On the first of the warm Memorial Day weekend days, there’s an interesting thread on Quora about why ice coffee is more expensive than hot. I initially made a cost-plus pricing assumption, arguing the following reasons: 1) Labor: It’s brewed, cooled, placed in a storage pitcher, and placed in storage (not served in real time) 2) Storage: It’s stored in [...]

I found operations research to be both a challenging and valuable business school class.  The nuggets I walked away with were fairly basic and could easily be obtained from a book or web page; and so it surprises me when companies do not more diligently work to enforce efficiencies.  For example, take lines.  It is statistically proven, beyond any doubt, [...]

Manual is not the long term answer for anything, but it can be the incremental start.  If certain processes that ideally would be automated or have systems in place require manual work (i.e. spreadsheet emailing), it doesn’t cause me that much anxiety in the short terms term for two key reasons: Doing manual processes is a great way to determine [...]

I often feel that poker is the ideal game for entrepreneurs, but while playing a few hands last night, it occurred to me how closely the game maps to Fred’s post From Hopes and Dreams to The Real Thing.  In particular, the idea of the trough of chasm of despair maps closely to what can occur at the time of the [...]

Jill got me a new digital camera as we were awaiting Cooper’s birth.  I took a bunch of pictures with it and was struck by the quality of images for the price.  The new camera had double the mega pixels over my old one, and it took much more noticeably better pictures than my iphone.  I wanted to take more pictures with [...]

Pricing transparency and consistency allow for scaling, positive customer perceptions, and easy sales team growth.  I believe strongly that two prospective customers with the same quantitative attributes should get the same deal.  You can allow for price breaks on volume or other similar measure, but segmenting on the basis of qualitative attributes gets messy and even unfair. I like having [...]

Stickybits is looking to make its 4th or 5th fulltime hire: an experienced python developer.  The full job post is here.  If you don’t know Stickybits, take a look at this demo by the founder’s at Tuesday’s NY Tech meetup: From the job post: What are we looking for? We’re looking for a Senior Python Engineer who has tons of [...]

I’ve read Robert Reich’s work since coming across his book, The Work of Nations, but I was particularly moved by his essay on the FTC’s double standard in investigating Apple but not the large banks.  It reminded me of how in the wake of the financial scandals, I liked the SEC’s investigations of insider trading to treating a patient who [...]

Today, we’re borrowing a conference room at the offices of Majestic Research for a board meeting. I worked at Majestic doing business development after business school, and the firm continues to hold a special place for me because of the quality and uniqueness of its products. I think I can go as far as saying Majestic produces my favorite products [...]

When designing products, “the funnel” is a frequent topic of concern. Will people drop off? How many clicks can a user be expected to do, etc. Over the weekend, I got my 23 and Me home DNA collection kit. It was an incredibly complicated process made very simple. The directions were clear, and the parts were pre-attached in such a [...]