2007

The Danger of Competing on Price

For some odd reason, far too many CEOs have the instinct of cutting price as a way to stimulate sales. Cutting price is easy to do, but difficult (if not impossible) to sustain as an on-going strategy. In every market, there is always going to be only ONE lowest-price producer. There IS an advantage to being […]

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Amazon’s Kindle – The Hidden Lesson

Amazon.com’s new digital book device, named Kindle, has just hit the market. While early reviews on Amazon itself appear fairly negative, there is a hidden lesson here that’s important for any CEO to recognize. In my book Extreme Revenue Growth, I used Amazon as an example of a company that has done some interesting things, […]

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TheFunded.com – The Balance of Power Has Shifted

Last night, I attended a launch event of sorts for TheFunded.com Actually, TheFunded.com has been online for over a year, but up until now, it’s founder has chosen to remain anonymous. TheFunded.com is a Web 2.0 “Consumer Reports” type site where CEOs of Venture-Backed companies anonymously rate the investors they’ve worked with and presented to. […]

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The Psychology of the Absurd Valuation

A few weeks ago, Microsoft made a $240 million investment in Facebook for a 1.6% stake.  That puts Facebook’s valuation at $15 billion versus sales of approximately $150 million. That’s a breathtaking 100-times revenues valuation.  By conventional logic, that’s a nearly impossible valuation to justify. But that pre-supposes that valuation is inherently a logical process. […]

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Common Startup Mistakes

It never ceases to amaze me how many startup ideas I hear about that are just fundamentally flawed. The flaw I’m referring to is a startup whose premise is to solve a problem that fundamentally nobody really cares about… except for the entrepreneur, of course. In most other industries, new businesses are started to solve […]

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