an area that’s grossly undervalued, both by managers and by people in general – especially when it comes to knowledge workers. Knowledge workers get paid reasonably well. If not, they know they can go somewhere else and make good money. I find that engineers, as a rule, are very good at crafting a world that works for themselves. Maybe because it’s easy to do. But crafting a world that → Read More

19
May

Managing stress

Published by adil in Productivity 2 comments

Tweet I saw an interesting article recently titled “What is the Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology” by Ben Horowitz on TechCrunch. In it, Horowitz talks about the stressful aspects of being a CEO (there are many) and shares some techniques he uses to calm his nerves. The startup environment is frothy now. Money’s coming back into play and investors are looking for the next big thing in tech. Sound familiar? When the → Read More

15
May

A followup on rapid prototyping

Published by adil in Development, UX 1 comment

Tweet In an earlier post, I offered some thoughts on rapid prototyping. I mentioned my preference for the “high-fidelity prototype”, which leaves very little room to the imagination and provides users and stakeholders with a realistic sense of the user experience of the product. I’ve been using a couple of different rapid prototyping tools and thought I’d offer some opinions on their limitations and what looks promising as I see it. Rapid prototyping tools I’ve → Read More