January 2012
1 post
“I want to make sure that I distinguish between net-promoter score and the ‘very...”
– Sean Ellis - http://mixergy.com/sean-ellis-interview/
December 2011
4 posts
yongfook: Accidental Entrepreneurs Don't Exist →
yongfook:
In response to this post.
The fairytale of an entrepreneur having an “aha!” moment - which transforms their business into a billion dollar public company - glosses over the months or years of wading through shit it took to get to that “aha!” moment.
The general sentiment of the author’s post…
We Need Someone to Bridge the Gap
It’s 48 hours before elections close for the NYTM Board. Last year I outlined my reasons for voting for Evan Korth of NYU/HackNY and here I’d like to explain the reasoning behind my vote for this year.
Let’s start by asking: What’s missing from the NYTM Board?
Take a look at the Board and you’ll see a cast of accomplished and inspiring people. Dawn Barber, Scott...
“Politicians and businessmen have re-discovered the power of Lenin’s old idea...”
– http://miltonglaser.com/pages/milton/mg_index.html
nayiaisms: Never stop chasing your windmills →
nayiaisms:
And turning to Sancho, Don Quixote said: “Forgive me, my friend, for the opportunity I gave you to seem as mad as I, making you fall into the error into which I fell, thinking that there were and are knights errant in the world.”
“Oh!” responded Sancho, weeping. “Don’t die, Señor; your grace…
November 2011
5 posts
Stay Humble
Quote From Seth Godin: “No one cares about you, not even your mother-in-law. No ones eagerly waiting your press release.”
What You Can Learn From It: There is no deadlier mistake in marketing than narcissism. Truly effective marketing is not even about how great you think your product is – it is about what it can do to change or enhance your customer’s lives. Do not waste time focusing on...
Asshole Survivorship Bias
Turn your back on others and succeed, everything’s ok. Turn your back on others and fail, it’s a long way down.
Why Founders Should Emulate Wozniak, Not Jobs
Having just read Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, I’ve come to realize just how many misconceptions there are about his life and who he was. In an era of Steve Jobs fan boys, I think it’s important founders understand the truth and not misguidedly emulate him.
More specifically, founders should think about something: Jobs was not a great founder. The early success of Apple was more...
October 2011
2 posts
The Problems with Accelerators
group think
companies all look the same
not doing anything crazy
regress to the mean
via @LawrenceLenihan
How to Overcome Your Fatal Flaw
One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is fatal flaws. Basically, what’s that one thing that is going to hold you back (perhaps systematically) from achieving your goals. For most people (and for me), this is a deep seated & recurring problem they’ve dealt with for a while. It could be caused by the way they were brought up, your personality, your physiology, or a...
September 2011
1 post
NYU Computer Science Job Fair
STARTUPS GET ON THIS!
NYU’s Computer Science and Technology Career Fair will be held on Wed, Oct 19, 2011 from 10am to 12noon. The Fair offers companies an opportunity to fill internship and employment openings, share your company ‘brand’ with NYU students, and network with other organizations. Attendees will meet both graduate and undergraduate students interested in computer...
August 2011
3 posts
“It turns out that the most important data point driving their earlier preference...”
– http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/08/05/ben-horowitz-there%E2%80%99s-a-fine-line-between-fear-and-courage/
“I’m a pretty lousy coder - I’m actually just doing stuff w/ scripting languages...”
– Dennis Crowley, founder of Foursquare (via nateberkopec)
Lesson 2: If your customer loves your idea, ignore... →
imaleanmachine:
Lesson 2 for my weekend at Lean Startup Machine follows Lesson 1. I learned that having a lot of potential customers say the liked an idea did not mean I had a viable product.
When we were hunting for good ideas, we had the brilliant idea (we thought) to go to BigAppsNYC.com where New Yorkers…
July 2011
8 posts
How Fortunes Are Lost
If you’d asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I’d have said by spending all their money. That’s how it happens in books and movies, because that’s the colorful way to do it. But in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments.
It’s hard to spend a fortune without noticing. Someone with ordinary...
Where To Double-Down
There’s the people in your life who’ve helped you without thinking anything of it. They believe in you more than you believe in yourself, and continue to do so.
Then there’s the people in your life who are like empty promises. They keep you moving with a carrot hanging from a stick. And you may never realize, that you’re not going anywhere.
20 Minute Stretching Routine
When I was competing in wrestling I used to do this every routine every night before bed, archiving it here
Hold each pose for 60 seconds, no resting
Lower Body
Sit and reach both legs
Standing feet apart lean to one side, groin stretch
Spinal twist each side
Lying on back, buttocks stretch
Lying on back, hamstring stretch each leg
Lying on back, knee to opposite shoulder
Sit Indian...
Adversity is Progress
Pain is motivation, failure is learning, discomfort is growth.
Right now, are you taking the hardest path possible? Did you previously doubt, that you could do what you’re doing now? Are you willing to push yourself to the limit, only to barely survive?
Ask yourself how hard your life is now, because only the skilled play on the most difficult levels.
3 tags
You have the passion
If the founder and CEO can’t sell the product, no one can. Not even the best salesperson.
Founders have permission to go a little nuts when they talk about their product. They can talk 100 words per minute. 90% of communication isn’t what you’re saying. Pique people’s interest. If you’re not a little crazy, your probably not an entrepreneur.
Engaging Followers
Last week I had an awesome convo w/ @khoi over invisible burgers about life, startups, blogging, and building a following.
Take-aways:
It takes a lot of time & effort to build a following
You have to enjoy it, the effort can’t be “work”
1. Khoi’s been blogging on Subtraction.com years before Twitter came along. From the success of his blog and he then became one of...
Not Everything's a Tech Startup
The first goal of a founder should be to create widespread positive change. In some situations, there are better tools than the web for this. It depends on the problem and what you’re trying to change. People’s minds, behaviors, and attitudes are all persuaded differently by mediums (written, video, interactive, etc).
June 2011
5 posts
Watchamazing interview
favorite part ~37:30
“There’s only one thought I think about when I pitch brands, ie. I’m meeting with execs at major media companies and the type of people like why would they want to meet with me? I think: the last year, if these events did not occur, I would be nothing and would be sitting around doing nothing. This is the most exciting thing that has ever...
“I’ve found there are two types of thoughts especially worth...”
– http://paulgraham.com/top.html
Nile Perch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile_perch
Zen Focus
The ability to keep a single train of thought may be the most important (unstructured) part of getting to breakthrough ideas. [see Osborn’s method]
Now, imagine how much is wasted on extraneous thoughts, simple distractions, lack of routine or discipline. The longer can you hold your mind on the problem you’re trying to solve, the more you surround yourself in it, the better.
...
The only thing that matters
Having great content on your blog doesn’t matter.
Having thousands of twitter followers doesn’t matter.
Knowing every VC in town doesn’t matter.
Having the most talented team doesn’t matter.
It just matters that you accomplish something significant. When you do this, people will subscribe to your blog, they’ll follow you on twitter, every VC will want to know you,...
Eye of the tiger
When you really want it, other people can feel it. It radiates your very being. Your focus, your posture, the way you speak, and the look in your eyes. Your quickness to respond. Your absolute refusal to give up or to slow down.
Required reading: Think and Grow Rich - Chapter 1
May 2011
10 posts
You set the vision
Organizations must have one vision that everyone from top to bottom follows and believes in. It’s the founder/CEO’s job to set the right vision. The vision isn’t crowd-sourced (to the team or the customers), it comes from within. Vision is the end goal, it’s the motivation.
Sometimes if someone in the organization doesn’t agree with the vision, that just means...
The Fallacy of Genius
There’s no such thing as a genius. The truth is that everyone has the affinity for a few things. And out of those things, we can only pick one to be the best at. Then it takes years in the right environment to succeed. But how many people choose just one thing or even choose the right thing? How many people make sacrifices to put themselves in the right environment?
Very few.
Experiment Design (notes from #SLLConf)
Experiments are a great way to test hypotheses, not to form them.
Have a specific hypothesis.
Ask the right questions.
Ask the right people.
Ask enough people.
Randomized control trial.
thanks @jamesbirchler for a great presentation
more resources at http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
The Power to Transform
Breakthroughs come from people that possess the power to transform.
Consider the drive, focus, and time it takes to become natively fluent in a foreign language as an adult. To lose over 100 pounds. To train for and complete an ironman without athletic ability. To summit Mount Everest. It takes more than this to turn an intangible idea into a human organization. To turn nothing into something. To...
Think Long Term
Adjust your mindset to think about everything you do as an investment in the long-term. How you spend your time, the things you seek to learn, your health, and your independence. Be cognizant of how you treat others and what you say. Be punctual, give off positive energy. The small things add up and they multiply.
One of the most important things in your long-term development is who you surround...
You are a leader
I’ll never forget when Steve Liu first went on stage to do stand-up. He got up there infront of the whole crowd and started his set by saying, “I’m not a comedian… by the way, I’m not a comedian.”
As a leader of any organization, people will look to you to take the first step. Leaders must be assertive and help drive outcomes, speak with authority and be...
Three keys to taking the leap
From all my conversations with entrepreneurs coming out of the Lean Startup Machine, they need 3 things-
a little money
a mentor
coworking space
How you know people are getting it
They start saying
“What evidence do you have to support that idea.”
&
“What’s the smallest thing we could build to prove that.”
thanks @thinknow for this
April 2011
1 post
thoughts, ideas && signs of a struggle: MVP #1 -... →
stevesdrop:
Disclaimer: This is a new series which asks the question: “What’s the least I can do to be considered good at ____”
Most people will complain with the way I’m using the term MVP, but for the sake of brevity I’m going to call these posts the “MVP series.”
—-
These are the minimal steps you need…
March 2011
2 posts
“I was building as fast as I could break ground,” he says. “Bang, bang, bang: I...”
– http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/magazine/06murdock-t.html?
“We value trust, respect, and consensus. We don’t invest in companies that...”
– http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/my-partners.html
1 tag
#LsmBoston
One team had what I thought sounded like a brilliant business idea — a hotels.com for boats. However, within 1 hour of going to a boat show in the Boston Marina, they found their idea didn’t solve a problem at all. None of their potential customers were excited about it. The funny thing is that they ran into a vendor who had been working on the same idea for the last 3 years, and he...
February 2011
4 posts
Fred Wilson on Lean Startup Methodology
http://bostonvcblog.typepad.com/vc/2011/02/fred-wilson-comes-to-harvard-business-school.html
Early on in a start-up, entrepreneurs should be hunch-driven more than data-driven. If you are only data-driven, the risk is that you will move too slowly. It’s more important to have a hypothesis about what might work and what might not work and then see what happens in the marketplace to prove...
5 tags
How to spark real student venture creation
My friend Brad Hargreaves recently blogged about the weaknesses of business plan competitions.
I’ve been waiting to give my thoughts on this as well and while Brad offers some interesting ideas, I don’t think business plan competitions need to be redesigned, they need to be done away with.
First, why I know what I’m talking about: I’m recently on leave from NYU where I...
NYU's Women Entrepreneurs Festival
Last weekend (Jan 28) I was one of the lucky attendees at NYU ITP’s Women Entrepreneurs Festival aka #WEFestival on Twitter.
#WEFestival was truly one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended. And I’m someone who organizes conferences as a job (ie. Lean Startup Machine). So let me go into why this event was so amazing:
Firstly, #WEFestival was kept extremely intimate and...
January 2011
3 posts
Common Mistakes at #LSMsf
Congrats to our three winners at Lean Startup Machine San Francisco! These three teams rocked it and came up with awesome products. One even made money!
As a postmortem I thought I would go over some of the mistakes teams made as it’s our goal in future events to have every team perform at the level of our three winners. These are simple mistakes that could easily be avoided.
.
1. Not...
“If a movie were to be made of Mr. Ferriss’s life, it would star Matthew...”
– http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/books/07book.html
Notes from Chicago LSM
Lean Startup Mindset: “If my life depended upon it, what’s the least amount of work I have to do [to test this]?”
Before you sell your project, try to sell magic.
Concierge MVP -> FoodOnTheTable.com -> Went to supermarket and tried to sell imaginary app, kept everything manually until they needed to take on more customers.
December 2010
3 posts
4 tags
The Solution to NYC's Tech Talent Woes
The NY Tech Meetup is electing two new members to its board. It’s now up to us to choose who will drive the most positive change in our community over the next several years.
Let’s start off by asking, how can we make the most positive change over the next several years?
Only one answer comes to my mind: increase the pool of startup-oriented technical talent in NYC.
So there’s two ways to...