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Uncommon (i.e. Very Valuable) Startup Advice From Dharmesh Shah

Dharmesh Shah is one of those names that keeps coming up for me. In the startup/entrepeneurship books I read, in the blogs I follow, on Twitter...and his quotes are usually very smart and to the point. Foolishly, I never bothered investigating more about Dharmesh until two days ago, when he popped up again, this time by leaving a comment on my very own blog!

I have also been following @OnStartups on Twitter for months but somehow never made the connection in my head.

So I headed to OnStartups.com and found Dharmesh's talk from The Business of Software conference:

Insights from and around MIT - Dharmesh Shah

Although it's a bit all over the place (apparently he had the wrong deck), I really liked the talk, mostly because there's more than a few little nuggets that I had never heard before, or at least never heard expressed as clearly before, like "partnerships when you're first starting up? don't do them", which confirmed a hunch I had in my gut.

Highly recommended. I am going to be following Dharmesh's advice more closely from now on. You should too.

P.S.Oh, great, now I see that Dharmesh is the developer behind the excellent Twitter Grader as well...see what I mean? The guy's everywhere! 🙂 Reminds me of a great Steve Martin quote: "Be so good they can't ignore you" (minute 52, also a great video to watch).

Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

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Comments (3)

  1. Thanks for posting this. It reaffirms my own beliefs in this business!

    Michael Bourque
  2. Thanks for the kind words.

    That presentation was indeed scattered. I’m generally a disorganized guy, but this one was more disorganized than usual. The fact that I had a last second versioning problem on the PowerPoint deck didn’t help. Oh well. Life goes on.

    I have since worked on improving my presentation skills. It’s an ongoing process. 🙂

    Love what you’re doing with Balsamiq. It’s what I would do, if I had your kind of talent.

  3. Thanks a lot for sharing this! Truly a lot of good advice.