Author: wi11iamm
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Moving Quickly to Next Idea: RFMConnex
To read the Green Pants Chronicles from the beginning, click here. Act 1: Inception “Call Me Back, I’ve Got the Next Idea.” While history will not commemorate these words in the same way that it did with “Mr. Watson, come here…”, it was a seminal moment in our trajectory. We’d just killed the BuzzBox idea, and…
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BuzzBox. Killed by Truck Rolls. No More Playing Start Up.
To read the Green Pants Chronicles from the beginning, click here. Act 1: Inception BuzzBox – Our First Idea The very first idea I played with had nothing to do with Windsor Circle. My thesis, in 2008-2009, was that smartphones were too expensive to gain wide adoption but that social media was taking over the world.…
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Introducing “The Green Pants Chronicles”
To read the Green Pants Chronicles from the beginning, click here. False Bravado and Platitudes The entrepreneurial journey is an exhilarating, terrifying, empowering, destructive and addictive experience. So often, what is written about these journeys falls into one of two categories… Platitudes and False Bravado. The False Bravado is that annoying “we’re killing it” thing that…
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And, that’s a wrap! Off to my next adventure…
What an amazing ride. When Chris Humphres, Brad McGinity, Scot Catlin and I started Windsor Circle in 2011, we had a vision of democratizing data for online retailers. We rocketed out of the gates with a pre-product, pre-revenue round, and scaled to 70+ people over the next several years, with fun team wins such as…
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Top Lesson #1: Product Market Fit
A few weeks ago, Windsor Circle was acquired by OSG. There’s a tremendous amount of validation in this moment. My band of warriors started a journey seven years ago at great risk and peril. No incomes for a year or two. An idea on a napkin, that turned into a team, that turned into a…
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Growth in Digital Users in US
I was doing some research for a client and assembled some data about the prevalence and growth of various forms of digital usage that could be easily quantified. Sharing some basic data here, but I found a couple of items notable. 1) Email usage is the largest, and still growing – This surprised me. I…
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Statistically, Teams Survive Longer Than Individuals
We have a core set of values that we are pretty rabid about. We talk about our values all of the time. They’re painted on the doors. We give people awards in our Team Meetings for being the best at exemplifying the values. It’s a big deal for us. One of the top values is about…
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The 2 Day Board Meeting: Speed Dating, Texas Hold ‘Em, and Green Pants
At Windsor Circle, we define team not by who is on the payroll or inside our four walls, but truly by everyone who is working to build the Center of the Retention Automation Universe. This includes our employees, our service providers (attorneys, accountants, landlords, etc.), interns, and most certainly our investors. We have worked hard…
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How Rockstar Leah Houde (Executive Director, Duke CE) Helps Execs Handle Difficult Conversations
Every quarter, Windsor Circle holds a “Team Day,” where we leave the office for a day and do three things: Volunteer in our community, Learn about “the science of teamwork,” and, Goof off a bit at Bull McCabes, our favorite watering hole. In this last science-of-the-team session, we enlisted the services of Duke Corporate Education, and specifically…
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Windsor Circle’s Compensation Philosophy
We spent some real time thinking about how we would approach compensation as a team now that we’re post-financing. We wanted to maintain the discipline that got us to where we are, but also do a good job of executing on our values around taking care of our most important resource… our people. Here’s where…
The Next 10,000 Hours 