From the recent BusinessWeek article, I found the ‘lessons learned’ snippets at the end of each finalist very insightful:
- BumpTop: “The key thing is, stay as lean as possible,” says Chief Executive Agarawala. “We don’t have fancy espresso machines or offer massage in the office. But we do have a team that’s motivated. Every full-time employee should have a meaningful stake in the company.”
- Aster Data: “A lot of our customers buy Aster because we can add more business value to the bottom line,” says Argyros. “That’s a message that works inside and outside a recession.”
- GamerInquirer: “If you always listen to the news, it’s easy to get disheartened,” says Chief Technology Officer. “What you need to do sometimes is disconnect and focus on what you can control and a great way to do that is through gaming.”
- Cloudera: “In a down economy, less-than-stellar ideas get filtered out,” founder Bisciglia says. “We were really lucky—we cleared our funding right before the economy really turned down. So we’re much more focused on building things people need than on guessing.”
- SEOmoz.com: “The buck stops here,” says Fishkin, adding that he took a substantial salary cut at the
