Steve Poland (@popo) | Startup Homeruns I go for homeruns, not singles. I want to knock it out of the park. The problem with that is homeruns are very high risk. The chance of a homerun is significantly lower than simply getting on first base. I don’t want to stop dreaming for the homerun, but more training is in order to get there. There is a trail of dead startups behind me and a money trail that I have burned through. Extendy, Boughtly, ViewCues, ifluencer, Trackable Links, Sme, InSeconds, ThankYouTroops, PinkPinky, MyFavorites v1, MyFavorites v2 (haven’t given up on this yet), and there are more. As much as I have read and heard the same thing over and over and over again in the past 12+ years, I want to say it has never really sunk in or I have just never really “got it.” I have found myself working on ideas over the years that I think can be homeruns, but they really haven’t been problems — or rather, big problems of mine. So I pledge to only work on a startup in the future if it’s solving a real problem I have.
How to get good ideas for startups The majority of people in the US would like to be self-employed, according to Dartmouth economist, David Blanchflower. This makes sense because people who work for themselves are happier than people who work at someone else’s company, according to research from Estaban Calvo at the Harvard School of Public Health. However the majority are not self-employed, and one of the most important reasons for this is that people do not know how to come up with an idea for a business. 1. Read all the time, among broad sources and materials. In a study spanning sixty years of economically underprivileged Harvard graduates, psychiatrist George Valliant concluded (in a great article in the Atlantic) that the only consistent indicator of who will be happy later in life is who did chores as a child. This information should make almost everyone happy, since obviously just graduating from Harvard isn’t enough to guarantee happiness. 2. 3. 4. Another idea I had is to buy a herd of Waygu cattle. 5. “Oh. 6.
The New York Review of Ideas How to Do What You Love January 2006 To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. And it did not seem to be an accident. The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. Jobs By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to. Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? What a recipe for alienation. The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Bounds Sirens Discipline Two Routes Notes
Steve Poland (@popo) | Serial entrepreneur and former early @TechCrunch Writer. Y Combinator Founder: 3 Tips for Coming Up With Start-up Ideas You're burning to do a start-up and think you have what it takes to succeed. Only problem: First, you need a great idea. As a co-founder of wildly successful incubator Y Combinator, Paul Graham has had a hand in shaping some of the best start-up ideas of the past few years. Now, helpfully, he has shed his insights on where they usually come from. If you are the person described in the first paragraph, seriously, read it in full. Those are the first couple of sentences of Graham's post, so there's no confusion about his essential advice. Go for Depth, Not Breadth To avoid bad but vaguely plausible start-up ideas--what the Y Combinator team calls sitcom ideas, i.e., the kind of ideas TV writers would make up if a character on a show had a start-up--choose something that some people want a lot rather than something lots of people might sort of want a little. Live in the Future Being at the leading edge of a field makes you more able to recognize good ideas. Turn Off the Filters
50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business We really can’t deny the fact that businesses are testing out Twitter as part of their steps into the social media landscape. You can say it’s a stupid application, that no business gets done there, but there are too many of us (including me) that can disagree and point out business value. I’m not going to address the naysayers much with this. Your mileage may vary, and that’s okay. Oh, and please feel free to reblog this wherever. 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business First Steps Build an account and immediate start using Twitter Search to listen for your name, your competitor’s names, words that relate to your space. Ideas About WHAT to Tweet Instead of answering the question, “What are you doing?” Some Sanity For You You don’t have to read every tweet. The Negatives People Will Throw At You Twitter takes up time. Some Positives to Throw Back Twitter helps one organize great, instant meetups (tweetups). What else would you add? By the way, Jeremiah Owyang has a great post on this, too.
Tips for Startup Companies The author of this article has started about six companies over the years with collective and cumulative revenues approaching $100 million. He has been a board member and advisor to young companies in software, materials science, and electronic hardware. Here are some tips for young people starting companies. Three Good Reasons to Start Your Own Company Don't start your own company because you want to be your own boss. Having rich parents is great. The most reliable source of supranormal profits is superior knowledge of one kind of customer (Way #3). If you don't understand customers, consider taking a customer-facing job (think "sales engineer" or "product manager" rather than "cubicle-dwelling system internals programmer") at a company that already has the kind of customers you think constitute an attractive market. Don't Get Too Good at Raising Money Suppose that you can raise $50 million in capital in four stages. Venture Capital and the Successful Company = High Risk
The World's Most Valuable Startups How to Validate Your Start-up Idea At my marketing agency, Ciplex, I deal with a lot of clients who hire us to build a website for their business idea--based solely on their gut feeling that idea will be successful. They skip the step of figuring out first if they're solving a real problem in the world. Big mistake. Before investing any time and money in a business, you need to validate your idea. I asked members of the Young Entrepreneur Council, an invite-only organization for young, successful entrepreneurs about the best ways to validate ideas. Check out their responses below: Use smoke tests. An easy way to gauge interest in an idea is to run some basic tests fist. Travis Steffan, a serial entrepreneur, says he generally places an idea on a site like LaunchRock, which helps people to quickly set up a "Launching Soon" page. Assess yourself. This one sounds basic but it's worth remembering. Find a mentor or industry advisor. There are always going to be people who have expertise or experience you lack. Conduct a survey.
Guy Kawasaki’s 10 Questions to Ask Before You Join a Startup I realize that in this job market, maybe you can’t be choosy about a job offer, but you should still understand what you’re getting into. If you are considering working at a startup, you should ask these questions. 1. How much money do you have in the bank? 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Guy Kawasaki is the co-founder of Alltop.com, an “online magazine rack” of popular topics on the web. Sergey Brin ( 7-Jan-1996) Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 (415)723-9273sergey@cs.stanford.edu Education September 1993 - Present: Stanford University, Computer Science Department Ph.D.: expected June 1997. September 1990 - May 1993: University of Maryland B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science. Publications "Near Neighbor Search in Large Metric Spaces", S.Brin, Proceeding of Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) 1995. "Copy Detection Mechanisms for Digital Documents", S. Research Projects GNAT's This project involved indexing multidimensional data for near-neighbor searches. I worked on a project with Hector Garcia-Molina involving automated detection of copyright violations. Current Research Directions and Hacks Movie Ratings A new project I have just started is going to generate personalized movie ratings for users. LaTeX to HTML Converter I've been hacking on a LaTeX to HTML converter which was used to generate the HTML versions of the papers above. Work Experience Dr.
Bush and French Word For Entrepreneur Claim: President George W. Bush proclaimed, "The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur." Origins: Yet another "George W. The source was Shirley Williams, also known as the Baroness Williams of Crosby, who claimed "my good friend Tony Blair" had recently regaled her with this anecdote in Brighton. Lloyd Grove of The Washington Post was unable to reach Baroness Williams to gain her confirmation of the tale, but he did receive a call from Alastair Campbell, Blair's director of communications and strategy. This is far from the first time Bush has been made the butt of a jibe meant to showcase what some perceive as his less than stellar intellectual abilities. Stories that illustrate this widely believed intellectual shortcoming will always waft after George W. Barbara "ears of corn" Mikkelson Last updated: 23 September 2007 Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2014 by Barbara and David P. Sources:
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