A word battle may be increasing your product fail rate “I’m not sure if we’ve fully described the pain points for the patient customer, let’s take another crack at that one,” said the product manager. She was trained as a

I was angry. It was 3:00 in the morning, and there was yet another springtime alleyway party in the Airbnb hotel behind my building. I live in the West Village of New York, which is home to a number of these buildings.

Let me describe how the Airbnb hotel works.

The Airbnb Hotel: An absent landlord owns a large building with multiple small units in a hard-to-reach location.

You know you want to reduce your risk, find the optimal path for your business, and validate that you’re on the right path. Are you going to let a few internal meetings get in your way?

I tend to speak to the converted – the innovation groups and startups that know they want to generate stronger business model options through direct customer discovery and lean experiments. But the biggest struggle and fight revolves around the calendar.

Last week it was one of those rare perfect sunny days in New York City, and I found myself looking up at the sky as I crossed West 4th Street. I was soon to be punished for my reverie. While enjoying the sun, my glasses had slipped out of my pocket and onto the middle of the street, but I hadn’t noticed this yet.

It would seem that young founders no longer dream of ringing the NASDAQ bell.

The initial public offering (IPO) – the first sale of stock by a company to the general investing public – used to be the goal post for entrepreneurs. The story went like this: start a company, seek investment from angels and then venture investors, achieve outstanding growth, and launch an initial public offering. The NASDAQ bell ringing day is celebrated like a ritual on Wall Street.

We know that unconscious bias happens in all of us. We categorize, we find patterns, and we like to group people. We decide who is in our “in group” – and then we favor our group. This ability to tell who is a friend, and who is a foe, helped early humans survive.

We like to think we are all reasonable open-minded humans who do not pre-judge other others, but much of bias happens hidden away from our conscious decisions. We all have bias. Our unconscious mind is wrong, often, especially on matters that truly would benefit from thinking rationally.

Startups have an incredibly high rate of failure. Over 75{4b0c188ae8604bf014d8bc27c7c65bbf455b55139b6ec077c9ec57d60479b1a7} fail to return capital to their investors, and more than 90{4b0c188ae8604bf014d8bc27c7c65bbf455b55139b6ec077c9ec57d60479b1a7} fail to meet their projections, according to an HBR professor Shikar Ghosh’s analysis of 2000+ companies.

Have you had an eye exam at Warby Parker? If you’re in health tech, or just healthcare, and you wear glasses, I recommend you make your way to a Warby Retail location soon just for the experience. Go to the website – you can make an appointment Apple-Genius-bar-style. (Sorry Bay Area folks – their first eye exam locations are East Coast and Midwest).

Why aren’t companies amping up their innovation investments in 2016?

This past week, I spent time with a number of CFOs of American-based companies on the topic of innovation – and the overall mood was “we’re holding steady on spend and are cautious about growth.”

When you go to build your business case for bigger innovation budgets, it’s helpful to know the objections, in order:

Alphabet and Wall Street’s appetite for innovation

The secret about corporate jobs in innovation is that they are hard to hang on to.

Which one have you been:

a/ The Innovation Pod Leader

Are you in charge of an experimental innovation structure? The incubator that serves as the pet project of a senior exec? Do you have an office outpost in Silicon Valley, where you give tours to senior execs from headquarters?

Lean Startup is great for finding scale opportunities, quickly, You make assumptions, discover your customer needs, run some tests, and you can quickly get feedback that you’re either on the right track, or need to start again.

Yet one thing that tends to stop founders from even asking the right questions in the first place is the reason why they are starting a business.

Look away for one moment, while everyone is reporting from CES and predicting great technology advances for the internet-of-things-in-my-coffee, blockchain-based-bake-sales, and drone-powered-dog-walking.

I’d like to celebrate my personal bank for making huge advances yesterday.

Citibank, I’ve been a customer for over 20 years, since my first big girl paycheck. You are my local bank. My community bank. In an email to me yesterday, you announced a huge technology achievement.