The 9 Skills Needed to Be a Super-Connector. Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book he’s giving away free. He built and sold Reset, Inc in 1998 and Stockpickr.com in 2007, among others. You can follow him @jaltucher. I know why I’m not a billionaire. I’m horrible at following up. But that said, I love meeting new people and I’ve always done a good job with the initial skills involved with meeting new people.
But here are the 9 Skills You Need to Become a Super-Connector. 1. 2. In other words, if you can help two other people make money then eventually, good things will happen to you. 3. But, I much more enjoy going to the dinner that I’m invited to. 4. But needless to say, if you make a connection, it’s so easy to keep it by just saying, “hey, it was great meeting you. 5. 6. 7. I’ve done this technique to some extent. When I was at HBO, I interviewed people for a living. 8. 9. 10 Things Entrepreneurs Don’t Learn in College. Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book is I Was Blind But Now I See. You can follow him@jaltucher. I’ve written before on 10 reasons Parents Should Not Send Their Kids to College and here is also Eight Alternatives to College but it’s occurred to me that the place where college has really hurt me the most was when it came to the real world, real life, how to make money, how to build a business, and then even how to survive when trying to build my business, sell it, and be happy afterwards.
Here are the ten things that if I had learned them in college I probably would’ve saved/made millions of extra dollars, not wasted years of my life, and maybe would’ve even saved lives because I would’ve been so smart I would’ve been like an X-Man. 1. In other words, life was going to be great. 2. Why can’t they have a good college course called BETRAYAL 101. 3. Jack Dorsey: How I Balance Twitter AND Square. How To Get A Job At A Startup If You Have No Skills. Editor’s note: This guest post is by Justin Kan, cofounder of Justin.tv and TwitchTV. You can follow him on Twitter and read his blog. Recently I had a conversation with a friend of mine who was interested in doing product management at a startup. He was working as a consultant, but wanted to join a company like foursquare as a PM. However, he wasn’t getting any return calls and was becoming frustrated, and wanted my advice on why.
I told him this:Guess what? The risk that each party takes has to be equal. Sometimes these young people watch The Social Network or read stories about other Millennials founding companies with no experience and think they should be able to join a startup with little domain background. This is a fallacy, however. So what should you do if you want a career switch to a job at a startup you don’t have any experience in? Instead, I’d recommend a couple things. Lastly, try to give yourself some experience. Image credit: Shutterstock/IKO. Beyond Badges: The New Rules of Gamification. Foursquare does it. Mint.com does. Even NBC and Warner Brothers do it. Like it or not, gamification is here to stay. So embrace the idea that you can encourage customers to stay loyal to your brand by using some of the ideas involved in game mechanics on your site, in your service, and even in your storefront. Rajat Paharia, founder of San Jose, California-based Bunchball, one of the earliest entrants into the gamification sphere, believes gamification's explosion is simple.
Gamification, he says, "satisfies our fundamental human needs and desires for reward, status, achievement, and expression. " Certianly, that's a loaded description. Build a model that's inherently social. When building a gaming aspect into your site, it's essential to let your users show off to—or compete against—their friends or online connections. "It's a way for people to show the world that they're accomplishing things," says Sims. Gamification should drive customer loyalty—all the time. His advice? Richard Branson: My Plan to End Occupy Wall Street. Testing a Start-up 8,000 Miles From Silicon Valley. In India, water brings uncertainty: when it will arrive, how it may arrive, whether it will arrive. Anu Sridharan, a young entrepreneur from California, tells the story of a woman in India who would have had to miss a wedding to wait at home to collect water, if it hadn't been for the service provided by Sridharan's new company, NextDrop.
"She could send her brother home to collect water, because she got our text message telling her that the valve had been opened," Sridharan says. Sridharan's company, NextDrop, was started out of a classroom at the University of California-Berkeley, but is being tested halfway around the world, in the "small" town of Hubli, India, population: one million. Going instantly global is a tall order for a little company with a big mission. NextDrop was born in the classroom two years ago when a public policy student and a civil engineer collaborated in a class on mobile-based solutions. The idea was refreshing; the need was sincere. Startups, Investing, And Daily Deals: Five Questions With Mark Cuban. Some think Mark Cuban is a genius, some think he’s lucky. Either way, the guy has a knack for seeing value where others may not, for locating long-term investments, and for ending up on the right side of the deal.
Some may disagree with his approach, but Mark Cuban is a billionaire, and while making money is a lot easier when you have stacks of it to play with, becoming a billionaire doesn’t happen by accident. (Lotto winners not included.) For those on the younger side who haven’t yet made their first billion, the investor’s early story should be comforting: After graduating from college, Cuban started his career (auspiciously enough) as a bartender. Next, he worked for a year as a salesman at a PC software retailer, making $18K in salary, before being fired for meeting with a new client to close a deal instead of opening the retail store.
And, what’s more, as a bonus for readers, Cuban has also agreed to answer a few of the “top” questions posted in the comment section of this post. Exploring The “Labs” Trend in Consumer Startups. Editor’s note: TechCrunch contributor Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks. Shah is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter @semil For those of us who studied (or suffered through) chemistry at some point in life, images from the chem lab inspire nostalgia (or dread). White lab coats. Protective goggles and gloves. Glass beakers and measuring cups. In the world of technology companies, the “labs” concept and nomenclature found a friendly home. Big tech companies have hearty budgets to set up “labs” for their best and brightest to cook up new ideas within. Fast forward to the eve of 2012, where it’s significantly cheaper to develop web and mobile applications now that software costs have plummeted and large distribution networks exist for startups to harness, though it still remains very difficult to get discovered.
Why all the “labs” startup companies all of a sudden? There are a host of reasons. Hot subjects in the Tech industry. Building For The Long Haul. Editor’s note: This post was written by guest contributor Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box.net. His last post on TechCrunch was Competing Against The Big Guys. At a recent Startup School, Mark Zuckerberg made some very poignant comments about Silicon Valley’s lack of long-term focus. While the quick turnover of capital, people and innovation makes the Valley an incredibly attractive place for starting companies, it also produces an environment that’s almost hostile when it comes to building them for the long haul. The tension is remarkable, yet it’s rarely highlighted among the more explicit challenges – say, going up against the 800lb gorilla – faced by entrepreneurs. Every so often, my non-tech friends half-jokingly ask, “Have you sold yet?” In many ways, starting a company in college (isolation) in 2005, before the dawn of TechCrunch (insulation), permitted a certain innocence.
Everything is working against you How you build for the long haul 1. 2. 3. Photo credit: Robert Scoble. Web Industry Topics. Tokyo Japan 2011: The Cambrian Explosion In Startups [Video] TechCrunch Tokyo Japan 2011: The Cambrian Explosion In Startups [Video] A massive number of species appeared and began evolving some 580 million years ago, forming the basis of modern life. Now we’re in the middle of another “Cambrian Explosion,” Erick Schonfeld explains in the video above, where the internet is primed for new startups like Precambrian Earth was for rapid evolution. Lower costs for getting started and the prevalence of internet-connected devices make it more possible for new companies to create big changes in seemingly slow-growing industries like health care, education and transportation.
But that’s not great for everyone. Like the fossils show, many of the species didn’t find a way to survive in the ever-changing world. The video is of a talk Erick gave at TechCrunch Japan‘s Tokyo 2011 conference this past week. Friend Count Up, Sharing Down: Path Only Works If You Reject Those Friend Requests. You’re going to be tempted, but don’t do it. Don’t add all your friends on Path. Don’t come anywhere near the 150-friend limit. And make the tough decision to reject the friend requests of people you care about. Because the whole point of Path 2 is sharing everything, and you won’t do that if you’re sharing to people that aren’t your best friends. This is difficult to adjust to because we’ve been conditioned by most social applications to connect with everyone we know.
Path lets you share things that only people who really care about you want to know, like when you wake up and go to sleep, or when you travel more than a few miles. That means you have to undertake the socially awkward experience of rejecting requests from your co-workers, acquaintances, and fellow early adopters, and make sure not to put them in the same position. The fact that you’re not trying to maximize your audience creates a fundamental distribution problem for Path and any other micronetwork that pops up. The Lean Finance Model Of Venture Capital. The venture capital industry is going through a ton of disruptions lately. One of the better explanations I’ve heard recently of what is going on comes from Duncan Davidson, a managing partner at Bullpen Capital who gave a great talk on the subject at TechCrunch Tokyo last week.
I interviewed him backstage on video, where he summarized his views. Just as there are now legions of “lean startups” which require less capital to build a product, Davidson argues that a “lean finance model” is also needed. “We are in the era of cheap. The whole concept is keep the company as lean as possible until the company validates its market, then you shovel the money in.” Tech startups don’t need $5 million A rounds when $2 million to $3 million will do.
In this view, we are not really seeing a Series A Crunch (where the growing number of seed-funded companies are failing to find series A money). The big-name VCs will still do okay. Spare Me From “Product Guys” Editor’s note: Guest contributor Aaron Harris is a co-founder of Tutorspree, the marketplace for tutoring. Follow him @harris, or take a lesson from him on Tutorspree. We’re seeing people move away from finance and law and towards a culture of building things. It’s great to see more people seek careers in technology. The problem, I find, is that so many people approach the transition poorly. The first, and I suppose seemingly easiest claim and means to justify your place in the startup world, as someone who has no experience, is to call yourself a product person. But that claim generally comes with a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to do product. And here’s my dark secret—a year and a half ago, I was sort of one of those “product guys.”
When I decided I wanted to lead product, I went and talked to friends who were product managers. Realistically speaking, there are certain people who will never be able to lead product of any kind. Read About Face.