I read this thought-provoking post by Paul Graham of Y-Combinator fame this morning (thanks to John Gruber of Daring Fireball for the link) and shared it with several friends. It’s a simple premise: We tend to have a ‘top idea’ that takes up a lot of our primary thinking energy. Paul identifies your current top [...]

I’ve spent some time in the Bay Area (and will be there this weekend) so I understand the weather issue. I also understand the cost of rental space. The two together mean people really do start-ups in garages- it’s pretty mild and you can just open the door up on most days. Sometime I wonder [...]

I was wading through my daily quick look at the tech sites like Teccrunch, VentureBeat, etc., getting frustrated that they all have the same stories, often with the same wording obviously lifted from press releases and I had a thought that I have on a weekly basis:
Why don’t they tell us, in a clearly understandable [...]

I work full time as Director of Marketing for a 35 person software company and spend the rest of my time working on 24PageBooks. One is a job (a good one), the other is a passion (all passions are good, IMHO, as long they are not destructive). I recently read yet another blog post about [...]

Tim Ferriss of The Four Hour Work Week fame was an inspiration to Mike and I as we evolved the 24PageBooks concept. The driving motivation behind it is personal liberation in both a literal sense and a spiritual sense. This recent blog post, though a long read, is worth spending time with- things don’t liberate [...]

I just read a perceptive post on adding value with your products by Chris Dixon, an investor and entrepreneur. He rightly points out that start-ups should consider what value they’re adding to society with their products or services, value beyond the obvious usage value. I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I realized earlier [...]

As we get ready to move out of beta for 24PageBooks, we’re already having an epiphany regarding the potential of our brief eBooks on business and lifestyles issues. This came from an accidental exchange with a friend who owns a successful business. She shared some info I sent her with her CTO who, being a [...]

I was in a library the other day and, while browsing through the new non-fiction titles I came across this astounding title: GPS For Dummies. This is a 408 page book about global positioning systems. It is not, apparently, a highly technical book for engineers- I doubt they would read a book with ‘Dummies’ in [...]

I stopped blogging a few months ago because my life started to change for the better, workwise. I’ve been doing the pundit thing here but like many blogging pundits it doesn’t really mean anything. I sat down and made a list of all my projects and potential projects and pared them down to two things: [...]

Can a book project be a start-up?
I’ve been looking for a start-up to get involved with in 2010. I’ve also been working on a book proposal. It dawned on me that the book proposal is my start-up. The proposal is a business plan. The literary agent is a business development person. The publisher is both [...]