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Becoming a first-time manager at a startup is hard. Given the intense pace and growth, you are often promoted with limited training and expected to manage people who used to be peers. You are asked to continue to deliver on individual contributor responsibilities – write code, support customers, or sell, while also managing a team. After going through this transition myself, and helping coach dozens of other managers through it, I wanted to put together a curated summary of the best advice I’ve gotten. Let me know what you think: ...

If a demo is going well, your audience will pepper you with questions. This is a great sign of an engaged audience. It gives them the chance to focus on their key topics. Unfortunately, given the open-ended nature, many new demo’ers find answering questions to be particularly challenging. This blog post will give specific advice on how to handle questions. Rule 0: DO NOT CUT THE PROSPECT OFF This is so fundamental it is both rule 0 and written in caps. No one likes to be interrupted. When you interrupt a prospect it comes across as arrogant, or worse, dismissive. Remember, you are talking for most of the demo. The prospect wants to feel heard and understood. ...

“If I had had more time, I would have written a shorter letter" Blaise Pascal 1 As Pascal notes, it’s hard to be concise. This is especially true when demo’ing a complex enterprise application. Unfortunately, our audience has trouble following a complex idea along on a longwinded feature focused demo. This makes it our task, as demo’ers, to break each key point into a short digestible story. I call these vignettes. ...

This post will be the first in a series on effective enterprise technology demos. I will share tips, tricks, and lessons I have learned over 5 years giving demos to everyone from analysts to C-Levels execs. Each post will contain a specific and actionable way to improve your demos immediately. Today, we will talk about how to use the first 2 sentences to capture the audience’s attention. The Problem: Like it or not, these days every person walking into a meeting can easily zone you out (with computer/tablet/phone) to do work they deem more important than listen to you. This is especially tempting when dealing with a vendor. This means you need to prove to them that listening to you is worth their time. ...

Recently I found myself planning a bachelor party. I was aiming to rent a house for 19 friends strewn across the northeastern United States. I wanted to pick a a central location easy for everyone to get to. So, like any normal person (at least one who works in analytics), I wanted to quantitatively determine the most fair location. “In the Middle” Very often, when you want to meet someone who lives elsewhere, we pick a point halfway between. This intuitively makes sense when a couple in New York and another in Washington, DC, decides to meet in Philadelphia. This is tidy enough when you have two groups, but what if you have more? ...

Recently, at a family gathering I made an off-hand comment to my parents that on some flights during the week it seems like 50%+ people are on Wifi doing work. I expressed how important it was to me in particular, given that I work at a cloud-based analytics company for me, to have access to the internet when preparing to meet with customers. And my Mom told me a great story about one of her first jobs. As a programmer in the aircraft industry building flight simulators (my Mom is very cool), she shared an office with 3 other people. Crowded, certainly. If that wasn’t enough, however, they also shared a single computer! Over the course of the day, they tried to be fair about giving each other ~2 hours each. They tried to be flexible when someone was close to a deadline. Remember, these are programmers. ...

I teach a class on Data Mining at Stanford. Students in my class are expected to do a project that does some non-trivial data mining. Many students opted to try their hand at the Netflix Challenge: to design a movie… One of my favorite blog posts ever. A very simple idea: it’s easier to win by creatively combining data than by using ever more sophisticated algorithms. This is especially important today due to two major trends in the analytics world: ...