Category: On entrepreneurship

My entrepreneurship

What I’ve learned about letting go teammates

When an employee leaves your company, it almost always fits into one of a few clear buckets: they left on good terms, or bad terms, or you let them go yourself.

  1. She found a better role, and you aren’t matching the offer. Either because you don’t want to or that you can’t, you don’t meet or exceed compensation or responsibility or title or something else that the new role offers, though she would be willing to stay.
  2. She’s quitting, and so you can’t do anything about it. Whether or not for another role, she wants to leave your company (maybe it’s time or maybe there’s a problem).
  3. You’re letting her go. Because of budgetary or strategy reasons, her role is being eliminated or fundamentally changed. You could think of this as anything from convenient (downsizing on someone you don’t think was a good fit anyway) to painful (someone you really appreciated but didn’t have the role or place for).
  4. You’re firing her. Because of performance or actions, she is being removed from the organization. There is an array of euphemisms and agreements that mask these, often for optics.

Happily most have left Technical.ly on good terms. But I have experience with them all. Here are some things I’ve learned about the process

Be a leader, not a founder

The truest goal for starting a company is to grow it to a stronger place of stability.

To battle a generational low point in business incorporation, we’ve built a solid drumbeat celebrating entrepreneurship. To complement this charge, we need a serious dialogue about transitioning founders into leaders, from the one who started a company to the one who is growing it.

As a cofounder of 25-person publishing company Technically Media who has interviewed hundreds of founders and CEOs along the way, I am experiencing this transition myself. To give yourself the best shot at success in business, you must know what your goals are. One of them should be looking for opportunities to make this transition from founder to leader.

That was the focus of a lecture and workshop I led at the second annual Fearless Conference, held by the precocious Melissa Alam, who has developed a wonderful community of (mostly) young women aspiring to build businesses of their own. Below I share my slides, some notes and reaction to my talk.

Continue reading Be a leader, not a founder

What made me proud about our sixth annual Philly Tech Week

You determine success by what goals you set. The mission of Philly Tech Week from the very start six years ago was to create an entry point for others to discover the community of technologists and entrepreneurs bubbling up in Philadelphia.

So this annual, community-supported calendar of events celebrating technology, entrepreneurship and innovation in Philadelphia will have a role for as long as those subjects warrant local on-boarding. Led by us at local tech news network Technical.ly, some 50 partners put together 150 events during a 10-day period ending this past weekend. And though we’re still collecting survey results and feedback from attendees, organizers and supporters, the early feedback I remains consistent with past years: (a) the collective calendar brings more people out to all our events and (b) the attendees include community-regulars and, just as important, people trying to better understand how to join in.

When that stops, that’s likely when PTW (and events like it) cease to matter. What does change each year is what stands out to me as particularly telling or representative from the calendar. That’s where I’m often most proud.

Continue reading What made me proud about our sixth annual Philly Tech Week

We beat $1M in revenue in 2015; small, growing and proud

Let’s start with the obvious: I help run a (very) very small, young business. By very nearly any measure, $1 million in annual revenue shows no great scale.

But for this first-time entrepreneur, slowly bootstrapping a niche news company like Technically Media, it means a lot to me to hit that nice round number in 2015. We have a full-time team of 15 with another half-dozen independent contractors who support the daily production of a news and events product with a strong reputation. We continue to find purpose with Technical.ly and expect our second brand Generocity.org to signal a coming explosion of local social impact conversations like local tech is here now.

I want to share what this means to us.

Continue reading We beat $1M in revenue in 2015; small, growing and proud

Surprises from our inaugural Delaware Innovation Week

We at Technical.ly hosted our inaugural Delaware Innovation Week. It was our smallest community yet to do something like that, so we anxious to see what would happen.

The early signs show the model worked — new people came to take part in the week and join the community. So we’ll be back in November 2016.

Since it was the first year, I thought I’d share some surprises that came across.

Continue reading Surprises from our inaugural Delaware Innovation Week

Generalists and specialists: when to hire for habits and when not to

When you’re building a team, each role is best filled by someone on a range between generalists and specialists. The first is flexible but lacking expertise, and the latter is experienced but lacking range.

Of course, like the term use among animals, most of us are somewhere on a spectrum, but it still can be a helpful prism to see your applicant pool. Some celebrate the generalist and others honor the specialist but both are necessary and nuanced. And perhaps most important to remember: anyone can move along that spectrum, depending on their willingness and adaptability. But be conscious of your choices.

Continue reading Generalists and specialists: when to hire for habits and when not to

Technically Media will be establishing new headquarters

We’re staying in Philadelphia of course. But after three years as a tenant of noted University City-based venture capital firm First Round Capital, we’ve outgrown the space.

By the end of the year, we’ll be moving our more than dozen-person team to the top floor of the Curtis Center, a historic building in Old City Philadelphia that once held the celebrated Curits Publishing Company (the ones behind the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies Home Journal and the Public Ledger, among other brands).

Continue reading Technically Media will be establishing new headquarters

This column about Technical.ly was spiked by the Philadelphia Business Journal

Ahead of the fifth annual Philly Tech Week back in April, consultant and Drexel University chairman Stan Silverman, who writes a regular column for the Philadelphia Business Journal, decided to write about Technical.ly and my work there.

Unfortunately the Business Journal’s leadership flexed its editorial discretion and spiked the story. It wasn’t the first time we heard something about us was dropped by the publication — Silverman told me he never had a column idea killed like that before by his editor.

One can’t know exactly why but one might come to assume it’s a rather petty swipe at us, as they see us as a kind of competition. I hope we can all appreciate the irony that during this very same Philly Tech Week, we happily included and helped to promote a Business Journal event, their IT awards. Oh it’s too perfect.

I guess it’s just the difference between the open web and ugly legacy tendancies.

Read Silverman’s column, which he published on his personal site, here.

What you can learn from the calendar of our fifth annual Philly Tech Week

The fifth annual Philly Tech Week, now presented by Comcast, kicks off later this week. There are more than 150 events on the calendar, two dozen of the largest anchors we at Technical.ly organize. We publish in five markets now and do an array of events but this is easily the largest undertaking of ours each year.

Below find out what you can learn by looking at that calendar.

Continue reading What you can learn from the calendar of our fifth annual Philly Tech Week