TheBetaStartup.com

Book: Founders At Work

// February 13th, 2008 // 7 Comments » // books

Founders At Work
interviews by
Jessica Livingston

ISBN-13: 978-1590597149

Lately, while reading, I’ve been underlining sentences and passages that are worth thinking about, sharing, or just rereading. I mark their position in a book by stickers. I don’t have to tell you how many things you can learn in this book – my copy has 53 tabs and looks like that:

Here is my read of it. In a To(Not)-Do list. Remixed.

Luck

• Get lucky. I am not kidding. One of the things I kept noticing is how everybody got lucky at some point, “we lucked out we found a great CEO”, or “that deal was total luck, came out of nowhere” etc. After all, if 1/10 startups succeed, if you do ten there is no way not to get lucky, is there? (statistically significant)
• There seems no luck, so don’t wait for it. It looks like a lot of the pivotal things happen on their own, but in reality it’s the result of your actions that you couldn’t predict. A lot of the founders seem to have ’caused’ good luck on themselves.

Qualities

• Do not give up. Jessica Livingston starts off with this point in the introduction, “In fact, I’d say determination is the single most important quality in a startup founder….Perseverance is important because, in a startup, nothing goes according to plan.” Unless you are lacking motivation, you should keep that on a sticky note on your screen.
• Think unusual ideas and don’t be afraid. Here’s what Buchheit (creator of Gmail) said about the googles, “…they are very open to crazy ideas – more so than almost anyone I’ve ever met.”

Marketing

• Make your product so good so it can market itself, I wrote about it. Here is Blake Ross on it, “It turns out that marketing is just making the product good enough that people spread it on their own, and giving them ways to do that. It’s a lot easier and more natural than I thought it would be.” In that category falls the story with choosing the right market. Marc Andreessen also said it in this post.
• Hire a good PR firm. The more I think about it, write business plans, and make projections it seems that direct advertising is just not the way to go. Word of mouth with PR help can do the trick. Paul Graham Says PR worked for them.
• Do not write business plans as a guidance of what you should be doing. It seems to be more of a marketing tool, “You can easily add a couple of zeros everywhere and sell the same thing to people. Instead of 10 percent market growth you make 20 percent market growth, and you suddenly make $200 million more in the fifth year, but so what?”

Hiring

• Hire the best people you can find (even if more expensive), “I still think it’s more efficient …. if you have two really good people and a very powerful tool. That’s still better than having 20 mediocre people and inefficient tools.”
  
• Hire someone with passion/desire. From my own experience too – even if people are not good at something, when they want something badly they will go long way to achieve results.

Product

• Release early/often. It will save you a lot in the end.
• Follow your guts more than anything else. They have been exposed to all the things in your life, so they know. And your users’ guts too.
• Make research on user’s requested features. Sometimes they want one thing, and when you look closely they actually wanted something completely different but didn’t know how to explain it.

VC’s

• Learn to guess when VC’s cut you off, because they never say, “No”. It’s quite logical that they don’t want to cut their connections with you. If you do succeed they want to be with you. But not know. So let’s talk Monday about it again?
• VCs are strange birds. Here’s a quote from Currier’s interview:
  They all told me $18 million wasn’t interesting. And I’d say, “But most people will tell you $50 million, and you know they’re lying. I’m already discounting it because I’m a venture guy just like you are.” And they’d say, “Yeah, but $18 million just isn’t interesting.
  So I changed my spreadsheet to say $50 million. And they said, “OK, that’s pretty interesting.”

Help From other people

• Move to the right place. Ross again,
  One thing I didn’t know was how tightly connected everyone is in the Valley. We’ll meet someone, and then we’ll meet someone who I would never expect to even know that person, and they’ll say, “I heard you met Tony last week.”
  (Oh god, I have to do this one myself…)
• People will help you if you are pushing enough. Winblad, “I think this is something that people underestimate – that there are always people out there rooting for you.”

Tricks to get there

• Get it anyway you can – software, hardware, whatever does it. Meaning, don’t get bogged down by trying to do it one way or another. Switch, try, explore. Be flexible.
• Do it with leverage. Why do robbers use crowbars? You can do more with less. Find ways. Don’t build everything from ground up. There are free stuff you can use. Don’t create Google analytics. It’s there, use it.

Misc

• Do not kill yourself. Uhm, okay what I mean is what Winblad said, “But the majority of companies fail by self-inflicted wounds by the leadership team.”
• Setup your startup user registration to send you a text on the cell phone. Awesome idea I read in there…
• I like James Hong, so this section is just for his advices:
  • “One, do it while you are young”
  • “Two, there’s no right path”
  • “Three, even if you raise money, spend it as if it’s your own and you have none”
  • “Four, there so such thing as easy entrepreneurship”

I think it’s time to end, but this book is a fountain of precious experience. Also this is just my look at it. If there is one book you have get and read and think about, it’s this one, read it.

Idea: Meeting 4 four?

// February 11th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // ideas

As my last semester advances I find myself involved in more and more group projects. 3 of my classes have long term group projects. In addition, I am a participant in the Merrill Lynch competition where 4 of us communicate on a daily basis and meet weekly. I am getting more and more frustrated with the task of finding time where all people can meet during the week. This back and forth email swapping and trying to match availability is a nightmare. Not that those people have no time they can meet, but if it takes 6 emails to figure it out, then there’s definitely an inefficiency to be corrected.

How difficult is to make a little site where people can post their free time. Co-workers will be able to check out each other’s free times, and see on the fly if all four anywhere. If not, you can easily see the whole chart and figure out where would be the most plausible place to do a little effort and squeeze a bit more time.

Book:Burn Rate

// February 9th, 2008 // No Comments » // books

Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet
by
Michael Wolff

ISBN-10: 0684856212

Though I knew generally what burn rate meant, I wasn’t aware of its implications. So I accepted this Amazon recommendation when I was researching for startup books. The book talks of how the owner of a media company is struggling to sell or position it strategically in the race of the upcoming internet (whatever internet meant back then). What this book really is – a book manual on business moves. Deals flying, promises exchanges, and crazy meetings. But interesting to see what really happens and that a startup is not just coding. Highlights:

• Naturally, the brightest figure from Burn Rate is the business guy that is trying to tie up random investors with companies on a variety of strategies. By the way, he makes it seems like business in itself is nothing like buying selling, but rather and art. The creativity Machinist comes with in terms of forming alliances, luring people into believing that the deal is going through are unimaginable. Basically – its what you make out of all the players, not what they are. You can move them. Just like a pieces of chess.
  • Author says it really nice, “It was true that when you reconstructed the specifics of conversations with Machinist, you often could not find the bridges by which we’d crossed these large chasms to great fortune”
  • Here is another example,
    “You know, your friend Machinist promised me, absolutely promised me, no doubt, no question, he’d have me out in a year, ” Rubin said, his pain apparent.. “You think I would ever have gone into this deal without that promise?”
    I nodded. “He made me the same promise. He swore he’d get rid of you in a year. I would never have done this if I thought I’d get stuck with you.”
    He bitterly laughed. “God, that Machinist is a fat fuck.”
• As Michael Wolff is trying to figure out what animal the Internet is, he made one of the most accurate 1-paragraph explanations and I love it, because I myself try to explain it somewhat like that:
  

  For Entrepreneurs (or unemployables) the Internet offered one of the most startling opportunities since – actually, has there been anything to match it? The cost of entry was minimal, the required knowledge base was so idiosyncratic that few could claim a meaningful head start, and there was little or no competition, regulation, or conventional wisdom. It was ground zero: no rules, no religion, no canon, no bullshit. It was startup time. If all else failed, you could still have the satisfaction of having been there; it was like Hollywood in the teens or Detroit in the twenties. A new American industry was being born.

Amazing.

• Another mystery seems to be accompanying the whole story, “Is internet a new medium?”
  - I believe no. A website is a medium. So Internet is more like a medium for other media. And no, nothing to match it…

Idea: Consumer Products Troubleshooting By Crowdsourced Flowcharts

// February 6th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // ideas

My airport extreme died few days ago. I restarted it a billion times, restarted the cable modem too. I had the weirdest problem – one computer gets the real IP and all others get distributed ones that start with 10.0.1.x and they don’t work. After tweaks, changes in name, hard resets I figured out somebody plugged the cable in the local port instead of the WAN port.

In the process of trying to figure out what the heck was going on, I made desperate tries to search for the problem in Google. I found a billion problems, all different from mine. I had to read the full threads to see what is actually going on and to find out the guy forgot to plug the cable. I thought how useless all those forums are. The days of the forums for that purpose are gone. Now that wikipedia demonstrated the power of crowdsourcing for building an almost complete set of knowledge on a certain topic and well organized too, it is time to dare a little more and aim at gathering the full pack of information and not answering only random questions that pop up.

So here is another startup opportunity: If you could make site where people can build trees with branched problems, specified tests and complete solutions for a certain product, no one would ever go to forums anymore. Basically a well done flow chart but real life problems instead of variables and expressions. For example, you start from the beginning: Is it powered? The you check the lights, and either go to branches for fixing power either you go forward to next step. And at every level you are told specifically how to check what you don’t know and what it means. All of this of course has to be editable by the public. Getting all the possible problems for an airport express I am sure is actually much more achievable than it seems, considering how many millions of people there are that have knowledge on the topic.

It is basically a flowchart. I am sure a lot of companies use flow chart for problems, but I think time has come for this to become a standard practice for consumers to crowdsource all possible outcomes into one manageable application.As with all other ideas I have posted I believe there is huge potential, it is not difficult to make but I am just busy with other projects and just don’t have the resources to create it. If you do decide to do it, write out a message, I will give you extra hints, ideas, maybe help with other things. I definitely want to be a tester and can bring bunch of users too

Reflections: Toiletry

// February 5th, 2008 // No Comments » // reflections

I just don’t understand how our civilizations are thousands of years old and yet some things in our lives that are so obviously inescapable have so many flaws and opportunity for improvement. Slightly awkward and amusing but quite relevant is the topic of public restrooms. I am not a freak about cleanliness so I do use them but most of them are just so gross that even Shrek is no match for. Here are a few solutions I would love to see:

• How many generations does it take us to understand that men are sensitive about their attributes and even though you put urinals, half of men are always going to prefer to pee on the seating toilet just to get more privacy. The result of people urinating on the seat and people trying to take a shit on the same seat looks about like that:
  
  So instead, you couple one toilet with one urinal (you can see that empty space that we actually have) and you never get that pic again. Btw, that counts for a house with many boys like mine, because its much more easy to pee at a urinal than to aim at the toilet at 6.30 am…

• Oh yeah, don’t you love those transparent toilet papers that rip rather than unroll when you pull them? How can you wipe anything with it anyway? I have to fold it in 2^4. Same for paper towels at drying procedure.

• Flushing systems are just not right. Those handles (seen on pic above) that seem to need to be pulled to flush the toilets are just not having me. People pee on their hands and then what is the first thing they go for? Yeah, the flusher. Or the exit door (assuming that people that pee on their hands are the ones that don’t care washing them. If you can’t pay for sensors then please take a look at Italians’ way: they use pedals! How much more sense does it make?

• Please do not try to convince me that I have to touch anything so that I can wash my hands. Especially the idiotic push-buttons that are one for hot and one for cold water and you actually have to keep them press constantly so that water runs, consequently of which you just can’t possibly wash yourself qualitatively because hands never meet. Oh, and yeah the left one always gets burned while the right one gets cooled to freezing. I’ve seen people try to use their elbows its hilarious, believe me! Anyway. Sensors pls. Or even just regular handles would do fine. I promise, I will not waste a lot of water!
  [UPDATE: A friend of mine hinted that if you press strong enough you can get those push buttons stuck down so you can actually wash your hands. Which is exactly the opposite of saving water, since I do see them 'broken' all the time...]

• Blowdryers. Rarely dry completely and still most of them have to be pressed. Dyson so far is the only one that got it right! Or paper towels are fine. Just no crappy dryers that make me sweat more than they dry hands.
  

• Doors! What is the point of going through 15mins drying procedure when I still have to touch that door that is touched by every guy that wiped his ass and didn’t go through the drying procedure (or for that matter washing procedure). Hmm how about at least make doors pushable rather than pullable? How much does that take?

• We can’t change the mindset of a country but my school had a campaign by putting a paper above the toilets, “If you sprinkle when you tinkle, please take the time to wipe it off.” I did take time to do so when it was previously clear [only in that case]. It worked overally but as the papers got tore off, they didn’t get replaced. Cheap solution that works, because if previous person was created incentive to be clean (all of the above points) and leaves the place clean, it is much more likely for you to also clean up your stuff. Usually, generally, probably… but not always of course.

• Another problem girls seem to have – none of them actually sit on the toilet. From numerous discussions about it, it turns out lot of them just squat as low as they can without actually sitting on the toilet which is extremely difficult (I have tried it and I have failed). Still thinking about this one…

As you can see, most of those take a little thinking rather than money, and as a matter of fact they probably save money because of cutting spending on cleaners paychecks.

So if your about to build a facility with public restrooms, get in touch with me – I will consult for free.

(let me know if you have other suggestions)

Book: Freakonomics

// February 1st, 2008 // No Comments » // books

Freakonomics
by
Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

ISBN-13: 978-0061234002

I bet that 90% of you have seen Freakonomics in one of the zillion bookstores around you. To be honest I was slightly disappointed since I didn’t find any firm, solid knowledge explaining today’s economics but rather a collection of random interesting economics-related facts. I did like some of them though so here we go:

• Crack dealers actually have extremely bad jobs – they make anywhere between $3.3 and $7 with a chance of getting killed of 1/4th! Why do they keep doing it? They play in a highly competitive field where the sweet life is only the top 1%, which is what everybody wants. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
• We often seem to oversimplify the situation. That causes us to be wrong, because the simplest explanations doesn’t get to the root of problems. When crime went down significantly in the 1990 (NY) people thought this is the result of random things – “gun control”, “clever police strategies”, and “better paying jobs”. However truth now discovered is quite unexpected: since most crimes were committed by teenagers and kids in their 20′s that were badly raised with no families and future, it was the Supreme Court’s legalization of abortion in 1973 that drastically reduced unwanted children so by 1990′s crime suddenly disappeared for unknown reasons. If you don’t step back to look at a huge picture, collect massive data, and analyze to the last detail you keep thinking that it was the “clever police strategies” that killed the crime in New York City.
• Authors make a good note on people’s incentives for… uh…anything. So basically if you want to motivate someone, you have to attack in all three areas:
  • Economic motivation…paycheck, duh!
  • Moral – you have to make someone believe that what they are doing is right and good for everybody. Painful example – Army.
  • Social – we want to be approved by other people so it is important that they accept our actions. Bring A’s from school and your parents are happy and you feel good about that.

  That being said now, we have to be careful not to create wrong incentives through others. Ex. In a daycare center, parents that are late picking up their kids started being charged $3. Surprisingly, after that surcharge was introduced many more parents started coming late. Why? Because the moral incentive has been replaced by the economic, but the economic wasn’t large enough to hold. So parents basically assumed that it is OKay to leave the kid longer and pay the money – “daycare center makes more”

• Somewhere around the book I saw a wonderful analysis of risk and people’s reactions to it. It looks like that:
  RISK = HAZARD + OUTRAGE
  (How dangerous) + (how much people are excited about it, and talk about it)
  OUTRAGE is significantly higher if risk occurs NOW – terrorist attack vs heart attack (more people die from heart attack, i don’t have to say it)
  OUTRAGE is significantly higher if we have NO CONTROL – plane accidents vs car accidents (as you might expect, chances of being in a car accident are many times higher than being in an airplane accident)
  So if the hazard is high and outrage is low – people under react
  But if the outrage is high and hazard is low, then people overreact
  So here is another fascinating example – rate of kids drowned in a residential pool is much higher than kids that shot themselves with guns. More specifically 11,000 to 1! So why are parents freaking out about guns and barely caring about their own swimming pools?

As a whole it was fun to read, but little helpful knowledge to be learned except this one lesson: Dig deep when you research, you’ll find amazing answers…

Book: Decoding The Universe

// January 28th, 2008 // No Comments » // books

Decoding the Universe
by
Charles Seife

ISBN-10: 067003441X

This one is somewhat a sidetrack from the entrepreneurial nature of his blog but I am still putting it since it has got some quote interesting points about… everything. It is a little technical but bearable. Here’s a few highlights:

• It used to be that scientists believed energy was the one unit, building block of the universe. Since we knew that matter turns into energy and vice versa, that seemed understandable. This book has a new proposition for building block – information. Anything contains information about itself and the surroundings and also can be reduced to bits and qubits.
• No information can be transmitted magically for free. It takes time and energy to do so…or rather it takes more information.
• You can’t measure information without altering what you are measuring. If you are measuring light you have to use some of its photons to trigger your measuring device.
• Quantum supposition means that one coin falls heads and tails and rolls at the same time until someone (or something) decides to check the result. At this point all the possible outcomes, by which he defines entropy, collapse into 1 single outcome.
• Charles Seife also proposes a reductionist view of the purpose of our existence: all we are is an organism that keeps randomness from happening by methods (DNA replication) powered mostly by the sun.
• One neuron of a fly can transmit 5bits per millisecon. (: how fascinating!

On a slightly off topic – he also talks of speed of light and why it can’t be overreached and I wonder why this method of transporting information can’t surpass c(c is speed of light): you have 2 bars extremely long, crossed at a very very small angle like so:

As you move bar1 the crossing point will travel along from one end to the other.

The angle of the bar crossing determins basically the speed of travelling of intersection point (information). Now we have a cap which we want to achieve and surpass (speed of light) but we don’t have any limitations on how small the angle is (I mean we are thinking theoretically here). So why can’t we reduce the angle (keeping the movement constant) till we get speed higher than c?

Waiting for comments…

Book: Stumbling on Happiness

// January 26th, 2008 // No Comments » // books

Stumbling on Happiness
by
Daniel Gilbert

ISBN-13: 978-1400042661

Every now and then you stumble on a book most randomly that overturns the way you think about something in life. In this brilliant explanation of why people are poor at predicting what makes them happy, the psychology professor Daniel Gilbert brings tons of evidence and research that will blow you away. I urge you to get that book and read it no matter what you do in life. Here’s a few reasons why:

• What is interesting about optical illusions is not that we all make mistakes but that we all make the SAME mistakes. Trying to predict how you will feel about something in future happens to abide the same “lawful, regular, and systematic” mistakes. In other words, there are reasons why we are bad at knowing what makes us happy.
• Phineas Gage is a guy whose head got pierced with a metal bar. He survived but had partly damaged frontal lobe but functioned normally. Subsequent studies led to the understanding that removing this part of brain could calm people down. 1930′s this became a practice for angry bipolar patients. And it worked until someone discovered that those patients had no concept of future. They blank out when they have to plan ahead and think of future. The connection here, “The key to happiness, fulfillment, and enlightenment, the ex-professor argued, was to stop thinking so much about the future.” Makes sense doesn’t it? Why think about crashing plane if it won’t crash? Why think of being victim of terrorist attack if you won’t? Most of our lives we deal with useless worrying about stuff that never happens.
• He explains that our ability to imagine future and remember past are quite flawed and super-influenced by our present moment. You overeat and you tell yourself, “I will never eat so much again, my stomach hurts” and your future of not eating so much is influenced by the current pain in the stretching stomach. But wait till tomorrow only and you are ready do devour the new meal with no traces left of your previous vows. He explains it really well.
• I already wrote a post the amazing observation that we are horribly bad at dealing with ‘negative’ information. Information that is not in front of us and is not easy to see.

one more

• “Because those interpretations [of the world by our brain] are usually so good, because they usually bear such a striking resemblance to the world as it is actually constituted, we do not realize that we are seeing an interpretation” and “…because we do not consciously supervise the construction of these mental images, we tend to treat them as we treat memories and perceptions – initially assuming that they are accurate representations of the objects we are imagining.”

The book is filled with fantastic observations about our miserable wretched prediction of what makes us happy. Buy it here. Oh, and btw, he also says that it turns out people feel much worse about not trying something than trying and getting it wrong.

Getting to James Hong

// November 20th, 2007 // No Comments » // books

[not spam]

The more I read what he writes (blog), what he says (eg. interview w/ Jessica Livingston from Founders At Work), or watch videos of him (with Guy Kawasaki) the more I think he is really amazing. Firm thinking, good decisions, awesome philosophy. I really want to meet him and maybe ask a few questions.

Turns out though I can’t find his email (I guess he took it down so crazy girls don’t bother him). The only way seems to be registering on hotornot.com and click “Meet James Hong” but invitations from a guy on hotornot is going to be way too awkward (if not spammed anyway).

So here I ask of you: send one email to the most likely of your good friends that might know someone, that might know someone else that might know….James Hong(‘s email) and paste as text this entry. Let’s see how long (how many hops) it takes if it ever gets through. I will report results in an update.

Thanx a bunch,
Petar Petrov
mgpepe@gmail.com

http://www.entrepreneur2be.com/2007/11/20/getting-to-james-hong/

Idea: Dating/Meeting Site In Real Life

// October 18th, 2007 // 5 Comments » // ideas

Trigger: I went for another weekend to Boston. I was thinking about Artificial Intelligence and how I can make a simple Artificial Neural Network to learn some simple concept. How could I get in touch with someone that knows how to do that? I am in Boston after all, there are plenty of amazing colleges (MIT, Harvard blah blah) that have professors teaching this stuff. And as a matter of fact as I am walking around the streets of Boston, I am probably seeing them all around…except, I don’t know it.

The Problem: The big problem, I thought, was that no one knows anything about anyone on the streets. These are people that just come and go without giving you one bit of information (the look of a person is exception, which if you think about it is the prime way of meeting people online – pictures). At the same time, plenty of people that go past you in the grocery store are probably very interesting people with whom you can connect very well. The only way to find anything about strangers is to talk to them. But how do you know who to talk to? Should you act like a nuts job and talk to anyone?

The Idea: It would have been nice therefore to have a website where you can put specific information you are characterized with and information you are looking in other people. In my case I am looking for someone that is working with ANN. Once I setup those preferences I walk out to the open world. I carry a phone/watch/device that connects wirelessly to other such devices, checks the preferences of two people walking by each other and beeps if they match.

This way, I can walk around in CompUSA and meet ‘randomly’ a professor in ANN that was looking for a flat screen, he would probably be more than happy to talk about it, since he posted it on his profile for that specific reason. This taps into a totally new way of dating/meeting services, because it has the following very important advantages:
. . . (1) It is much more natural. There is a very big problem with dating sites: it’s the notion that if you are signing up on one, you are probably doing it out of despair b/c you have tried all your real life alternatives (or so you think). This moral underlying guilt prevents many people from using such services. But if you could meet someone in such a natural random way (on the street while shopping) then things look a whole lot different.
. . . (2) Confidentiality of information. There are many cases in which you want to make a piece of information available to the public but at the same time really only to certain people and not to others. Take a weird but true example – HIV positive person. He wants to find a date (most probably HIV positive too) so he has to state that fact and make it available to public. However it would have been nice if only the other HIV positive people new, rather than just about anyone that can exploit that information. Thus your device will only beep on the right occasions.

Difficulties: I discussed it for few days with Alek. We had the idea of making it work with cell phones because it will be easier to start the service. However, it turns out GPRS and bluetooth will not be a very likely option. Wifi could work if the area is fully covered, but again, I think cell phones are at a disadvantage. Also anything else that is more practical (a watch or a device specifically designed for the purpose) will be too expensive and will require investment and experience, neither of which we have. You got better ideas on execution, get in touch with me! You have that ready? I will definitely sign up!