The Joeism Blog

On Wednesday I met with Chris Heivly to discuss his new venture Triangle Startup Factory (TSF). TSF is an interesting idea. It brings a new seed investing / incubation model to the Triangle –model that is becoming popular other high tech hubs. TechStars and Ycombinator are two of the most notable examples. I like TSF [...]

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Communicating strategy is hard. As the company grows and there are more moving pieces, it becomes difficult to keep everyone on the same page. We’re over 50 people now and with this size, we have to use a good framework to describe how we look at our company, our goals, and our strategy.
We base our [...]

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Ximena now has a store on Etsy. Here’s how it came about…
Ximena is my 7-year old daughter and was born at about the same time that Bronto was founded. In fact, in many ways, her life parallels Bronto’s history. When my wife Karalyn and I became pregnant with her,  I significantly stepped out my efforts [...]

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Hits not Home Runs …. that’s a common phrase spoken around the halls of Bronto. It speaks to our focus on day-to-day execution versus sky-in-pie schemes to serve our customers and grow the company. Plus it’s catchy.
I was recently interviewed by Alice Bumgarner about this principle and how it applies to innovation. The interview was [...]

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Wednesday night I spent judging the semi-finals of the Carolina Challenge. The Carolina Challenge is a startup competition hosted by the Kenan-Flagler Business School and pulls teams from the entire UNC community.
The startups are broken into two groups — commercial and social. I judged three teams from the social side — startups with [...]

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This week has been dominated with pricing and packaging. We are offering some exciting new pricing and edition offerings to our customers in February and I (along with others) have been hard at work nailing down the final details. It should be well worth it. More details to follow in the next few weeks.
The product [...]

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