TL;DR I grew my LinkedIn network to 22K contacts. You *might* grow yours to advance your career. “You want to have as large a LinkedIn network as possible,” he said. At the time, I didn’t understand. What was this investor was telling me? I’d been on the professional social network for a few years. I’d […]
Category: Marketing
Product Market Fit
To paraphrase, Lean Startup author Eric Reis, “We can build any product. The question is: Will anyone buy it?” True Story: She is developing a new chip set. It’s revolutionary in its design and potential applications. When I ask about customers, she answers, “We’re building a platform, like the app store.” When I ask about […]
Why You Need a Bio-Strategy
Here’s a spoken word version of the keynote I gave at Biofabricate 2017. To learn more about why you need a bio strategy, click here.
What I’m Reading
Happy New Year! Over the holidays, I unsubscribed from dozens of newsletters. I was very critical in thinking through whether a newsletter belonged in my email box. Was it helping me stay informed? Was it inspiring? Or, was it wasting (virtual) space? Here are a few of the newsletters I subscribe to stay up to date on biotech, […]
What Is Bio-Strategy?
TL;DR. Bio-strategy is a framework to incorporate biology, biotechnology into your business. “At the dawn of the 21st Century, strategy seems to have gone out of fashion.” – Chet Holmes, Certain to Win The word “strategy” has become so overused that most people have forgotten what strategy really means. John Cumbers and I were inspired to […]
It’s No Secret, Your Presentation Matters
How you present your business, your story, your offer is no secret. In many cases, it’s the presentation that matters. The voice you use, the magazines your content appears in, the social channels you engage in. Your presentation is the articles, blog posts, and white papers you publish. It’s the videos on your web site and […]
iGEM is the Future of Biotechnology
Jennifer Lopez and Zachary Quinto. Biotech is going mainstream in a big way. That was the message to the more than 5,600 high school and college students crowded into Boston’s Hynes Convention Center for the 2016 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition. Lopez’s production company is producing CRISPR, a near-future crime drama named after the […]
How to Create 10,000 Jobs?
How do you create 10,000 jobs? Train 500 brewers. Originally, I was going to write: Train 10,000 teachers. Despite the overwhelming need for teachers [1], the profession currently is looked down upon in the United States and people don’t understand that if you don’t invest in education, you’re not investing in the future. (Cynically, I […]
30 Things I Did Before Turning 30
In anticipation of my 54th birthday, I answered this question on Quora: What are the 30 things you did before turning 30 in your life? Learned to skateboard ramps and pools. Memorized every ditch and was part of an informal word-of-mouth network that knew when a new ramp appeared in Ventura. Convinced my parents to drive […]
You Need 1000 True Fans
That’s the number of True Fans Wired founder Kevin Kelly suggested any creator needs to make a living. “A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author—in other words, anyone producing works of art—needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.” These True Fans, “Will purchase anything […]