Jeff Widman (.com)

I’d done a fair number of interviews lately, mostly about Facebook Analytics and EdgeRank. So it was a refreshing change when Dale from TrekDek asked for an interview about the emotional side of being an entrepreneur (hint: big highs, big lows) and the values that drive me day-to-day. Read the full interview.

Here’s the rather random backstory about how I found myself in Croatia preparing to speak on “business networking.” Eighteen months ago, Ryan Stephens graciously asked me to do a guest post on his blog about my approach to networking. (I don’t pretend that I’m an amazing networker who can solve all your problems–I’m very upfront [...]

I have a virtual assistant…. And we’ve been successfully working together for almost a year. (She keeps my frenetic life as a Facebook marketing specialist tied together.) My explicit instructions for hiring a virtual assistant, including copies of my templates are below. It all works–when my virtual assistant Katie went on vacation for  the entire [...]

Hey all–I officially graduated college in the middle of September. Thx for all the support, encouragement, and friendly ribbing… PS: Out of all the time I’ve spent learning how to negotiate, this was by far the most useful 90 minutes: Stanford Podcast with Joel Peterson.

Several months ago, I attended the GTD Conference, where I heard Marshall Goldsmith describe what he called “Peer Coaching”: Every day Jim asks Marshall the same 24 questions. Every day Marshall asks Jim the same 17 questions. Marshall and Jim each have a spreadsheet of each other’s questions where they record for each other the [...]

Currently, I’m spending much of my time in Mountain View, CA, but finishing my last few classes at WWU in Bellingham, WA. This involves a lot of tap-dancing, several independant study and distance learning courses, and some very flexible professors (Thx guys!) Dr. Stella Hua worked with me to design an independent study examining how [...]

Where can I read more about feedback loops in models? If you heavily rely on analytics, you might miss breakthroughs because you’re so stuck on gradually evolving… how do you balance learning from feedback loops and simply taking a leap with your gut? In the tech world, I see three stereotypes: engineers who are clueless [...]

(My secret sauce for decision-making. So simple… I must be stupid to benefit from this.) The background: For the past three summers, I’ve spent a week in the outdoors with my friends Ryan and Matt (one of those rare types with zero Google presence). We’ve gone backpacking, canoing, overseas, etc. These trips were great fun, [...]

Last Wednesday, I spoke on a SD Forum panel about “College Students & Technology”. Our moderator, Josh Lowensohn, asked about our thoughts on startups, gadgets, dealing with online distractions, how companies should recruit college students, what we did to land killer internships, etc. During the Q & A session, June Bower from Cisco asked, “How [...]

Recently, I met with a VP of a major software company (trust me, you’ve heard of it) and pitched him on creating a position for me as a go-between the corporation and the startup community. In the weeks prior to the meeting, I spent about forty hours researching the company’s strategy, the VP (how do [...]