Hell’s Kitchen - Tips for Startup Growing Pains

ast week, Mick and me I spoke at Transaction 2.0 (part of CeBit). Mine was about some tips for surviving mid-stage startup growing pains.

Thanks to everyone that attended the talk in the room, and also via The Chaser, for encouraging me to swear alot and providing great feedback.

Here is the latest deck on slideshare:

Hells Kitchen Notes on Slides.

Here is the uStream recording from The Chaser. Its a bit hard to hear so probably not a great deal of use. Hopefully CeBit will release something better because it looked like everything was filmed professionally.

I will blog each slide in more detail in the weeks to come because I think the message is important.

In the meantime, I have had a few requests for links to the tools I mentioned in the talk. When we formed Pollenizer, we invested immediately in Confluence and Jira from Atlassian. Because we made that decision we have collected all internal IP as we go in the Confluence Wiki and tracked tasks across all projects and (globally distributed) teams using Jira. It was some of the best money we have spent. Everyone has access to the information they need and there is never a question of who owns a certain task. More on this in a later post.

Mick was a total star with his Focus or Fail talk. He juggled AND managed to smash a glass in the audience as well as grabbing our interest with some important lessons he has learned working with startups.

On a final note, it was my great pleasure to meet Jason Calacanis and Tyler Crowley from Mahalo. Frankly Jason’s reputation had preceeded him and (like a true Australian) I had him marked as a bit full of himself. Instead, he came into Sydney like a whirlwind, inspired everyone (I actually think he did meet EVERYONE in the whole city) and left, leaving us whinging a little less and getting down to business as a community of awesome startups ready to take on the world. He encouraged us to just to get on with it!

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