The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed—if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed—and that's too big a question to answer on the fly. Afterwards I realized it could be helpful to look at the problem from this direction. If you have a list of all the things you shouldn't do, you can turn that into a recipe for succeeding just by negating. In a sense there's just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. 1. Have you ever noticed how few successful startups were founded by just one person? What's wrong with having one founder? But even if the founder's friends were all wrong and the company is a good bet, he's still at a disadvantage. The last one might be the most important. 2. Startups prosper in some places and not others. Why is the falloff so sharp? 3. 4.
What do you need to do before you quit your job to form a startup company Browse > Home / Incorporation / What do you need to do before you quit your job to form a startup company? There are various things a potential founder of a new startup company needs to do before quitting their job. 1. Review all agreements with your current employer. Most employees may have signed an offer letter and a confidential information and invention assignment agreement, as well as other documents such as a stock option agreement. Reviewing the documents for the following provisions is important. Confidentiality. A typical invention assignment clause provides: In California, there is an exception to this requirement to assign inventions if the employee has made the invention on his/her own time not using company equipment and the invention does not relate to the business of the company or did not result from work for the company. (2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer. Invention disclosure. A. B. C. Non-solicit of customers and vendors. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Creating in-cell bar charts / histograms in excel Posted on May 13th, 2008 in Charts and Graphs , hacks , ideas , Learn Excel , technology - 51 comments Ever since writing the create in-cell pie charts in excel, I have been itching to find a simple enough method to do incell bar graphs. An in-cell bar would probably be more useful and cuter than an in-cell pie as it can instantly provide trending details. What more, these would probably look gorgeous when printed out. My first challenge was that there was no font readily available for bar graphs. You should download bargraph font if you want to use incell bar graphing technique mentioned here. Once you have downloaded the font, the rest is simple process. First we will insert a column next to the total sales column and call it “last 12 months”. Thats all, we now have a charming data table with cute little incell bar graphs to insert your project report / sales memo or news letter. Feel free to download example excel sheet I have created and learn how to do in-cell bar graphs
How I Built a Viral Node.js App in Just One Weekend - BestVendor.com Will it fly? How to Evaluate a New Product Idea I've been thinking about a number of new product ideas lately. In doing so, I've been trying to come up with a more structured way of evaluating them. Here's a first attempt at defining that. It's not as clear as I'd like it to be. But perhaps you'll find it useful. Tractability Question: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0? Blogger was highly tractable. Tractability is partially about technical difficulty and much about timing and competition—i.e., How advanced are the other solutions? In general, if you're tiny and have few resources, tractability is key, because it means you can build momentum quickly—and momentum is everything for a startup. If you're big and/or have a lot of resources—or not very good at spotting new opportunities, but great at executing—a less-tractable idea may be for you. Obviousness Question: Is it clear why people should use it? Everything is obvious once its successful. Deepness Question: How much value can you ultimately deliver? Wideness
Procrastination The Misconception: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can’t manage your time well. The Truth: Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking. Netflix reveals something about your own behavior you should have noticed by now, something which keeps getting between you and the things you want to accomplish. If you have Netflix, especially if you stream it to your TV, you tend to gradually accumulate a cache of hundreds of films you think you’ll watch one day. This is a bigger deal than you think. Take a look at your queue. Psychologists actually know the answer to this question, to why you keep adding movies you will never watch to your growing collection of future rentals, and it is the same reason you believe you will eventually do what’s best for yourself in all the other parts of your life, but rarely do. A study conducted in 1999 by Read, Loewenstein and Kalyanaraman had people pick three movies out of a selection of 24. Sources:
BOOM Goes The Dynamite! 500 Startups Explodes With 2 New Periodic Elements, 12 Sensational Startups, and 1 Awesome Accelerator Program 500 Startups announces today they have discovered the newest periodic elements – Upandtotherightium (Ur) and Viralium (Vi). In addition to this amazing new discovery which is awaiting official recognition by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, they are also proud to announce they are in the early stages of developing 12 remarkable new startups in their just-launched 500 Startups Accelerator program at their headquarters in Mountain View. The buzz among the science community is the 500 Startups Accelerator will soon eclipse the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, which has long held the title of the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. Several Russian physicists have raised concerns this new 500 Startups Accelerator could be dangerous and has the potential for creating wormholes with unknown outcomes, possibly even the creation of a black hole. Specs of the 500 Startups Accelerator are detailed below www.internmatch.com www.baydin.com
Windows Phone Ad Paints Apple and Samsung Fans as Buffoons Microsoft is attempting to triangulate in the Apple-Samsung war with a new ad that presents itself as above the fray of their petty bickering. The ad takes place during a wedding. As a nerdy guy steps up to photograph the event, an iPhone fan challenges him to remove "your enormous phone." "You mean the enormously awesome Galaxy?" another Samsung fan counters. "Search: 'One trick pony,'" a middle-aged woman replies, speaking to Siri on her iPhone. The scene soon erupts into a brawl. Though the ad seeks to differentiate itself from both Apple and Samsung, the background music and tone are strikingly similar to Samsung's anti-Apple ads, including its 2012 Super Bowl spot. At this point, Nokia is more of an underdog than Samsung was at the time. Image courtesy of YouTube, Nokia
The IPO of the decade? My valuation of Facebook : Facebook is on a "high growth" path, with revenues growing by 150% in 2010 and another 88% in 2011, but as even that sample of two observations suggests, the big question is how that growth rate will hold up . I estimate a compounded revenue growth rate of 40% for the next five years and a scaling down of that growth rate to the nominal growth rate in the economy (set equal to the risk free rate of 2.01%) by the end of ten years. While both assumptions may strike you as conservative, I am effectively assuming that Facebook will follow a revenue growth path close to Google's over the next 8 years, as evidenced in the chart below, where I compare Google's actual revenues in the 8 years since their IPO with Facebook's forecasted revenues for the next 8 years: Since advertising revenues are the drivers of both firms' growth engines, and they may very well be competing for the same advertising dollars, I think a comparison of their competitive advantages is in order. 4. 5. 6. 7. a. b. c.
What If Your Smartphone Could Read Your Mind? Kimera Is Working On It Today's smartphones are pretty darned smart. Yet we are only scratching the surface of what these devices might do. What if our smartphones were actually intelligent? Apple's Siri, the current standard bearer for smartphone AI, has nominal contextual awareness; it understands whether you are speaking to it or trying to determine your location, for instance. "We want to deploy a 100% decentralized AI layer on top of the existing Internet. The Kimera AI system attempts to model the world and derive useful intelligence that lets it adapt to the individual. To do this, Kimera has set up a system that taps the Internet guided by the phone's sensors. "[A DMe] can belong to a human, a business, a location, am object, anything. The DMe interacts with the world through what Kimera calls a Salience Engine. "The Salience Engine looks at the DMe accounts as neurons in a potential large neural network," Shita said. The next layer is known as DMe Smart Agents.
26 Brilliant Minimalist Print Ads Leonardo da Vinci once said: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, and architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe adopted the motto “Less is more” to describe his extreme simplicity, by enlisting every element and detail to serve multiple visual and functional purposes (such as designing a floor to also serve as the radiator, or a massive fireplace to also house the bathroom). Even after 500 years Leonardo’s words are true and this rule is still widely used in design and advertising. It may sound a bit contradictory, but simple things often require much more brain power to create than the most complicated stuff. And it always strikes you when something completely simple is capable of conveying so much more than you expect. Without further ado, let’s take a look at 26 most creative examples of minimalist advertising, and afterwards you can always leave a comment telling how much you liked our post! 1. “It’s the hat “ (Advertising Agency: Serviceplan Hamburg / München, Germany) 2. 3. 4. 5.
32 Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow - Interactive Feature Electric Clothes Physicists at Wake Forest University have developed a fabric that doubles as a spare outlet. When used to line your shirt — or even your pillowcase or office chair — it converts subtle differences in temperature across the span of the clothing (say, from your cuff to your armpit) into electricity. And because the different parts of your shirt can vary by about 10 degrees, you could power up your MP3 player just by sitting still. Chris Nosenzo The New Coffee Soon, coffee isn’t going to taste like coffee — at least not the dark, ashy roasts we drink today. Analytical Undies Your spandex can now subtly nag you to work out. The Morning Multitasker The problem with laptops and tablets, says Mark Rolston of the design firm Frog, is that they’re confined by a screen. Clean Hair, No Hands This 15-minute shampoo treatment begins when you lean your head back into a machine that looks like a sink at the salon. What are your two best million-dollar ideas? The Congestion Killer
An Entrepreneur's Guide to Relationship Management: Who To Keep in Touch With, and How Often Editor’s Note: This blog post has been excerpted from an article that was originally published by Zvi Band on the Contactually blog. When running my previous company, staying in touch was crucial to my business. We were one of dozens, maybe hundreds, of web development firms in the DC region, but we kept really busy (sometimes overwhelmingly so) thanks to a continual flow of referrals from past clients and our network. Come to think of it, I never accepted a client that came via anonymous websites (read: my own website). I’ve now transitioned to co-founder and CEO of Contactually, an early-stage, venture-backed startup. Top Users: keep in touch every 15 days – We ping them about new feature releases, ask for their support, and in general, just touch base to see how Contactually is working for them. Partners: keep in touch every 30 – We talk about deals we have in the pipeline, API providers, business development relationships, resellers, etc.