The Dirty Little Secret Of Overnight Successes As Chris Dixon pointed out in a recent blog post, Angry Birds, the incredibly popular game, was software maker Rovio’s 52nd attempt. They spent eight years and nearly went bankrupt before finally creating their massive hit. James Dyson failed in 5,126 prototypes before perfecting his revolutionary vacuum cleaner. When looking at the most successful people and organizations, we often imagine geniuses with a smooth journey straight to the promised land. We often celebrate companies and individuals once they've achieved undeniable success, but shun their disruptive thinking before reaching such a pinnacle. In your life, you've probably had a setback or two. The ubiquitous WD-40 lubricant got its name because the first 39 experiments failed. You have a mission to accomplish and an enormous impact to make. Don't cave to your mistakes, embrace them. And who knows? For more insight on creativity and innovation, visit joshlinkner.com. [Image: Flickr user Dillon Hinson]
How to Get Rich Programming I originally discovered the fiendishly addictive Tower Defense as a multiplayer game modification for Warcraft III. It's a cooperative game mode where you, and a few other players, are presented with a simple maze. A group of monsters appear at the entrance and trudge methodically toward the exit. Your goal is to destroy the monsters before they reach the exit by constructing attack towers along the borders of the maze. I can't explain exactly what makes Tower Defense so addictive, but man, is it ever. I suppose it was inevitable that this new, addictive Tower Defense game mode would jump from the select audience of gamers with gaming-class PCs to simpler Flash implementations everyone can enjoy. Warning: before clicking on that link, allow me to reiterate: tower defense is addictive! You'd be surprised how much money you can make by creating a flash game and giving it away for free on the internet. Granted, $4 million per year is a heck of a lot more than $100,000 per year.
Notes Essays—Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup—Stanford, Spring 2012 Peter Thiel's CS183: Startup - Class 10 Notes Essay Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 10 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are mine. Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, joined this class as a guest speaker. Class 10 Notes Essay—After Web 2.0 I. It all started about 40 years ago with ARPANET. The Mosaic browser launched in 1993. “Web 1.0” and “2.0” are terms of art that can be sort of hard to pin down. Relative usage patterns have shifted quite a bit too. II. The Internet has felt a lot like the Wild West for last 20 years or so. Over the last 40 years, the world of stuff has been heavily regulated. Some big-picture Internet developments are on everyone’s radar. III. No one knows for sure when the future will arrive. Villemard's 1910 prediction of what schools would be like in 2000. Just a few decades ago, people were predicting chemical dinners and heating houses with radium. IV. V. And then it worked.
» Early stage companies don’t need money, they need customers Note: This is cross posted from WhoYouCallingAJesse.com by Jesse Rodgers, who is a cofounder of TribeHR. He has been a key member of the Waterloo startup community hosting StartupCampWaterloo and other events to bring together and engage local entrepreneurs. Follow him on Twitter @jrodgers or WhoYouCallingAJesse.com. Some rights reserved by wallyg The popular belief in Canada is that the tech startup world has been fairly light on investment dollars relative to other industries in Canada. Five years ago Paul Graham observed that the total cost to get a tech startup started had dropped dramatically and will continue to do so. So my first prediction about the future of web startups is pretty straightforward: there will be a lot of them. There is a lot of attention around getting young people money but does that help them? Know thy stage From the Startup Genome Report 01. What I have seen happen before the discovery phase: What founders fail to do:
2001 Toyota Tacoma Xtracab Limited Used Car Prices, Reviews Trade-In Value Kelley Blue Book® Trade-in Value - This is the amount you can expect to receive when you trade in your car to a dealer. This value is determined based on the style, condition, mileage and options indicated. Kelley Blue Book® Private Party Value This is the starting point for negotiation of a used-car sale between a private buyer and seller. Excellent - 3% of all cars we value Looks new and is in excellent mechanical condition Has never had any paint touch-ups and/or bodywork Does not need reconditioning The engine compartment is clean and free of leaks Is free of rust The body and interior are free of wear or visible defects Wheels are flawless All tires match and are like new Has a clean title history and will pass a safety and smog inspection Has complete and verifiable service records Very Good - 23% of all cars we value Based on Very Good or Better Condition Good - 54% of all cars we value Based on Good Condition or Better Fair - 18% of all cars we value Trade-In Range
The Buffett Formula — How To Get Smarter “The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.” — Charlie Munger “Go to bed smarter than when you woke up.” — Charlie Munger Most people go though life not really getting any smarter. It’s easy to come home, sit on the couch, watch TV and zone out until bed time rolls around. Sure you can go into the office the next day and discuss the details of last night’s episode of Mad Men or Game of Thrones. But you can acquire knowledge if you want it. In fact there is a simple formula, which if followed is almost certain to make you smarter over time. It involves a lot of hard work. We’ll call it the Buffett formula, named after Warren Buffett and his longtime business partner at Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger. “I can see, he can hear. We can learn a lot from them. How to get smarter Read. Warren Buffett says, “I just sit in my office and read all day.” What does that mean? All of us can build our knowledge but most of us won’t put in the effort. Continuous learning
How to Start a Startup March 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.) You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed. And that's kind of exciting, when you think about it, because all three are doable. If there is one message I'd like to get across about startups, that's it. The Idea In particular, you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. Google's plan, for example, was simply to create a search site that didn't suck. There are plenty of other areas that are just as backward as search was before Google. For example, dating sites currently suck far worse than search did before Google. An idea for a startup, however, is only a beginning. What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. People What do I mean by good people?
The Power of 'I Don't Know' Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing. My friend Alicia likes to mock me by mimicking the tone of online comments on my writing, affecting the snarky hauteur that is the Internet’s default: “Kreider makes the audacious claim that his cat is more attractive than all other living cats,” she’ll say. “According to Kreider, pie is a perfectly acceptable breakfast,” or “Kreider would have it that pants are purely optional.” She’s making mild fun of my sporadic blips of Internet celebrity, but I think she’s more heavily amused to hear commenters citing her feckless goofball friend as though I were some eminent authority, solemnly parsing my passing opinions as though they were official policy statements. There seems to be a widespread presumption that writing is prescriptive (or proscriptive) rather than simply observational or meditative. Jim Stoten Thucydides says: “Ignorance is bold, knowledge reserved.”
Seth Goldstein: 10 tweets for startups Seth Goldstein broke his advice for entrepreneurs down into 140-character bites. Seth Goldstein, investor, serial entrepreneur and chairman of Turntable.fm, prefers to tweet his advice. He gave the crowd at KANEKO his top 10 tips for entrepreneurs in under 140 characters — plus this more lengthy challenge to create something different. "I think your ideas should be strange and weird and nonsensical," Goldstein said. 1. Don’t wait for the right moment or until you know you can do it well. 2. Goldstein says entrepreneurs know their ideas are good but are surrounded by people who need to see it to believe it. 3. Or, in other words, look conventional, but think unconventionally. 4. Goldstein said that building a social gesture that scales is "the billion-dollar challenge." 5. "Too often we do the opposite," Goldstein said. 6. Goldstein says we avoid tough conversations because they’re hard — but they will never be convenient. 7. 8. 9. Investors are important. 10.
50 Things Dear Class of 2010, This will be my last entry written specifically for you; beginning with the launch of our new site in early September, I'll begin focusing on the future class of 2011. I hope that you guys won't be strangers; stay in touch either in person (come visit us!) or online (please drop by the blogs from time to time and say hi). As you begin your college experience, and I prepare for my 10-year college reunion, I thought I'd leave you with the things that, in retrospect, I think are important as you navigate the next four years. Here goes... Your friends will change a lot over the next four years. Be yourself. Welcome to some of the best years of your lives.
Do what you do best 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. June's topic is role of founder. About the author: Michael Ferrari is the co-founder of Social Money Sure the idea was mine, but to bring my idea to life, I needed help. Fast forward a few years, we now have a team of 30, we renamed the company to Social Money, and introduced a new product we call Goal Saver, a white-label goal saving application that any bank or institution can integrate into their own Web site. I believe our recent growth, direction and focus of our company can be attributed to our new leadership within the company. So the question that was asked of me was, what's it like handing over the leadership reigns to an outside CEO. I personally didn't start a company to have the title of "CEO" on my business card.
Life: What are the top 10 things that we should be informed about in life Marc Andreessen Says Now's the Time to Build Companies Like It's 1999 - Arik Hesseldahl Few people have the perspective of living and working in the tech industry that venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has. Founder of the browser company Netscape and then of the software company LoudCloud, later renamed Opsware, he’s seen the boom and bust cycles and the shrill choruses of hype (tempered by reality) that go with them. Now, as one of the two primary partners in the venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, he’s playing the completely different role of shepherding what he hopes are the next great tech companies. Andreessen (pictured from a legendary Time Magazine cover on which he appeared in the late 1990s) was the first speaker today at Fortune Magazine’s Brainstorm Tech conference being held in a very rainy — but still beautiful — Aspen, Colo. Asked by interviewer Andy Serwer what he’s excited about right now, Andreessen looked back. From there he pivoted to an argument that the consumer electronics industry is coming back to the U.S.