8 Core Beliefs of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs. Execution Machine: Doron Kempel's Six Keys To Getting Stuff Done. I Banned All Internal E-Mails at My Company for a Week. Assistants for Everyone - Fancy Hands. As a member of Fancy Hands, you're always supported by a team of assistants, but with our Personal Touch feature, you can give the whole team one name. You can set up a custom email address so it appears you're always working with one assistant. This allows you to say in an email, for example, "I've cc'ed my assistant, George, who will schedule this meeting for us. " This is less confusing for everyone instead of you saying, "I've cc'ed my awesome team of assistants at Fancy Hands. " Once you set the Personal Touch feature up, all of our assistants will use that specific email address and name whenever reaching out to third parties on your behalf.
Carl Jung: Face to Face [FULL INTERVIEW] An Anatomy of Inspiration circa 1942. By Maria Popova “The true novelist, poet, musician, or artist is really a discoverer.” Such is the labyrinth of literature: Some time ago, Dancing About Architecture: A Little Book of Creativity led me to the 1939 gem A Technique for Producing Ideas, through which I discovered one of the best things I’ve ever read, The Art of Scientific Investigation, which has in turned led me to An Anatomy of Inspiration (public library). Written by music historian Rosamund E. M. Harding (1899-1982) in 1942, this slim but potent volume sets out to reverse-engineer the mechanisms of creativity through the direct experiences of famous creators across art, science, and literature. From Tchaikovsky’s letters to Jane Austen’s diaries to Mark Twain’s daily routine as relayed by his daughter, Harding teases out the common threads of creation and weaves them together into a framework for optimizing creativity, stressing its combinatorial nature and its reliance on eclectic knowledge.
Donating = Loving. Smart Wall Paint Ireland | Whiteboard Paint Ireland| Dry Erase Paint Ireland | Turns any surface into a whiteboard | Clear Erase Paint | Whiteboard Accessories | Dry erase paint | Blackboard paint | Dry Eraze paint |e into a whiteboard | Clear Erase Paint. Simian Mobile Disco - A Species Out Of Control. Questions you and your co-founder need to have answered before you start (or ASAP) 7 Things I Learned from Failing. Like any juicy breakup from our adolescence, entrepreneurs also crawl their way through similar stages of grief when faced with startup failure. It’s been four months since we discontinued work on Bidzuku and until now, I was unable to string together my thoughts into a coherent and helpful message despite my best efforts.
Time has since passed and grief has turned into that burning desire to do something worthwhile again. So, in an attempt to thwart other very eager entrepreneurs from making the same mistakes I did, here are 7 things I learned from my most recent of tragic startup failures. 1. Shut up about equity and build something. Passing equity around before you’ve done anything is like budgeting your lottery winnings before you’ve even bought the ticket – at this point it’s nothing more than unicorns and rainbows as my developer would say. 21.8% of an idea is 100% of nothing. 2. 3. 4.
I always hated reading. 5. 6. Nearly two years passed by the time we threw in the towel. 7. How to Choose Your Startup Idea. Index Ventures Blog – Secrets to Success in a Complex Enterprise Market. 90 Things I've Learned From Founding 4 Technology Companies. On October 27, 2010 I wrote a blog post about the “57 Things I Learned Founding 3 Tech Companies.” It has been awesome, flattering, and humbling to see that post went viral and has been seen by so many thousands of people — mainly aspiring entrepreneurs — and has been translated into many languages.
This past week while I was in Tokyo for meetings with potential partners for Fab, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion on startups. The discussion quickly turned to those 57 things. Amazing. Thousands of miles away and two years later, people still want to talk about those 57 things! So, here goes. 90 Things I’ve Learned Founding 4 Tech Companies: Four traits of successful non-technical solo founders via Sandi MacPherson - QUIBB. This is the story of three solo founders who have either achieved millions in revenue or received millions in investment. I was lucky to be able to chat with all three of them as I work on Quibb - a new product I'm working on to reinvent professional news, starting with the tech & startup vertical. How did they get there? How do non-technical solo founders create successful startups? Alexander Mimran of Penzu (and now Minbox), Deena Varshavskaya of Wanelo, and Noah Kagan of Appsumo are all non-technical solo founders that have done it.
Based on their experiences, 4 common traits stand out: Technically literateProduct orientedHave cashAre startup/tech connected More details, based on their experiences… Technically literateAs Deena knows from her experience creating Wanelo, "you need to be really comfortable discussing technology". It's imperative for anyone running a tech company to know the basics of coding. Product orientedNon-technical solo founders need to be extremely product focused. How I’m Making Five-Figures A Month Off Bootstrapped Products | Planscope Blog. For most startups, the natural course is to raise money. After all, investment gives a necessary runway of capital that will allow you (and your team) to survive as you develop and attempt to sell your product. For the last few months, I’ve rejected a few investors in favor of raising money the old fashioned way: by selling stuff that people will buy. I want to show you how can, quite literally, invest in your own products and fund the development of slow growth products (like SaaS) while remaining 100% accountable to your customers and by not getting in bed with an investor.
Building Planscope While Consulting Full-time Building a product on the side is tough. There’s a very valid reason that most founders I know raise money: it allows you to focus completely on your product and still pay your bills. After I launched Planscope (to an audience of 300+ eager people – mailing lists work!) Entering An “Over-satured Market” But still, project management. Here’s why: Cultivating Your Customers. Compassion meditation may boost neural basis of empathy, study finds. (Medical Xpress)—A compassion-based meditation program can significantly improve a person's ability to read the facial expressions of others, finds a study published by Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
This boost in empathic accuracy was detected through both behavioral testing of the study participants and through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their brain activity. "It's an intriguing result, suggesting that a behavioral intervention could enhance a key aspect of empathy," says lead author Jennifer Mascaro, a post-doctoral fellow in anthropology at Emory University. "Previous research has shown that both children and adults who are better at reading the emotional expressions of others have better relationships. " The meditation protocol, known as Cognitively-Based Compassion Training, or CBCT, was developed at Emory by study co-author Lobsang Tenzin Negi, director of the Emory-Tibet Partnership.
Ship: Risks You Need to Consider (Infographic) While entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes, one commonality binds them all together: the willingness to take a risk. This Dun & Bradstreet Credibility infographic (below) encapsulates many of the struggles and fears that small business owners have to overcome, including the ultimate risk of closure or bankruptcy. If you hear that Mark Zuckerberg is 28 and think that your opportunity to strike out has passed you by already, think again: Most company founders are middle aged, according to the infographic.
Being an entrepreneur is less about fitting into the Silicon Valley mold than it is about having courage, perseverance and ambition. Catherine Clifford is a senior writer at Entrepreneur.com. The Product is the Byproduct. 10 team building actions that are louder than words - National Startup Business. Success in a startup is not possible as a “one-man show.”
An entrepreneur has to engage with team members, partners, investors, vendors, and customers. In my experience, the joy of positive engagement is sometimes the only pay you get in an early startup. Amazingly, many successful startups are built on this basis alone, with almost no money. I will talk here primarily about building the internal team of a startup, but the same principles apply outside to your “extended team” and customers. I like the ten practical and transformative steps outlined by Bob Kelleher, in his book “Louder Than Words,” from his many years of experience in corporate environments. These are easily adaptable to the startup environment: Link high engagement to high performance. Always remember that your actions speak louder than your words or any written policies. Riding the Consumerization Wave.
October 7, 2012 | Leave a Comment Rather than resist it, organizations should embrace Consumerization to unlock its business potential. This requires a strategic approach, flexible policies and appropriate security and management tools. The Consumerization of IT is the single most influential technology trend of this decade. Companies are already well aware of it, as they wrestle with the growing influx and influence of smartphones, tablets, Facebook, Twitter and on and on.
While this new BYOD growth does bring risks, too many companies make the mistake of trying to resist the influx of consumer IT. One: Have a plan. Two: Say yes – but not to everything for everyone. Three: Put the right infrastructure in place. Companies that are questioning whether or not to allow workers to bring personal devices into the workplace should just stop asking: It’s clear that you can get a competitive edge when you put the right precautions in place. RSA Conference Europe 2012 Mobile 2.0 Conference. Strategy or Execution: Which Is More Important? This article was written with Evan Hirsh and Kasturi Rangan. I once heard a business leader say, “Strategy is results.” He meant that strategy doesn’t matter as long as you are producing results. Many other business leaders feel the same way. Often, this is because they associate strategy with analysis and execution with getting things done, and they attribute more value to doing than to analyzing.
On its surface, this view that strategy is less important than execution is hard to refute. This article is featured in the strategy+business compendium “The Executive Guide to Strategy,” designed exclusively for smartphones and tablets. To download, select your device: But any seasoned strategist knows that strategy is not just sloganeering. Most everyone would agree that you cannot achieve good results without having good execution; similarly, most would agree that having a good strategy alone is no surefire formula for success. The airlines industry provides another example. Regulatory hacks. A common way to think of business regulations is by analogy to sports: the rules are specified up front, and the players follow the rules. But real regulations don’t work that way. Regulations follow business as much as business follows regulations.
Sometimes the businesses that change regulations are startups. Startups don’t have the resources to change regulations through lobbying. Nextel was one of the all-time great regulatory hacks. Predictably, the cellular incumbents tried to regulate Nextel out of existence. In a move that could threaten cellular telephone companies, the Federal Communications Commission may decide on Wednesday to grant a small radio company’s request to provide a new form of mobile telephone service in six major cities, including New York. The incumbents argued that Nextel’s service would interfere with public safety frequencies and therefore endanger the public.
And their call quality would be inferior: The FCC eventually decided not to block Nextel. Startups: As a startup CEO what is your favorite productivity hack. Building the Global Startup // John O'Farrell. This is the first in a series on building a global company from the ground up. In browsing Quora recently, I was struck, but not surprised, by how many people sought advice on how to expand a startup internationally.
Not surprised, because for many young companies international expansion ranks with M&A as something that’s easy in concept, but difficult to execute well. (See the many Quora responses, including my own, to Why do companies often fail at international expansion? ) I believe you can maximize your chances of getting international right the first time around if you: Lay the groundwork from the moment you start your companyLaunch internationally with an owner, a strategy and a planApply some key principles and best practices once you’ve launched I’ll devote a blog post to each of these topics, starting today with the first one.
I grew up in Ireland. On the other hand, that huge starting advantage can become a liability when it comes time to expand internationally. Protect your IP. 8 Little AWS Billing Oddities You Might Want to Know | CloudVertical Blog. As part of working on a purchasing and scenario planner for CloudVertical, I’m going over all the EC2 pricing variables – instances types, cost by region, cost by life cycle (on demand, reserved type and time, or spot), and I noticed a few small oddities I thought were interesting. 1. US West Oregon and US East Virginia regions share the exact same pricing (Virginia doesn’t offer Cluster compute though). US West California however, is generally about 10% more expensive. 2. 3. 4. 5. Not oddities, but two important points to note 6. 7. 8. Y Combinator growth benchmark. Back in September Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote an essay about growth. The central point of his essay is that startups are all about growth and that is the one thing they measure at Y Combinator.
According to Paul most startups should look at revenue growth, but active users is a good proxy for companies that aren’t charging their customers (yet). Because the Y Combinator program is short (3 months) they measure growth weekly. Here are the benchmarks: A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week. If you can hit 10% a week you’re doing exceptionally well. If you can only manage 1%, it’s a sign you haven’t yet figured out what you’re doing.
Paul goes on to point out that growth is exponential and that small differences in the weekly percentage growth rate have a surprisingly big impact on where a company ends up after a year or two: A company that grows at 1% a week will grow 1.7x a year, whereas a company that grows at 5% a week will grow 12.6x. Most companies aren’t so lucky. When is a Startup Non-Disclosure Really Required? How To Scale Yourself as a One-Man Band. LEAN GTD #2 - Defining customer value - Poder.dk : Poder.dk. 7 tips for bootstrapping a (profitable) Internet company. Don’t Quit Before You Reach the Tipping Point. A Swedish/British entrepreneur in Berlin, trying to make it happen — Alexander Ljung. Spencer Fry — Harnessing Entrepreneurial Manic-Depression: Making the Rollercoaster Work for You.
The OODA Loop: Playing chess with half the pieces. How To Create A Brand With Values. How to Create a Distribution Strategy ...That Banks. 8 Steps to Establishing a Performance Culture | Revelstone. Lessons Learned. Mark Cuban's 12 Rules for Startups. Leading From The Front Lines. A Simple Tool You Need to Manage Innovation - Bansi Nagji and Geoff Tuff. Chief Innovation Officer’s Agenda. The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs. What To Do When You Don't Know What To Do - Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer, and Paul B. Brown. 6 Habits of True Strategic Thinkers. How Priorities Make Things Happen.
Start-Ups Keep Revenue at Zero to Cash In on Acquisition - Disruptions. Going from $0 to $500k in 1 Year with no VC Money. TalentBin: Source the Web.