Early on in my first company we hit a nice period of growth and hired a bunch of people. Fast forward 18 months and the business was fine but the people side of things was a mess. There was no cohesive corporate culture and we were suffering mightily because of it. At that point, I went on a reading binge and worked at assimilating as much information as possible on the people side of the business. Finally, we worked through a number of tough changes and came out stronger because of it.

I tell this story not to highlight the importance of corporate culture, but rather to emphasize that entrepreneurs need exposure to many ideas early and often. Yes, it was important for me to experience things first-hand, but I should have been more proactive earlier around gathering ideas and learning from others.

Here are a few ways to seek…

In a simplistic form, I view the first one to two years of a startup as building a fairly basic product and constantly refining it until it uniquely meets the needs of a target group of customers. Once it’s providing real value to 10+ paying customers, then it’s time for phase two: building a customer acquisition machine. It’s hard enough making it from phase one to phase two that many entrepreneurs don’t even realize they need to shift their focus once they’ve found product/market fit to building a repeatable customer acquisition process. Working on the product, talking to existing customers, and refining what’s in place comes much more naturally to most entrepreneurs compared to obsessing over how to acquire substantially more customers every quarter.

Here are five quick steps to go from product / market fit focused to customer acquisition focused:

1. Decide that at least 10+ paying customers represent a good cross…

Achieving product / market fit is one of the most difficult things to do as an entrepreneur and the ultimate goal of phase one of the startup process. Most of this first phase of the process is spent building a minimum respectable product and doing whatever it takes to get the product into the hands of users — users provide the required oxygen for the product to improve. While most startups never make it past this phase due to funding, timing, lack of viable market, poor execution, etc., many do complete phase one and enter phase two where they have to build an efficient customer acquisition machine.

Here are five ways to identify that product / market fit has been achieved:

1. 10+ customers have signed on in a modest period of time (e.g. 3 – 9 months) and they haven’t been friendlies (people you already knew, favors you called…

Entrepreneurs have always had a history of giving back to society and other entrepreneurs. Step into any public library in America and there’s a good chance it was initiated by the entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie (2,509 libraries). Step into the Georgia Aquarium, the largest in the world, and know that it came from a $250 million donation via Bernie Marcus, the cofounder of Home Depot. Step into an entrepreneurship program and there’s a good chance it is from or influenced by the Kauffman Foundation, a multi-billion dollar foundation dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship.

With more societal focus on social entrepreneurship, initiatives like the Giving Pledge where billionaires give away at least half their fortune, and more focus on small businesses as the net new job creators in the country, we’re going to see even more entrepreneurs giving back to help others, especially other entrepreneurs.

Here are some examples…

This morning I emailed my sister a story about Google interns making $20,000 per summer with a photo of them playing in a ball pit. She responded: “#MoneyInABallPit.”

I’d be hard pressed to think of a seriously useful benefit to the hashtag. Hashtags are a cultural phenomenon that have bypassed their Twitter origins. They’re useful for conveying irony on the internet. They’re useful for conveying extreme irony in real life conversations. The hashtag was even deemed “Word of the Year” — it’s gone global. But on Wednesday, Facebook welcomed Twitter’s iconic feature with open arms, apparently not ironically:

“Hashtags are a first step in surfacing relevant and important public conversations. Over time our goal is to build out additional functionality for marketers including trending hashtags and new insights so that you can better understand how hashtags fit into your overall Facebook advertising strategies and drive your business objectives.”

Maybe back…

Rumors that Apple (s AAPL) may launch a full-fledged TV set to finally take on the TV business have been around for years. So why hasn’t Apple launched such a product yet? One reason could be that cable companies don’t want it to.

Bloomberg reported Wednesday that Time Warner Cable has been using its negotiating muscles to keep TV networks from licensing content to Apple and others. An industry insider who declined to be named confirmed this account in a conversation with GigaOM, saying that the company has been aggressively pushing for these kinds of clauses in its recent contract negotiations.

At the center of the dispute are so-called virtual cable operators — companies that operate pay TV services without having any physical infrastructure of their own. Instead of using their own satellites, cables or phone networks to get TV signals to the consumers, virtual operators would simply stream…

Mobile devices keep getting better yet they’re still hobbled by relatively poor battery life. Sure, we’re getting powerful chips that are more efficient on a regular basis — that’s part of the equation. Battery technology is the other part, and we’re still on a slow boat in that regard. Even worse: more devices than ever have integrated batteries that begin holding less charge over time and can’t be easily replaced.

Enter Texas Instruments(s txn), which announced new chipsets for chargers on Thursday to help in the battery department. This solution won’t let your device run longer on a single charge, so don’t get that excited. However, smart chargers that use TI’s new MaxLife technology will recharge batteries up to 30 percent faster and allow the overall lifetime of a battery to last longer. That means a full charge on a one-year old device battery won’t differ that much from…

On the fourth day of the federal government’s ebook pricing trial against Apple (s AAPL), Amazon (s AMZN) and Google (s GOOG) executives offered testimony in hearings that were often fraught and occasionally funny — but still introduced little evidence that was new or surprising to anyone who has been following the trial.

Kindling on the fire

First up on Thursday was VP of Kindle Content Russ Grandinetti, whose testimony continued from the previous day and who was questioned by Apple (s AAPL) attorney Howard Heiss. Heiss sought to demonstrate that Amazon needed participation from all of the Big 6 publishers in order to launch the Kindle Store in 2007,; to make it clear that Amazon was aware of publishers’ dislike of the $9.99 price point long before Apple came on the scene; and to show that Amazon had reasons of its own to switch to agency pricing, beyond the…