Grade A Entrepreneurs

Guest writer: Sophie Delphis My mother is currently finishing up her French translation of Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, which comes out in the US on March 8th. As in past translation work she has done, I’ve been providing irregular advice on how to adapt certain phrases or anecdotes […]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis The Mesh, an old word meaning the “opening between the threads of a net” got its technology flavor with the concept of mesh networking generally defined as “a type of networking wherein each node in the network may act as an independent router.” For Lisa Gansky, in her book The Mesh, […]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis The shibumi strategy by Matthew E. May is both a parable and a lesson on the quiet aesthetic simplicity and transformative energy in Japanese culture. It all starts with Andy Harmon’s sudden misfortune. One day, his company closes. A good husband and good father (very much the image of the perfect, […]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis Chatting over breakfast the other day at Il Fornaio with Nilofer Merchant, whose book The New How, Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy I discussed in a former post, I realized that a “new how” often starts with a “new me.” This “new me” can be triggered by unforeseen events – events […]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis What I like about long flights is that they enable me to read an entire book in one shot. This is how I read The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith from Vonavona ventures (an advisory and consulting practice), published earlier this year. This excellent book focuses on how social […]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis Reaching out to customers has been most companies’ motto for over twelve years, except that back then, “reaching out” mostly meant finding ways to bring them to your website with the maximum of bells and whistles through large email marketing campaigns. Great. It works, and works well, but it’s only one […]

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By Marylene Delphis @mddelphis The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits was published last July. It is a short sequel to a part of Steve Blank‘s The Four Steps to the Epiphany (2005) and is prefaced by him. It starts with a truism that can’t be repeated enough, and that every single […]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis From the science of automata to love stories with androids: Think about Wilhelm Schickard‘s “calculating clock” in 1623 and, almost two hundred years later, of Charles Babbage’s first mechanical computer, the difference engine, and about the many inventions in between: Pascal’s Pascaline (1642), Leibniz’s Stepped Reckoner (1672), the dozens of mechanical […]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis Last Friday, Marian Scheuer Sofaer invited a few friends for a breakfast in Palo Alto, CA with Gloria Feldt, who presented her now famous book, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think about Power. A great intimate setting early in the morning that did not diminish Gloria’s energy and determination to […]

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David Cohen is the founder and CEO of Techstars, a mentorship-driven startup accelerator, and Brad Feld has been an early stage investor for over twenty-five years. Both authors are innate entrepreneurs and authentically love entrepreneurs. So Do more faster is not simply a platform to create speaking-opportunities, but the sincere expression of their desire to […]

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