October 2010
Beginner
352 pages
6h 11m
English
Content preview from Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 51. Throw Things Away
Eric Marcoullier
Eric is the co-founder and CEO of OneTrueFan. He previously co-founded Gnip and was the co-founder and CEO of MyBlogLog, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 2007. He has been a TechStars mentor since 2007.
In late September of 2009, I met with Gnip board member and lead investor Brad Feld. It had been a few weeks since we'd spoken face to face and the meeting quickly turned into a litany of reasons why I was stressed about the company. I felt like we were headed for insolvency in 12 months and I was powerless to fix it. When Brad mentioned that I sounded pretty unhappy, I threw caution to the wind and told him just how miserable I was. And suddenly, I found myself resigning as CEO.
I had not begun the meeting with that intention, but as I spelled out the sense of inertia that had taken over Gnip, it seemed like the logical decision. We had tried multiple times to expand on the core tech platform, and every time, it appeared that we weren't making progress. I felt like we had more drama than companies many times our size. And I was bored out of my mind with what I was doing on a daily basis. During the meeting with Brad, I spontaneously decided it was time for me to go.
Brad and I discussed the repercussions of leaving and they all sounded better to me than crash landing a company for the next 12 months. We parted that day with the understanding ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.