Chris Knudsen on Life & Business

Guy Kawasaki has a great post this morning on the Lies of Engineers.  Here’s lie number eight: 
“‘We can do this faster, cheaper, and better with an offshore programming team in India.’  Rank and file engineers usually don’t tell this lie; it’s the CTO who does. Somehow we’ve got it in our heads that every programmer [...]

I was once told that you are “paranoid” if you think someone will come along and steal your business idea. I bought into that for a long time. Then I had a business idea stolen right out from underneath me. That was one of those belief changing moments in my life. 
Here’s the story. 
I had secured a deal [...]

Here’s a handy list of things not to tell potential investors:

We have no competition
Our projections are conservative
We’re going to sign a contract with (insert Fortune 500 company here) this week.
Our competitors can’t move fast enough or they are too big to move fast enough
Key employees will come on when the money is in place
We have first [...]

This story has been on my mind a lot lately. 
A man sold his company for $30 million and promptly headed to his local Ferrari dealer for a new car.  He settled on a sleek horse, paid cash for the machine and floored it as he left the dealership. Fifteen minutes later he wrapped his new Ferrari around a telephone poll and [...]

Here’s a great thought from Guy Kawasaki… 
Anticipate a need and invent a market—forget gap analysis.  You must look beyond the gaps to where that puck is headed. Getting trapped by gap analysis won’t get you there. The gap in the market right now isn’t going to be a business opportunity in 18 months, if the [...]

I really enjoy reading but I haven’t done much lately due to my schedule.  Even though I haven’t been reading much I’ve still been ordering books off Amazon like their going out of style. Amazon’s one-click ordering technology makes it so easy and for a guy like me that’s very dangerous! I just looked at [...]

As I sit here banging out the business plan for 10Speed Media, I am having a difficult time defining what Web 2.0 is in one simple sentence that actually means something to a non-techno, non-bay area nerd. 
Is it blogging, RSS, AJAX, tagging? What is it? Is it even technology at all? Perhaps its just a new [...]

I will be teaching the Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship class this fall at Westminster College. If you are a Westminster business undergraduate I would love to have you join the class. The class will be held on Monday’s and Wednesday’s from 5:30 pm to 7:20 pm. The course code is MGMT 474. The class texts will [...]

Hire the right people for the job and then trust them to make the right decisions. 

I was fascinated by blogging when I first discover it years ago. However, it took a long time to launch my own blog. I was afraid that I would expose too much about myself to the world. I especially did not want to reveal any information that a competitor or potential client could use against me. 
Here’s an example.  [...]