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Articles

  • The Elephant in the room: The myth of exponential hypergrowth
  • The practical application of “Rocks, Pebbles, Sand”
  • Fixing the ROI rubric
  • Binstack: Making a maximal, multi-dimensional decision
  • The “Talk” vs “Walk” framework
  • The Iterative-Hypothesis customer development method
  • Extreme questions to generate better ideas
  • The Impossible “Great Product Manager”
  • Finding Fulfillment

Blog

  • More posts and long-form are over here

    January 8, 2023

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    Jason

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    Uncategorized

    In 2022 I started writing some longer articles as well as new blog posts. Because I wanted a new format, with more fine-tuning, special control over image processing, and a print-specific PDF, I created a new website: https://longform.asmartbear.com/ Please join me there!

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  • Who’s lying?

    February 26, 2022

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    Jason

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    Uncategorized

    Pilots use multiple dials, employing different sources of energy, to report identical data, because they understand that in a dashboard full of information, something is always lying to you. The lesson is useful for data and metrics at our companies.

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  • What’s The Important Thing, that is powerful enough to override all your deficiencies?

    November 4, 2019

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    Jason

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    Uncategorized

    Do you feel the crushing weight of disadvantages facing every new company? No brand, no features, no customers, no money, no distribution, no search engine rankings, no tuned advertising, no incredible executive team, no NPS, no strategy. How do the successful startups rise above all that? Do they solve all those problems at once, or at least quickly? No. Here’s what to do instead.

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  • Capturing Luck with “or” instead of “and”

    October 8, 2019

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    Jason

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    Essays

    There’s always a lot of luck in startups, but there’s ways to better capture upside, and better mitigate downside.

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  • Kung Fu

    February 26, 2019

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    Jason

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    How-To

    A summary of nearly everything I think about building companies.

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