Sep 01

My last 3 Lightning Talks in Lisbon

Events, Speaking No Comments »

Haven’t written on here in ages and figured I’d post the last three 5min talks I’ve given for Lisbon Lightning Talks. In reverse chronological order:


This is a talk arguing for that the 3 most powerful force multipliers one can learn are mental models, spaced repetition cards and nocode. Slides here.


This is an attempt to tell a fable about “Stone Soup” in an analogy to what I’m working on today with Problemattic. Slides here.


This is an introduction to the Problemattic effort, backstory on the origin with Charity Makeover and what this project is attempting to do. Slides here.

I did one more that unfortunately wasn’t recorded on Paragliding the slides of which can be found here. Lighting Talks in Lisbon are run by my friend Looke and is an amazing community-building resource. Highly recommend checking it out if ever you’re in Lisbon. They run every two weeks.

Aug 17

My talk for the Remote Year London Junction event

Remote Year, Speaking 1 Comment »

“What would it take for us to become the most effective tribe on the planet?” That was the question I posed to our group at the Junction event last night for Remote Year. Below is the full 30min talk in which I propose the two most high-leverage activities I believe we can perform and the six topics I would love for our group to cover via in-person seminars during the remaining travels abroad.

And here are the slides from the talk:

Thanks Aline for the opportunity to speak and Tyler for livestreaming it on FB. Blown away that had 3000+ views in the first night.

Nov 21

“Five Gold Bars” talk for ASEDS students

Speaking No Comments »

Below are the slides and video from a talk I did yesterday with the 7th & 8th graders at All Saints’:

Thanks Irene Tseng for the opportunity. I graduated All Saints’ in 1989 and I would send my kids there in a heartbeat today. Happily none of the kids there had the haircut I did back then ;-)

Jun 13

My talk on Outsourcing for NACET

Arizona, Speaking No Comments »

Big thanks to the folks at NACET for inviting me to present to their people on the basics of outsourcing. Here’s the Ustream of that talk:


You can get the slide deck here. Many of the graphics in the deck are linked to their corresponding remote resources. NACET is a great resource for entrepreneurs in AZ and at 75deg the temp is right especially this time in AZ. We just carved out a new cowork space at their facility and it’s now open for folks who want to beat the heat and work up there for the day. Also put the weekend of Aug 11th on your calendar as they’re hosting Startup Weekend Flagstaff. Should be a great time to get out of Phx and build stuff up in the pines. Rumor has it they’re sponsoring a shuttle up there leaving from CO+Hoots and they’re mixing in fun night activities like a guided tour of the famous local breweries – stay tuned.

Mar 31

My Fasttrac talk on Product Dev

Entrepreneur, JumpBox, Speaking 2 Comments »

Big thanks to Francine Hardaway, Phil Blackerby and Ed Nusbaum for inviting me to speak with their class on monday and share what we’ve learned on product development in our experience in building JumpBox. Fastrac is a great program sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation. I went through 2 semesters of this course a few years ago and it’s an honor to be invited back as a presenter. Note: realistically Kimbro is the visionary behind our product and he should be the one to give this talk, but I did my best to distill the 10 lessons I’ve gleaned around product dev while riding shotgun in building our our company/product offering. Here are the slides (feel free to share, embed, email, whatever):

We played the “product box” innovation game and had two teams invent and sell a new type of lawn mower in 10min. This is a great exercise to grok the difference between features, advantages & benefits. Here are the product boxes they came up with:
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We had a little friendly “industrial espionage” given the proximity of the teams ;-) but good times. If you’re starting a company I definitely recommend looking for the fasttrac course in your area. It’s inexpensive and “gets you out of the building” and talking with other people who are in the same boat.

Oh and I try to share helpful info and links for entrepreneurs and software startups. If you use Twitter follow me for those tidbits.

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Sep 25

My interview on Daily Hoopla

JumpBox, Speaking No Comments »

My friend Josh just interviewed me for his AZ tech news site. The interview gives some of the backstory of how/why we created JumpBox. Unfortunately it also comes off as attributing way too much credit to me. I have to reiterate here that 99% of the vision and strategy for JumpBox comes from our CEO Kimbro Staken. And 100% of the engineering execution is from our tiny “lil’ engine that could” team. I provide what I can to support these people and insulate them from BS, but the hardest work for the company is done by them.

Anyways, thanks Josh for the interview. We feel like we’ve come along way and at the same time realistically we’re still closer to the starting line than we are to the finish line with miles to go before we sleep.

P.S. Please plug the economy back in- I think somebody kicked the cord.

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