Hoping a great idea will spring into your head, like the proverbial light bulb turning on, is like hoping to win the lottery. Sure, it could happen, but it likely will not. Why leave innovation to fate when you can force it?
Through the ScOp Playbook, we’ve refined our strategy for identifying, building, and investing in successful companies. For us, business success hinges on creating value by solving problems, increasing productivity, and assessing how every decision we make either creates or destroys value. This principle guides both our professional and personal decisions.
I too often see marketing plans “focused” on everything: podcasts, site redesign, name change, conferences, awards, etc. When you focus on everything, you are clueless; you will fail at everything and spend all your money. FOCUS. Get one thing working, then move on to the next high-conviction item.
Below is a very brief overview of the three pillars of marketing.
I’m often asked for career advice. People think linearly: I get my degree, work for two years, return and get my MBA, etc. I like to challenge people to think non-linearly if they want to be massively successful. Here are the four career tips I give people:
Guava, one of our investments, is a free app aggregating ALL your healthcare data in one place. They pull data from your consumer, commercial devices, and over 50,000 healthcare providers (physicians, hospitals, blood labs, etc.). You can have a comprehensive view of all of your health data. They added a cool feature called "Insights" that looks for correlations between factors, like how the number of steps impacts sleep.
Jason and I go back to the early days of the Internet. Back in 1996, Jason started “The Silicon Alley Reporter” while we were building DoubleClick. We finally got to catch up on Jason’s “This Week in Startups” podcast. Enjoy.
