DROdio - CEO @ Storytell | Advisor at FounderCulture

High Fives and Arash's Story

At a recent DFJ venture capital conference, I heard the story of Arash Bayatmakou. He fell from a 3rd story balcony a few years ago and landed on his neck, paralyzing him from the chest down. Incredibly, he's determined to walk again. We exchanged emails after the conference

founders

Negotiation Pro Tip: Creating An Obligation

I'm going to share one of my most powerful negotiating techniques. The funny thing is that up until a year ago, I didn't even realize this was a technique -- I thought everyone did this. But apparently not -- here's the backstory: > A

founders

Zuck in 2005: No plans for world domination, but the product/market fit to get there.

I absolutely love this video of Zuck talking about Facebook back in 2005. If I had been in that room, I wouldn't have been able to guess that Facebook would become a $180+ billion company. The best part: Zuck describes Facebook in minute 1 as an "online

founders

How Are You Spending Your 700,800 Hours?

"Time is what we want most, but what we use worst." - William PennTime is our most precious asset, and none of us know how much of it we have left. It's ironic, then, how easily we let it slip away. An hour for a meeting,

Show Me The Money: Six Strategies to Put Your Cash to Work

UPDATE: I've posted lots of updates since I originally wrote this blog 2 years ago. If you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole, check out this post comparing Betterment vs. Wealthfront ETFs [http://danielodio.com/betterment-vs-wealthfront-which-one-will-maximize-your-wealth-more] and this one on Peer to Peer lending [http://danielodio.

WhatsApp's Journey From Being Ignored To a $19 Billion Exit

Unless you've been living in a cave, you've probably heard that WhatsApp was purchased by Facebook for $16 billion in cash plus $3 billion in RSUs [http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/facebook-buying-whatsapp-for-16b-in-cash-and-stock-plus-3b-in-rsus/] . But what you may not know is that originally, WhatsApp was not solving

"Product Prioritization System" at Pandora

Based on your recommendation of First Round's "Review" blog [http://danielodio.com/first-round-capital-is-now-a-must-read-vcs-blog-for-entrepreneurs] , I've been reading all the posts. AWESOME one today on how Pandora managed an engineering resource crunch [http://firstround.com/article/This-Product-Prioritization-System-Nabbed-Pandora-More-Than-70-Million-Active-Monthly-Users-with-Just-40-Engineers] to get to where they are today! “This is

It's settled: Native Wins over HTML5. For now.

I've been blogging about mobile for six years. Including things like whether native would beat HTML5 [http://danielodio.com/mobile-web-vs-native-apps-daniel-moderates], why Facebook switched back to native from HTML5 [http://danielodio.com/native-apps-vs-html5-the-smoking-gun], Native vs. Web [http://danielodio.com/native-or-web], the rise of apps [http://danielodio.com/ill-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours-apps-that-is], the

Quantifying Self by Counting Steps: Jawbone UP vs. Fitbit Flex

Up until the 1980's we basically all lived in an analog world. Record players, cassette decks, cars, telephones, cameras -- these were all analog. The only digital interaction most of us had was with clunky big-box computers that started appearing in some homes. Then, by the late 1990&

First Round Capital's 'Review' is Now a Must-Read Publication for Entrepreneurs

Some VCs write great blogs. A few that come to mind are Fred Wilson [http://www.avc.com/], Chris Dixon [http://cdixon.org/] and especially, Ben Horowitz [http://bhorowitz.com/]. But I'm usually not impressed with the quality of blogging that VCs do as a firm, which is

The Future of Customer Loyalty: Dynamic Pricing with a Hedge

I went to get my car washed today in freezing weather, the day of a massive snow storm about to hit DC. Needless to say, nobody else was there. (Why did I do this? Because the car desperately needed to be waxed + interior cleaned, and I'm not in

The Secrets Behind Spotify's Product Success

I ran across a fantastic PDF on HackerNews by Henrik Kniberg that pulls back the covers on How Spotify Builds Products [http://drod.io/232k3g0H3o01]. It's such a good article -- and so different how many companies actually execute on building products -- that I wanted to highlight

managers

Hey Managers: Show Me The Last Thing You Created

I'm the SVP of Strategic Partnerships at ShareThis. It's my job to find the right strategic partners for us to work with. This morning, in the shower, I thought "I'd like to have a simple combo slide deck + narrated screencast to show to

Perspective

A Startup's Perspective on Time

Startups feel like a race against the clock, because they are. The trick is to extend a startup's runway (or as one of my investors put it, "oxygen in the the scuba tank") long enough to become successful. This means creating the right team, finding product/

app

Musings on the State of the (App) Developer Nation

Vision Mobile just created a fantastic report called "State of the Developer Nation [http://www.developereconomics.com/reports/q1-2014/]." Here are some highlights and thoughts: There's no question that apps are here to stay (and that was a big question, even just 24 months ago). Over

Advertising

Finally: Making Advertising Relevant

I never thought I'd say this, and I'm not sure how I feel about myself for saying it, but it's an exciting time to be in advertising. There's a famous quote attributed to John Wanamaker, a pioneer in marketing from the late

Fired

Should Gurbaksh Chahal have been fired by his board?

A crazy story is unfolding in Silicon Valley right now: RadiumOne CEO Gurbaksh Chahal was fired by his board after he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors of battery and domestic violence against his then-girlfriend, who he accused of having sex for money and allegedly assaulted. He says it was just

Dissecting Coin's Massively Successful Product Launch

Coin [https://onlycoin.com/?referral=H0D0Spzn] is a new startup that's trying to replace traditional credit cards. Its YouTube video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9Sx34swEG0] has 6.8MM views. When you Google the word "coin" they show up as the #1 search result --

Reasoning from First Principles: A Framework for Disruptive Innovation

Here's a great post by Skellie that dissects Elon Musk's approach to disruptive innovation [http://blog.microlancer.com/elon-musks-greatest-weapon-laymans-guide-first-principles/] , which is based on reasoning from first principles. I had an MBA group come in to visit ShareThis yesterday [http://danielodio.com/uid/84038], and we were

MBA

Berkeley Haas MBAs visit ShareThis to talk startups, social media & entrepreneurism

Great to meet the Berkeley Haas crew today; thanks for stopping by the ShareThis office! Also, thank you to Jacqueline and Janice in our office for getting everything set up, including your schwag! Here is the video from our talk: And here are my notes from the talk today, as

Meetings

Transform Your Meetings, with Hackpad

I've been using Hackpad [http://www.hackpad.com/] for a few months and I absolutely love it. Hackpad is a collaborative editing tool similar to Google Docs, and yet very different (and in many ways better) at the same time. Fred Wilson had a great writeup of Hackpad

Baby DROdio

Hello World, Baby DROdio!

My incredible wife gave birth to a beautiful daughter earlier this week. 6lbs, 6oz. Mom and baby are doing great. No name yet (we have to get to know her first!). A few pictures are below. • Visitors: We can't wait to introduce Baby DROdio to our friends and

Process

Creating a Process for Process

> "If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing." - W. Edwards Deming I've found myself thinking a lot about process recently. Creating and documenting processes in startups is hard, for

Deep

The Value of Going Deep instead of Wide

One of the advantages of focusing on focus [http://danielodio.com/finding-the-yes-by-focusing-on-the-no] is the ability to go "deep" instead of "wide" on what a company's actual business is. A fantastic example is Dropbox. They do one thing, and they do it with such an

Valuable

When valuable employees quit/resign

Hi DROdio, I wanted to get your take on how a CEO should handle the case where a valuable employee quits or resigns on good terms. I've been at a number of companies recently where the process has been poorly handled and just leads to uncertainty and stress