Excited to see my work published by TIME - huge for me.

Any success is going to take a commitment of time, and a solid amount of time at that. No matter where you want your career to go, the only way to get there is to accept that you are going to have to dedicate years of your life to it.

I like to follow one rule. I never start anything that I’m not prepared to commit 5 years of my life to. That’s a long time frame, I know. But it gives me room to plan, to try and to measure what I’ve done.

Thanks Hubspot, for including me in their list of the top 100 quotes from Medium:

“It’s easy to mistake excitement for passion, motivation and ability.”

There are a lot of things that make me catch Ubers over Taxis. Most of the time, they all boil down to the terrible experiences that accompany waiting on a street corner attempting to catch the attention of a cab. Let me give you some examples. These are the last 3 times I tried taking […]

I hate doing almost everything. I mean that, I wake up in the morning and I don’t feel like functioning 6 out of 7 days. The one thing that I’ve always had a deep, healthy passion for is creating content. Blog posts, articles, images, videos - I do it for fun as much as I […]

Ron Miller for TechCrunch, writing about the superfluousness of Windows phone:

The question remains; can Microsoft succeed without a strong Windows mobile position? From the looks of things, they don’t seem to have much choice. Nadella appears to be staking his position in the cloud, which is a perfectly reasonable way to play it, while opening up his company’s tools to iOS and Android in the absence of any meaningful Windows phone adoption.

Windows Phone is a failed experiment. It’s an also-ran. And I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if Microsoft were to partner up with someone else to build a Windows flavored Android device.

Steven Sinofsky writing on Medium:

As many have recognized, when inventions and innovations first appear they are often (always) labeled as “toys” or “incapable” of doing “real work” or providing “real entertainment”. Of course, many new inventions don’t work out the way inventors had hoped, though quite frequently it is just a matter of timing and the coming together of a variety of circumstances. It can be said that being labeled a toy is necessary, but not sufficient, to become the next big thing.

I think the mainstream always struggles to visualise a use for a product, until it’s been clearly established and made safe. And the way to get to that point is through the concept of Play.

My latest post on Medium:

For some people, going scalable is the right path. They’ll be happy. They’ll achieve incredible things. But their path isn’t the only viable path. Mark Suster talks about this in his piece “What Should You Do with Your Crappy Little Services Business?”
There are always going to be entrepreneurs who are better suited to building a web design firm, a clothing label or a consulting business than a software platform. That’s common sense.

This is an important piece, for me. I’ve met many entrepreneurs who fall victim to thinking that their business doesn’t matter, simply because it’s not a scalable platform. It makes me wonder how many incredible businesses have never been founded because of that poisonous idea.

I was recently interviewed by Cynthia Than for Inc.com:

Do you think there are general differences entrepreneurs who aspire to be founders and those who want to be business owners?

JW: I think founder is a title that people want because it has connotations, it has prestige and it has that “cool” factor. We’ve reached a point in entrepreneurship where startups are mainstream now. It’s like a reality TV singing contest. This is an example I use all the time. When you read about the wannabes who go on X Factor or Idol, they’ll always say that their life long dream is to be a singer. They never say their dream is to sing. And this is because what they really want is the success and the lifestyle and the glamour of being a singer. That’s why they’re jumping in front of a camera. If what they really wanted was to sing - they’d be out there every night playing gigs and building an audience and doing what they love.

Really enjoyed chatting about business and startups. Great to see it online!

I’ve learned, over the years, that I have a gift of believing. When I take on a project, or make a firm friend, that’s my default reaction. I start to believe, fully and truthfully. From time to time, this has had it’s downsides. It’s tough to stay strong and keep your head up when you […]

Some days suck. Right? Those days when you wake up and you don’t want to do jack, you don’t want to go to work or hustle or build a business or sit down and hammer away at that novel. Everyone has those days. I have those days. Those what I call Fuck Everything Days. I […]