Time you could be spending sewing face masks, baking sourdough, looting stores or waiting for Q’s next cryptic instruction — Let’s consider whether adding another connection to another stranger is actually going to help you achieve anything, or whether the value of your time is actually all going to Microsoft (which owns LinkedIn). How many contacts can you really stay up-to-date with? LinkedIn says I’m connected to 7,881 people. If they all just post an update once a month…

Yes, there’s just four. No, they’re not easy to achieve but here they are. — I spend most of my consulting days with founders and teams ranging from idea stage to minimum viable product (MVP) to early commercialisation, so I get asked one question a lot, “What will angel or venture capital investors want to see from us before we’re good candidates for investment?” The long answer is: every investor is different

A common question from Aussie tech startup founders is whether they should raise their investment with a convertible note, priced equity, or a SAFE note. The short answer is that you can raise investment with a SAFE note or convertible note in Australia, but you may find it harder to raise your round. Here’s the longer answer (nothing that this advice pertains to Australian tech start- ups in 2020, that the future may be different…

How Oxfam Trailwalker 2023 works, why it’s hard, and how so many good people have been making it easier for us. — All week my nerves have been bubbling up inside me because my Facebook feed keeps serving me up photos reminding me of moments from the eight previous times going back to 2004 that I’ve attempted to complete 100km of rugged bush track non-stop, in the Oxfam Trailwalker Sydney. All week…

When I was a wardsman at Westmead Hospital (about your age) I worked a lot on neurology wards and ICU because my job was mostly to help lift and turn patients so they didn’t get bed sores, and people in a coma can’t do it themselves, obviously. I very clearly…

It’s easy to get these basic things wrong and easy to get them right, so let’s get them right! — Videos are sometimes an investor deterrent Unless you’re a video startup or there’s something visual about your customer experience that is essential to understand, don’t send investors videos instead of decks — they are harder to navigate than a PDF and almost never as brief as an investor would like them to be.

In the unlikely event you’ve got time to listen to something while you’re working in a startup, my long-time collaborator Megan Flamer and I recently began co-hosting a new founder-advice radio show called “The Advisory Board”, where we offer advice and answer questions written or sent to us as voicemails…

A story about startup storytelling, and where my story began — Almost as soon as I could talk, I wanted to learn how to be a great storyteller. I would waddle in a cloth nappy around my family’s humble fibro house telling lengthy and grandiose stories about my three great loves — my teddy bear, my trucks, and spaceships — until…

Can we pause for a moment on developing more AI learning models that can write blog post, SEO and social post copy and focus on LMs that can help a user with a technical support question? — In the past few days I’ve used a few SAAS platforms that have thrown up a cryptic error message and left me blocked from moving forward with my task. There is never a layperson’s explanation of what the error message means, why it has happened, or what to do next.