TL;DR: experienced CEO/CTO/TechDirector with long background in programming, sales, and business management (Corporate, iPhone/Android, Games, Education) looking for strategic roles in USA, UK, and Asia. After a year-out to do a post-graduate degree in Education, I’m looking for something new and exciting to do next. My primary goal is to […]
entrepreneurship
53 posts
This week I’m paralysed on some of my simplest decisions while happily making complex decisions quickly, and being incisive and highly effective on others. This problem occasionally crops up in my work and personal life, and it frustrates the hell out of me; I’m going to write about it here, […]
Many businesses underestimate the power of a clever Pricing Model. I’m selling a new product at the moment (we’re helping schools teach children to program), so pricing models occupy a lot of my head right now. Startups are so unsure of what model to use that they often say “anything, […]
This: (blocking me from doing any work – I need that spreadsheet, and thanks to Cloud, it’s impossible. Any other system – source / revision control, local files, file servers, etc – would have a quick, easy way for me to get at it. It’s only Cloud that fails … […]
In the past, I’ve found Thomas’s Kickstarter analysis for game-projects very useful. Today I found something that complements them: an excellent visualization of Kickstarter projects. It takes a little thought to understand how to use it, so here’s some ultra-quick example analysis…
(background: after 8 years as one of the world’s mid-tier MMO games, City of Heroes (+ City of Villains) is being shut down. The community banded together to ask if they could take over running the world that meant so much to them; NCsoft (the publisher, and a company I […]
In the past, I’ve had terrible advice from brilliant people. The best way to avoid that is to be careful to research the brilliant person and tailor your questions to avoid their weaknesses. Tomorrow I’ll be meeting a bunch of people at Google London’s open day. I started by writing […]
“Disruption” used to be mentioned frequently as the thing that every company wanted to be (urged on by investors). But what is it, really? I’ve met lots of people who believe it’s “a fancy word for ‘innovation'” – but if that’s all, it would be pretty pointless and vapid. This […]
According to Sefton Hill: “You just think about quality developers like Bizarre Creations, Black Rock – people who are making really good games and going out of business. Those guys were so talented so how can that happen? Well, obviously, it wasn’t anything to do with operational mis-management, poor commercial […]
Please email me (adam at red-glasses.com) if you have skills / interest in the following: Mass market (i.e. everyone + their mom) telling stories javascript frameworks for complex visual 2D stuff (e.g. iGoogle, Netvibes, etc) Visual manipulation of large 2D images on mobile (especially iPhone) NB: we have no funding […]
Here’s a new term: The FAILtrepreneur FAILtrepreneur def: someone who tries to be an Entrepreneur, and takes advantage of lots of things intended to “help” them be a success, but somehow finds each “help” pushes them further and further into mediocrity and the failure of their business. Then they go […]
“Starting work without a contract is like a putting a condom on after finding out you got someone pregnant” For this and other great pieces of advice on life as a services company, trying to get paid, watch this great talk from Mike Monteiro: http://www.wikio.com/video/mike-monteiro-ck-pay-5196884
I believe this is the best post I’ve seen on startup funding since the creation of Venture Hacks: Raising money for a startup is an inherently risky proposition. You step up to the plate knowing that the odds are slim and that, for every story of success on TechCrunch, there’s […]
A delightful quote from Google. Although equally, Florian Mueller has an interesting analysis on whetherGoogle really wants to kill patents – or just kill “patents which Google doesn’t already own”? note that Google’s discussion of its intellectual property rights starts with patents. They could have started with copyright, trademarks and […]
(that’s almost $12 billion) This is a BIG DEAL, for the UK, and for Cambridge. Rory Cellan-Jones is moaning about how terrible it is (“looks like a sad day for British technology – and for Cambridge in particular”) – and I wanted to put across a very different perspective. NB: […]
All in the same market/need/desire space: First product: FAIL. Second product: FAIL. Third product: looks set for success “Our last version was just Tian and I late at 3am practically crying that everything in the food world we were building sucked. So we asked ourselves what could we do well […]
Yes! Yes, yes, YES! Next time anyone in the UK hears an investor ask about patents (hint: they probably are ex-3i staff – and no, that isn’t a good thing), send them this: 10 Myths about patents “Myth 3: Nobody would invest in startups that don’t have patents. Fact: The […]
This (“NESTA: Investing in Video Games”) was last month, but I’ve been too busy to write it up till now. The most interesting things that I noticed at the event: Index is interested in spending SEED money on games companies [Ben Holmes] Index can now “write cheques” up to $1m […]
Recently I had reason to contact a bunch of UK games studios. I thought the hard bit would be to find the names of all those out there. Actually, the hardest part was navigating their websites to do the outrageous thing of daring to send them an email… Here’s a […]
(From an aside by one of LinkedIn’s founding team (interesting blog post on what it was like raising the first Series A funding for LI)) This is one of the hardest things for “old style” European VC firms and Angels to get their heads around, IME. And it’s entirely true, […]