What Would Lisa Suennen Say?
As I write this, I’m on a flight home from Las Vegas. If you know me well, you know I love coming here, which horrifies some, amuses others, and just elicits a wistful longing in the hearts of my closest comrades in arms. I didn’t really fully appreciate my love for Vegas until I started […]
Last week I saw an article announcing eHarmony’s intent to launch a new career-matching service that will “pair hiring managers with candidates based on desired culture, personality and skill-set traits.” Granted, this could go somewhat legally awry if hiring managers are entering criteria suggesting they are looking for a hot personal assistant or a cabana […]
“One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.” –Charles Darwin As you can see from the quote above, I was recently perusing the works of my favorite business advisor, Charles Darwin, after I saw this statistic on Twitter: Wow, that is […]
There was a story in the Washington Post a few weeks back that started with this paragraph: “People, and especially men, hate being alone with their thoughts so much that they’d rather be in pain. In a study published in Science Thursday on the ability of people to let their minds “wander” — that is, for them to sit and do nothing […]
So a bit of a lapse in posts for me as I spent a luxurious few weeks vacationing. It’s amazing how fast that buzz can wear off as the world shoots you out of a cannon and back into your desk chair. I figured I would ease back into the blog with something light-hearted, so […]
One thing the tech software industry is great at is failing fast. This concept of “failing fast” means, at least in part, rapidly bringing the “minimum viable product” to market, even if it’s a little rocky and feature-light, and then fixing it as it gets adopted by iterating with new releases. We see this all […]
This post also appeared June 16, 2014 in PE Hub. I was watching an episode of the sitcom Modern Family on TV the other day and one of the subplots was about one of the kids, Luke, trying to invent the next great kitchen innovation. Among his attempts are a toaster that butters and toasts […]
I always assumed “entrepreneur” was a French concept, considering the etymology of the word, but as it turns out an Irishman coined the term in 1755. Richard Cantillon first introduced the term in his seminal economic work called Essai sur la nature du commerce en general, which was published after his 1734 death. In the […]
I spent the second half of last week at one of my favorite events of the year, the AARP Annual Health Innovation@50+ meeting. The first day of the meeting was a sort of entrepreneur “bootcamp” where there were neither boots nor camping, but an array of executives speaking to entrepreneurs about the kinds of things […]
Well I don’t know why I came here tonight, I got the feeling that something ain’t right, I’m so scared in case I fall off my chair, And I’m wondering how I’ll get down the stairs, Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right, here I am, Stuck in the middle with you. […]
Lisa Suennen is a venture capital investor and the managing partner of Venture Valkyrie, LLC, which publishes the Venture Valkyrie blog and co-produces the Tech Tonics podcast. She is also co-founder of CSweetener, a women's healthcare mentoring organization.