The Power of Negative Thinking.
Startup accelerators. Physicist Richard Feynman’s science lesson for entrepreneurs: Challenge authority. | Radical Social Entrepreneurs. “If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong!” Roars Richard Feynman in a video recently dusted off by NPR. The clip, on the foundations of science, is only 63 seconds — but its power is clear. Feynman’s lesson is quietly anti-authoritarian, and it should be near the heart of anyone interested in radical social entrepreneurship.
When it comes to finding new truths in science, “it doesn’t make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn’t make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is” declares Feynman. If a theory fails the test — if we can falsify it — it is wrong. Or at least that’s how it works in theory. In sad truth, science — like anything else — is occasionally derailed by special interests and political agendas. For example, many premier private foundations financed research in eugenics in the early 20th century. So for science, the social system around it matters. Indeed, philosopher of science W.W. Pseudoscientist Lysenko studying wheat. Entrepreneurs Are Tough To Be With.
Work harder on yourself than you do on your startup. "Work harder on yourself than you do on your job. " - Jim Rohn A long time ago, I came across the amazing quote above, which was said often by Jim Rohn. It stook in my mind, and as the years have gone on, I feel I’ve increasingly started to learn the true meaning of it. I feel that in a startup, the quote is even more relevant. Here are some of the reasons I’ve discovered that tell me that you may want to seriously consider working harder on yourself than you do on your startup: It usually takes a few tries I certainly hope you do things better and faster than I have, and I know people far smarter than me building kickass products, but looking back and joining the dots of my own journey it is interesting to recall the number of different projects and startups I’ve started before hitting something that has worked.
For that reason, I think it’s not a smart approach to put all your eggs in the “current startup” basket. Be open, vocal, and build your network Marketing and blogging. The Top 50 Startups Blogs to Watch in 2012. 1) TechCrunch - TechCrunch is a leading technology media property, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news. Richard Macmanus, Founder of ReadWriteWeb 2) ReadWriteWeb - ReadWriteWeb was founded on April 20, 2003, by Richard MacManus and is now one of the most widely read and respected blogs in the world. 3) BizSugar Blog & Press Center - BizSugar is a small business news site where you can discover, share and vote for the best small-business news, tips, and information on the Web.
As an entrepreneur, business owner, manager, marketer or professional, the site allows you to spend more time enjoying your life and work — and less time reading. 4) Mixergy - Today Mixergy is a place where successful people teach ambitious upstarts. 5) OnStartups.com - Blog and online community for startup entrepreneurs. Experimentation is to a startup as a task list is to a job. Founder Friday is a weekly guest post written by a founder who is based in or hails from the Silicon Prairie.
Each month, a topic relevant to startups is presented and founders share lessons learned or best practices utilized on that topic. May's topic is leaving a full-time job to pursue a startup. About the author: Wade Foster is a co-founder of Zapier. Few people come out of the womb, kicking and screaming, born ready to be a startup founder. Most of us take the longer more traditional route. Usually that means 12 years of primary education, 4 years of secondary education, a few more years working at a good job before finally catching the startup bug.
There is nothing wrong with a more traditional route. Getting out of your comfort zone For decades we've been trained, molded, guided, and shaped to follow instructions, stand in a straight line, check off items on a to-do list, respect authority and not rock the boat. Experimentation - The entrepreneur's to do list Enter experimentation.
Different hiring techniques. Founders and Dysfunctional Families. 5 Things I Learned About Entrepreneurship From Y Combinator's Paul Graham. Paul Graham (PG) is one of the most prominent figures in Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial community, and his reputation is well-deserved. He's an honest leader, a talented computer scientist, and has an uncanny passion for entrepreneurship. Most importantly, he’s an entrepreneur himself. The first time I met PG was in the summer of 2010, when my cofounder and I were selected to participate in Y Combinator (YC), the startup accelerator program PG founded that helped to create many successful companies, including Reddit (acquired by Conde Nast), Heroku (acquired by Salesforce), OMGPOP (acquired by Zynga). He’s known to be extremely particular about teams over ideas and, despite what you might think, is often pushing teams to radically change their ideas. 1.
There is no question that PG is highly intelligent. Why? The nature of taking on the difficult challenge of starting a company is that sometimes your best-laid plans will be crushed. 2. 3. 4. 5. [Image: Flickr users Larry W. The Future of Web Startups. October 2007 (This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.) There's something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper. It's a pattern we see over and over in technology. Initially there's some device that's very expensive and made in small quantities. Then someone discovers how to make them cheaply; many more get built; and as a result they can be used in new ways. Computers are a familiar example. This pattern is very old. Now as well as being produced by startups, this pattern is happening to startups. 1. So my first prediction about the future of web startups is pretty straightforward: there will be a lot of them.
Even that threshold is getting lower, as people watch others take the plunge and survive. Starting a startup is hard, but having a 9 to 5 job is hard too, and in some ways a worse kind of hard. 2. Some investors will still want to cook up their own deal terms. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Kauffman Foundation. Disconnect.me. Action Trumps Everything - The Best Way To Predict The Future Is To Create It. Paul B. Brown: I am one of the co-authors of Just Start: Take action; embrace uncertainity and create the future, as well as an extremely proud Forbes alum. A former writer and editor at Business Week, Inc. and Financial World, in addition to my six years at Forbes, I've also written, co-written and “ghosted” numerous best-sellers including Customers for Life (with Carl Sewell.) A long-time contributor to The New York Times, I am also a contributing editor to both The Conference Board Review (where I also write a column) and M.I.T.’s Sloan Management Review. Len Schlesinger: I am president of Babson College, widely recognized as the world’s leading educational institution for entrepreneurship. I formerly served as vice chairman and chief operating officer of Limited Brands.
Y Combinator. Angel Investors. Startups. Crowdfunding. Social Networking Software Websites. Peak age for entrepreneurship: who cares? People love to talk about whether there is a peak age for entrepreneurship. Who wins, the 20-something just out of college with unlimited energy, no family or other obligations, who’s too naïve to know what he can’t do and isn’t afraid to break the rules? Or the seasoned veteran who’s already made his rookie mistakes, who brings experience, patience, wisdom, and maturity?
For investors, this is probably a fascinating topic. They see lots of pitches and have to use “pattern recognition” to decide whom to fund. Maybe age should play a role in their decisions (maybe not). As an entrepreneur, I don’t care, and neither should you. As an entrepreneur, you don’t get to choose how old you are. Don’t worry about being too young. Don’t worry about being too old. Let potential investors worry about how old you are. The Pitch: Vote For The Best Technology Startups. In The Future, The Business Founder Will Not Be Ignored. Editor’s note: Adam Rodnitzky is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Favo.rs.
He programmed his first startup using ColdFusion in 1999. Rodnitzky is based in San Francisco, and you can follow him on Twitter @rodtwitzky. The entrepreneurial world loves nothing like a good meme. One of the more recent ones making the rounds from Palo Alto to Paris is that a startup simply can’t get off the ground without a technical founder. For now. Soon, however, I believe we’ll see a marked shift in who holds the cards in the startup world. First, let’s flesh out the current argument a bit more. So, for the moment, the technical founder is in the spotlight. If Moore taught us anything about technology, it’s that it advances at an exponential rate. After all, those technical hurdles are already obscenely low compared to where they were even a decade ago. Today? Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom for the technical co-founder in the future.
So take note of the business founders’ plight today. Do Things, Tell People. These are the only things you need to do to be successful*. You can get away with just doing one of the two, but that's rare, and usually someone else is doing the other part for you. If you you don't have any marketable skills, learn some. It's the future. We have Khan Academy and Wikipedia and Codecademy and almost the entire world's collective knowledge at your fingertips. Then make something that you can talk about. Next, find events where the people you want to work with are. You would not believe how much opportunity is out there for those who do things and tell people. Ciarán McCann and I (mostly him) started working on a HTML5 game engine and blog when we were in first year of college.
*I define successful as "taking advantage of personally interesting opportunities," but I think that this mantra works for success in terms of money also. Ira Glass on Storytelling. How Three Germans Are Cloning the Web. A purple rooster sculpture made from recycled grape Fanta bottle labels. Clocks designed to hang in corners. Bauhaus posters from the 1920s. Hand-painted vintage typewriters. These are some of the carefully curated objects for sale on Fab.com, the fast-growing flash-deal site for designer goods. Launched out of a loft in New York City’s Garment District last June, Fab had sales of $20 million in its first six months and is on track to earn $100 million in 2012. “We owe our success to keeping it real, authenticity, being close to designers,” says Jason Goldberg, Fab’s chief executive officer.
That, and “offering people objects and design products they wouldn’t find elsewhere. Six months after Fab launched, it was knocked off. Fab vs. Bamarang is the creation of Oliver, Marc, and Alexander Samwer, a trio of German brothers who have a wildly successful business model: Find a promising Internet business, in the U.S., and clone it internationally.
An image boost couldn’t hurt. Microsoft’s new documentary about startups is brutally honest about Microsoft. Gotta hand it to Microsoft, they’re taking this documentary stuff seriously. I just finished a full-length sneak preview of the company’s new film. Yes, an honest-to-goodness Microsoft fim, called Ctrl+Alt+Compete. (We first told you about it in September.) It’s a behind-the-scenes look at the startup world, making its world premiere at the Napa Valley Film Festival on Friday. It’s a very good movie. In content and pacing, it actually felt to me more like a high-quality television documentary, telling the stories of five startups over the course an hour. But most of all, Ctrl+Alt+Compete deserves credit for pulling no punches in its portrayal of the technology industry — even when it comes to Microsoft.
The most attention-grabbing line comes from Zappos founder Tony Hsieh, discussing Microsoft’s $265 million acquisition of his previous company, LinkExchange, in 1998. Chris Shipley, the veteran technology conference producer, delivers this great analogy … 'Go build it,' Renaud tells Summit crowd in ecosystem-focused address.
Christian Renaud encouraged Summit attendees to be proud of the Midwest startup style in his morning keynote. Christian Renaud, a co-founder of the technology startup incubator StartupCity Des Moines, focused on the idea of the Silicon Prairie ecosystem in kicking off the sixth annual Nebraska Summit on Entrepreneurship on Friday. “You not only own your own future, your own entrepreneurial endeavors," Renaud said during the morning keynote at the Embassy Suites Conference Center in La Vista, "but as part of this ecosystem, part of the Silicon Prairie ecosystem, you own the development of that as well.”
Renaud emphasized four points in his discussion of the Midwest startup style: "We are very pragmatic as Midwesterners," Renaud said, "and something that we do very well is face reality.” He said the reality we must face as entrepreneurs in the Midwest is that, in order to make our entrepreneurial ecosystem thrive, we must work together as a region. "Go do it," Renaud said. "Don’t hesitate. Kiene closes Summit with 'You might be a Nebraska entrepreneur if…' "You might be a Nebraska entrepreneur if you believe in quality before quantity," Steve Kiene (left) told the crowd during his closing keynote at last Friday's Nebraska Summit on Entrepreneurship. In a style reminiscent of Jeff Foxworthy's "You might be a redneck if…" routine, Kiene, the managing principal of the Lincoln-based software investment fund Nebraska Global, delivered 33 characteristics of a Nebraska entrepreneur.
Before he share his list with the audience, however, Kiene defined "entrepreneur. " "What does it mean to be an entrepreneur? " Kiene said. "Well, you can be an entrepreneur if you're introverted like me … or dress like this or even if you don't shave or cut your hair," he said, referring to his T-shirt, jeans and Chuck Taylors coupled with his long hair. "To be an entrepreneur, you've got a burning desire in your heart to change things, to make things better, to create things, to push things forward," Kiene said.
Previous Post Looking to hire? Next Post.