This is the seventh in a series of 11 videos produced by the Smeal College of Business at The Pennsylvania State University. This one focuses on team recruiting, growth, and culture. Chemdex Shines on Market Debut Doing what’s good is not always what’s best.
At first, I didn’t see much of Bob... UPSIDE’s 1999 Hot 100 Ariba IPO Goes Through the Roof Web Firm Neoforma Names to Top Post Zollars From Cardinal Jeff and I had started Neoforma.
We had provided its first monetary food. We had reared the company, nurtured it, guided it, imposed our will and ingrained our personal ethics. But we did not control Neoforma... Sleeping Giants Healtheon, Neoforma Join Forces Motivation and intelligence in the absence of experience yields dazzling inertia.
I hadn’t thought about Sharon for more than a decade... Buck’s Restaurant in Woodside, California I am not one who can live in a stereotype without subconsciously fighting it.
Trapped as I was in the role of an aggressive, dotcom entrepreneur, I lacked many, if not most, of the habits of the natives... Letting go felt very good—until I lost my grip.
Jeff and I were getting tired. Tired of wearing so many hats to work each day. I fantasized what it would be like to focus on only a few jobs at a time... When I finished the first draft of Starting Something, the book was too long. Going into the process, I had thought that I would struggle to come up with enough words to fill a book, so this was quite a surprise. Thanks to two great editors, most of the pruning was quite painless, making the book better with each omission. However, there was one overlong chapter that I was very reluctant to trim.
The Casting chapter is about hiring. The book’s core message is that a company’s ultimate product is its culture. How could I exclude some of our most important experiences – successes and failures? But this chapter was contrary to my objective to keep each chapter as short as possible. So I ripped the following section out of that chapter, telling myself that I’d likely release it separately at some point. Over the years, many people have asked me to expand upon my hiring process. After much procrastination, here goes. This section covers a period in 1998, just after our first large funding round. The market for talent was very hot, making it essential to work with recruiters. This picks up near the end of the Casting chapter. As it was extracted from the book, this prose is told in the past tense, but I still apply the same principals and practices today… A company’s ultimate product is its culture.
We weren’t rolling in dough, but for a time we were making more money than we were spending. And the work was piling up... |
About MeI am an architect, writer, and serial entrepreneur. Archives
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