Damir Perge's Blog: Entrepreneur Insights from the Trenches, page 19

The Psychology of the Commandopreneur Mind

I went to see my daughter to see how she’s doing. I guess it’s something every father does before he goes to any war. In my case, the war is launching a startup in stealth mode. She knew it was going to happen any day because she saw my entrepreneur mind mentally prepare for it. I hadn’t told her the exact day because, when you’re in the stealth mode, the only person that should know the beginning of the war is your internal team. You can’t endanger your family with “you’re on a need to know...

The Dangers of “Product and Idea Creep” in Your Business

I am not talking about feature creep. I'm talking about companies that have more products in their lineup than they even know. Of course, I am exaggerating... only a little. I've seen companies with so many variations of SKU’s; that even long tail[1] business principle don’t work. Most of the SKU’s[2] are not selling. They just sit in the warehouse and collect dust on the inventory shelves.

In other columns, I discuss two other types of creep:feature creep within a specific product, andmarketi...

Startupmentals: Startup Lessons Learned from “Be like Nike and Just Do It”

Procrastination is a huge enemy of any entrepreneur mind. I hate to admit it, but I've been there myself, not only as an entrepreneur but also as a venture capitalist. From a VC perspective, I have at times procrastinated on making the startup investment decision — when I should have simply said “yes" or "no” to the entrepreneur.

Some entrepreneurs love to use the slogan, “Be like Nike, Just Do It”… rah, rah, rah … in order to pump themselves up and stop procrastinating, start getting things d...

The Psychology Behind a Failed Startup Mind

I see it a lot — entrepreneurs don’t like to talk about their startup failures. It becomes even more evident when an entrepreneur pitches me for money.

“Have you ever failed?” I ask entrepreneurs during the investment pitch. There's typically a long silence, followed by a hesitant response.

“Ugh … yeah.”

How each entrepreneur answers my failure question tells me something about the psychology of their entrepreneur mind. I have never met a successful entrepreneur that liked failure. I have never...

Startupmentals: When Making a Sale, Don’t Get Too Personal

I can’t make up this entrepreneur story even if I tried. Some years ago, I was involved in a business sales transaction that was beyond strange. It was a large commodity deal. In order to close this deal, three of us, semi-quasi business partners (for this particular transaction), drove an hour to the meeting. It was a sight to see. All of us were wearing our business suits, driving in a huge Bubba-like truck that one of the partners owned. I even wore my Armani suit, that’s how big of a deal...

The Frugality of the Entrepreneur Mind

My father, Chichi, was a champion of Yugoslavia in weightlifting. Pound for pound, he was the strongest man I've ever met — and he never did any illegal drugs. Because I was a soccer player, I never did any weight lifting in my youth because I believed it would alter my playing style. Despite not being a weightlifter, genetics played a part when it comes to “moving stuff.” For whatever reason, I have the ability to move extremely heavy furniture — even my father, when he was alive, would get...

Entrepreneur Myths: The Perfect Startup or Product Launch

I changed my mind about the market launch of one of the startups we are accelerating. I thought about pushing the launch date slightly because I wanted to launch it perfectly. Despite my experience of being an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I almost fell into the trap of delaying the launch.It happens to every entrepreneur. You focus on launching that perfect launch. I guess we all, deep down in our entrepreneur subconscious mind, are looking for that perfect storm.

The perfect launch co...

Launching Startups and Products at the Speed of Speedy Gonzales, Bugs Bunny and Road Runner

When I was a kid growing up in Yugoslavia, we only had two TV channels. That’s right — only two! Every night, the news would come on at 8:00, and I dreaded that because I knew the 10 minutes of cartoons they showed before the news were over. Of course, the cartoons were from America, which is ironic since Yugoslavia was a communist country back then.

I loved watching Bugs Bunny, Roadrunner and Speedy Gonzales. I love those animated characters because they all have one thing in common: they use...

Startup Prophecy: Re-learning What I Learned Before

Sometimes you have to go back to the white board to see whether what you learned before as an entrepreneur is applicable for today and tomorrow. What you learned before is a combination of education based on experience and theory applied to real situations. Continuous entrepreneur education is critical for any ambitious entrepreneur. I continue to educate myself every day through daily experiences as well as hitting the books —even when my bandwidth for time is limited.

One of the things I hav...

Efficionado: Accelerating Monkey Work

When my niece was younger, I would make her smile by acting like a monkey. I discovered that both of us like monkeys.I would hunch over, jump up and down and grunt loudly. She’d laugh shyly but she definitely loved my monkey antics. She called me "Uncle Monkey." Now that she's elementary school, we’ve kind of outgrown the monkey role-playing. But I am still a monkey when it comes to work related to business

There are business processes entrepreneurs have to do that I consider Monkey Work. I ho...