Archive for the ‘Business’ Category
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019
Here's a braindump of some things I've learned over the years. Caveat lector: my experiences inform this, and they aren't representative of all the possibilities, etc. Ignore this if you want; I've been meaning to write some notes for Kiwis or Aussies who are joining startups for the first time, ...
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Tuesday, May 29th, 2018
There's an open consultation about to end, on the changes MBIE would like to make to NZ's R&D incentives. In particular, they'll phase out the Callaghan Growth Grants and replace them with R&D tax credits. As the FAQ says, There are differences in the definition of eligible expenditure between the ...
Posted in Business, New Zealand, politics, Rant, Technology | No Comments »
Sunday, October 30th, 2016
I was just catching up on Tim Kong's excellent blog, when I read this great quote from Dan Carter:
"One thing we talk about over and over with this current All Blacks side is about never focusing on the outcome. We view the outcome as a function of following our processes. ...
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Tuesday, October 25th, 2016
(Wynyard Group, an NZ tech high-growth company [or, perhaps, not-so-high growth] just entered voluntary administration. On Twitter, a friend was adamant bad luck had nothing to do with it. Instead of a tweetstorm, here's my response in a vintage retro format known as "a blog post")
You can always look back at every ...
Posted in Business, New Zealand, Technology | No Comments »
Saturday, April 30th, 2016
It's bloody hard to build something new into the world. Don't let anyone tell you it's easy: there's a lot of unfunded and unrecognised work that you have to do before you can get to the point where fame and/or fortune arrive. And once you've finished the painful birth of ...
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Sunday, April 10th, 2016
[I posted this on a Slack recently, and would like to give it a longer life than Slack's 10,000 line scrollback. --Nat]
Socially constructed roles like “douche-bro” and “rock star teacher” are generally strongly viewpoint dependent. The rhetoric of continuous improvement is part of self-help, get rich quick, professional development, factory ...
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Monday, January 18th, 2016
Teamwork shares a lot of good practices with parenting. This lesson was no exception .... I realised fairly early on in my time as a parent that I had a tendency to fail, bigtime, by blasting my kids for something they hadn't done. The pattern became evident: I see something, ...
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Saturday, January 9th, 2016
When I was recruiting the fabulous Chris McDowall for a job, he asked me "why do YOU work here?" I replied that I was learning lots. He then said the most important thing anyone has said to me this decade: "what are you learning?"
I goldfished for a few seconds and ...
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Monday, January 4th, 2016
I was asked for comment by Bill Bennet from the NZ Herald, for a piece on Kiwi startups moving to Silicon Valley. He built a nice little article, in which "Torkington says" features heavily. My policy is that if I email journalists, I'll blog my side of the conversation for transparency's sake.
I ...
Posted in Business, New Zealand, Technology | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 20th, 2015
In this internal 1972 DEC memo (PDF) about the PDP-16 re-release, modern tech companies should find plenty of familiar territory:
While the PDP-16 has been marginally successful to date,
some problems have been noted.
1. Since the product, in its present form, is relatively
complex, it is difficult to train salesmen.
2. Since the ...
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