After my visit to Stuttgart, I went to Berlin to speak for Russell Reynolds. Berlin is a very interesting city with many places to visit.

These are pictures from the Porsche factory in Stuttgart. I even got a ride in a 918!

These are my pictures from the Mercedes-AMG facility. This is where the AMG GT is made.

In the real world, you don’t have infinite resources; you don’t have a perfect product; and you don’t sell to a growing market without competition. You’re also not omnipotent, so you cannot enforce what people think your brand represents. Under these assumptions, most companies need all the help they can get with branding.

This is my advice to help you.

In their book, Absolute Value: What Really Influences Customers In The Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information, Emanuel Rosen and Itamar Simonson explain a new approach to planting seeds to build awareness for a new product or service. Their idea is that the gradual adoption, trickle-down approach that started when Moses went to see God is less applicable today because online information is getting fast, free, and perfect.

I’ve lived in California for forty years, and I have never visited Yosemite until last week. Wow, I was missing so much. The epic nature of the park is mind boggling. Here are pictures from my visit.

Don’t be a fool like me: visit Yosemite as soon as you can!

(Photographed with a Sony A7 II, courtesy of my friends at Sony.)

My time-tested, battle-hardened best tips to help you create the best presentations possible. If you feel the need to be creative, do it in your product design, not your pitch.

The art of board management is a skill that you need to master because it can mean your survival and at least greater leeway in managing your startup. The first issue is deciding when you need a board.

If you take outside investment, then you will have to create a board because your investors will want a say in how you manage the company. Even if they don’t, you should create a board when you accept other people’s money in order to establish high fiduciary standards.

Several times a year a group of executives from startups do a six-minute demo of their products to an audience of venture capitalists, analysts, and journalists. This name of the event is, logically, DEMO.

It’s a great occasion—especially if you understand the dance that’s going on: Entrepreneurs acting as if they don’t need venture capital, and venture capitalists acting as if they don’t need entrepreneurs. (This is like acting prudish in a brothel.)