Author Archives: flybrand1976

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About flybrand1976

Find me on twitter @flybrand.

Biology, populations and VC

The meadow voles we found each morning in our traps were tiny, hardy animals who endured the weighing and tagging before being re-released. There were thousands of them in the fields of Blandy Farm or Mountain Lake, the field research … Continue reading →

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6 Ways to Get the Most out of Day 2 – #ISUM16

It’s Day 2 of the Internet Summit in Raleigh, NC.  Here are six ways to get the most out of it, based on what was shared on Day 1. Enjoy.  You’re out of the office.  Like Al Madrigal said – … Continue reading →

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The Best SaaS Product I Ever Saw was built by a Towtruck Company in 2006

In 2002, after joining a former customer in the electronics industry which had raised $30 million, we went through a CRM evaluation.  The VP of Sales and VP of Engineering were at odds over the rate at which we were … Continue reading →

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IoT Review: Yale Z-Wave Home Lock

We recently purchased a Yale Z-Wave touchpad home lock that integrates with our home security system.  The online features through our security provider are fantastic.  We can add specific passwords for individuals, have them expire over time, set access hours … Continue reading →

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Nice Pants: Tactical Office Wear

Comfort is difficult to quantify.  We tend to use air perm as our primary metric when working with water barrier materials.  There are many high-end pants now on the market from non-traditional vendors with unique angles on comfort. 1a& 1b: … Continue reading →

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Under Bidding a Bridge to Nowhere

If a customer isn’t 100% certain about the value of a product, then they’ll want to minimize their committed costs.  From an ROI standpoint, their R (the return) is uncertain and has risk.  To maximize their ROI, they will want … Continue reading →

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Scaling in Europe: An easy (8 year) plan

Disclaimer:  We sell industrial equipment, not software.  Also, we were spun out of a Czech university, so it wasn’t a ‘start-from-nothing’ type startup. We scaled a startup out of Europe, specifically – out of the Czech Republic.  Our market is … Continue reading →

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Growth by Document

The current business has experienced pleasant success despite a challenging market.  We grew our ASP from $40,000 by nearly 20x, increased our industrial installation base by similar numbers and have figured out how to grow in a long sales cycle market. … Continue reading →

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Recruiting and HR: Facets of a Job

We’ve had good success in recruiting and building a talented team.  As part of that our job descriptions became much clearer in some ways, and less clear in others.  We’ve also observed that our best candidates and most successful hires … Continue reading →

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Believe the Team that is Doing It

Better batteries will definitely impact the automotive market, but there are a wide range of opinions as to how.  The US Department of Energy estimated that nearly 1.2 million such vehicles were part of the American automotive fleet as of … Continue reading →

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