Sachin Rekhi: Being entrepreneurial product manager

Sachin Rekhi is a serial entrepreneur with product management background.  He founded Connected and Feedera which got acquired by LinkedIn.  He is also a coder and writes about API platform and how to build developer community.

He has been blogging since 2009, and he has shared product management and lessons he learned from his startup experiences through his personal blog.

Here are some blog entries that I found helpful:

• Top 10 Posts on Product Management from the Industry's Best
• What is Product Management?
• Considerations in Designing a Developer Platform
• Lessons Learned from imeem

Chris McCann: StartupDigest and GroupTie

Chris McCann is a serial entrepreneur who started StartupDigest and GroupTie.  He started StartupDigest soon after he packed all his belongings in his car and drove to Palo Alto without a place to stay.  StartupDigest is a free weekly email digest outlining the startup events and resources in hundreds of cities around the world.

He has been running his personal blog since 2009, and here are some blog entries that I found interesting:

• New Beginnings to the StartupDigest Story
• How to get distribution for a new product
• Business Networking
• Be Relentlessly Resourceful

Rob Walling: Lessons Learned by a Solo Entrepreneur

Rob Walling is a serial entrepreneur who advocates launching small startups and staying small.  He has launched several startups and has been sharing his experiences and lessons learned on his blog, Software by Rob.  He has launched several self-funded startups and also acquired technology to re-launch using variety of marketing techniques.

Here are some articles that I found interesting from his blog:

• Passion as a Competitive Advantage
• Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money
• Why Startup Founders Should Stop Reading Business Books
• The Software Product Myth

He also gave an interview outlining the steps that he took to acquire HitTail.com, long tail SEO site:

Martin Zwilling: Startup Professionals

Martin Zwilling is the founder and CEO of Startup Professionals, Inc.  Prior to founding Startup Pro, he was a managing partner at Southwest Software Ventures & Consulting.  He also writes for Forbes, HBR and Huffington Post.  He is an active blogger and has been writing daily articles on his blog Startup Professionals, Inc, helping entrepreneurs sharpen their business plan and find their initial funding.

Here are some blog entries that he wrote in the past that I found interesting:

• You Need to Recognize and Attract Top Talent
• Ten Tips to Kick-Start Your Startup With Twitter
• A Blog Can Be A Startup’s Most Valuable Investment
• Quotes From Entrepreneurs To Dodge Accountability

Jason Cohen: A smart bear

Jason Cohen is a founder of Smart Bear and WP Engine.  He has successfully started multiple startups, and grown them to over million dollars of revenue.  He currently runs WP Engine, Wordpress hosting company.  He has been sharing his startup lessons on his blog, a smart bear, since 2007.

Here are some articles that I found interesting:

• Rich vs. King in the Real World: Why I sold my company
• Enough with the “expert” guilt
• How do you tell a non-technical person that they can’t understand?
• Teeny bit of traction — what next?

Jacques Mattheij: Technology, coding and business

Jacques Mattheij is an entrepreneur and M&A due diligence technology consultant for hire.  He is a founder and owner of ww.com, and loves to tinker with technology.  He has been actively blogging on his blog site since 2008.

Here are some interesting blog articles that he shared to date:

• Stick to What You Know, a Tale of an Investment Gone Wrong
• Does It Scale? Who Cares!
• First Employee or Co-founder?
• The Story Behind ww.com / camarades.com.

Sean Johnson: Intentionally

Sean Johnson is the lead of product development at Digital Intent.  He runs the Chicago Growth Hackers Meetup and wrote for Lifehacker, Technori and other sites.  He offers interesting perspective to entrepreneurship and career development through his own experience of learning how to design at the job.

He has been sharing his thoughts on his blog Sean Johnson Intentionally.  Here are a few blog posts that I found interesting:

• Why you should burn your resume
• Why you should work for free
• Don't tick people off

Danielle Morrill: Refer.ly and Distribution Hacks

Danielle Morrill is a co-founder of Refer.ly, and was CMO of Twilio.  Refer.ly launched May of 2012 out of Y Combinator 2012.  It's an affiliate program for everyone where users can recommend products for cash incentives from companies.

She has been writing her blog since 2007 sharing her perspectives on marketing and startups.  Recently she shared lots of insights from running Refer.ly.  Here are a few sample entries:

• Timeline: Starting Referly Took Me Three Years
• Don’t Waste a Single Moment
• The Best Advice My Dad Ever Gave Me (for Demo Day) - from Distribution Hacks
• Who Owns the Website, and Why - from Distribution Hacks

She also runs Distribution Hacks where she shares her marketing insights.

Jordan Cooper: Startups, VC, Hyperpublic

Jordan Cooper is a VC and an entrepreneur who founded Hyperpublic.  He has been sharing his experience of launching and running Hyperpublic on his blog: jordancooper.wordpress.com.

Here are blog entries that I found interesting:

• 35 Gut Checks When Founding Your First Company
• What Apple Has In Common With Prep School Gangsters
• The 2 States In Which A Blogger Doesn’t Suck
• Seed Stage Valuation Guide

For those who might wonder about what Hyperpublic did (it got acquired by Groupon Feb 2012), here is the TechCrunch interview with Cooper.  In short, it was an open localized database of place, people and things.

Steve Sammartino: Startup Blog

Steve Sammartino is a founder of rentoid.com and a long time blogger of Start Up Blog.  He has been sharing his lessons learned from running his own startup through his blog since 2006.

Here are a few interesting blog entries that I found:

• The big job
• Negotiation and motivation
• The Big Shift – a business manifesto
• Would you like some pie?

Daniel Tenner: Startup is not as scary as jumping off a plane

Daniel Tenner is a cofounder of GrantTree.  Before he started GrantTree, he had two other failed startup experience and worked at Accenture.

He keeps a blog site swombat.com where he shares his startup experience and perspective on running a startup.  Here are some sample articles that he wrote:

• Sales comes out of who you genuinely are
• How to get better at writing
• Side projects
• Doing more by doing less

He had also shared his learnings with other entrepreneurs.  Recently he gave a talk at Startup Academy at Belgrade about his take on launching a startup.

Aaron Swartz: Raw thoughts

I'm sure most of you have heard of Aaron Swartz.  I have known his existence from news, but only found out about his writing after his untimely passing.  After going through random samples of his work, I can now see how much we as society have lost by not having him around any more.

He started blogging as early as 2004.  (I read that he started publishing earlier from Wikipedia, but couldn't find the links from his website.)  His writings are found from his website.

He wrote about many topics covering startup, productivity, education and information sharing.  Here are a few samples that I found interesting:

• Take the Easy Way Out
• Release Late, Release Rarely
• HOWTO: Be more productive
• Getting it Wrong

Noah Kagan: Start with the market

Noah Kagan is a marketer/entrepreneur who had learned the art of marketing by learning from his mistakes.  His career included a stint at Intel, Facebook, Mint, KickFlip and AppSumo.  The last two companies were founded by Kagan.

Gabriel Weinberg: Startup & Stuff...

Gabriel Weinberg is the guy behind the DuckDuckGo search engine.  He has been chipping away at building traction for 4 years.  I was surprised to hear that he had been working pretty much alone at building DuckDuckGo for the first three years.

He runs his personal blog discussing his lessons learned from bootstrapping his search engine startup.  He is also active in helping other startups get started.

Aatish Bhatia: Empirical Zeal

Aatish Bhatia is a graduate student at Rutgers University.  He also maintains a science blog called Empirical Zeal.  I stumbled upon his blog last week, and found his writing style to be very enjoyable to read.  He has a way of telling story with related scientific background.

It turns out that I was not alone finding his blog very valuable.  He received many accolades from science writers and bloggers since he uploaded his first article back in April 2011.

I highly recommend his blog entries.  They are fun to read because it starts from a common scenario and drills into scientific reasoning.

• What does randomness look like?
• Pancakes, served with a side of science
• What it feels like for a sperm, or how to get around when you are really, really small

Imagine teaching Physics and Chemistry to children in this way.  First telling them about the problem, and working out solutions with them collaboratively.  It would not only make the class material more interesting, but foster their creative thinking to come up with their own solutions.

I applaud Bhatia for writing these pieces to make the science more approachable for many.  I certainly wished that I had learned from someone like him when I was in school.

Peter Bregman: How to manage yourself

Peter Bregman is a leadership consultant who writes about how to manage oneself.  He has written a couple of books on business leadership, and speaks to executives in coaching how to be more productive.

Here are some interesting blog posts from his website:

• Consider Not Setting Goals in 2013
• Do You Really Need to Say Thank You?
• Want to Keep Your Job? Stop Trying to Fit In

He also appeared on TEDxMillRiver event discussing business leadership through admitting "I don't know."

Derek Sivers: Don't be afraid of failing (and learning)

Derek Sivers sold his CD Baby business in 2009 and set up a trust fund with his $22 million cash profit to return everything back to music education when he dies.  He has been sharing his insights that he learned over the years while running CD Baby amid competition from Amazon and other startups.  His 8-piece talk on YouTube titled Uncommon Sense covers the highlights of his lessons including some practical tips to humanize the business (see the part 8 of 8).

I like Sivers' advice because they are very practical.  He connects his earlier attempt at launching his music career with running CD Baby experience to discuss some important lessons that we can all learn from:

Kenneth Reitz: APIs for human

Kenneth Reitz is the author of open source project called Requests: HTTP for Humans in Python.  He has been advocating about writing minimalistic README-driven API built for human.

His main thesis is that all software projects, even if internal, should be treated as open source projects with rich documentation and clear separation from the outside layers.  In order to make every module separate, each implementation should start with clear definition of what problem it is solving.  It also forces programmers to think about how it should interface with customers, including developers in case of API.  Interfaces should be minimal, lack of clutters hiding unnecessary details.  Often these details are the results of closely modeling the implementation layers instead of focusing on usability of interface.

One new blogger each week

One thing that I notice each day is that there are many interesting bloggers out there.  There are some famous ones, such as Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood, Daring Fireball by John Gruber, Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky, and AVC.com by Fred Wilson to name a few.  But there are many other bloggers who are sharing their perspectives on line.

• http://mattmaroon.com/ by Matt Maroon
• http://www.richardprice.io/ by Richard Price
• http://joel.is by Joel Gascoigne
• http://mkronline.com/ by Michael Robinson
• http://patrickbgibson.tumblr.com/ by Patrick Gibson
• https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1 by Patrick McKenzie

These are just a few bloggers that I found interesting in the last couple of weeks.  I know I missed a whole bunch, and I'm thinking that there must be many more who are starting out their own blogs.

So it got me thinking.  Why not share these interesting bloggers as I find them from the web?

More than anything, I want to be able to keep track of these interesting bloggers for my own benefit.  I'm hoping that others may be able to consult my list to find new and interesting bloggers to follow.

If you find any interesting blogger, please let me know as well.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.