Category Archives: Startup

Startup, Success

The lesser-known member of Facebook’s original team is ready for the spotlight

One of the original five Harvard students who helped build the largest social network in the world walks into a gastropub just a few blocks away from the dorm room where it all began. The handful of students and staff who have returned to campus on this bitterly cold January day show no signs of recognizing him. The host seats him without a second glance. The waitress breaks his heart by announcing they don’t serve root beer.

“I have a really complicated relationship with Harvard,” Andrew McCollum says after finishing his meal. McCollum, 31, who still has the look of a college student with jeans, a casual half-zip sweater and some light scruff, has moved away from Harvard multiple times over the years. Somehow, though, he always seems to end up back in this place. After all, this is the school that changed his life. “I definitely got some amazing things out of Harvard. I met Mark and Dustin and the other Facebook guys.”

McCollum became friends with Mark Zuckerberg through the many computer science classes they took together in Harvard and was one of the first people Zuckerberg told about his idea for The Facebook before it launched on Feb. 4, 2004. For more than a year after that, McCollum worked as part of the small founding team in Boston and later Palo Alto, California. Like Zuckerberg and cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, McCollum left Harvard to work full-time on the startup.

Then, in 2005, just as it was becoming clear that Facebook was taking off, McCollum did what now sounds unthinkable: He left Facebook and went back to school.

For the better part of the next decade, McCollum kept a low profile on and off campus. He got a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s degree in education, traveled to 40 countries in a year, invested in and worked with startups behind the scenes. Humble by nature, according to friends and colleagues, McCollum stayed away from press and was effectively a footnote in the official Facebook story. He’s mentioned a handful of times in media articles and in The Facebook Effect, the authorized history of the company, mostly as a guy in the background. The other four original Harvard students are listed as cofounders on Facebook, but not Andrew McCollum. And no, you won’t hear his name mentioned in The Social Network movie.

At the end of last year, McCollum decided to tiptoe into the spotlight. He agreed to take over as the CEO of Philo, a 4-year old live TV streaming service for college campuses, backed by nearly $9 million in funding and based a couple blocks from the Harvard campus. Philo had already enjoyed comparisons to Facebook: it was founded by two Harvard students who have since taken a page from the social network’s playbook of spreading first across college campuses.

By bringing on a CEO who was present during Facebook’s earliest days, Philo now gains an even greater claim to being the heir apparent. It may also get first-hand insights into the product strategy that drove Facebook’s success. On the other hand, it’s putting someone in the top spot who has never served as a CEO of a startup. If Philo succeeds in reshaping the TV experience for a broad swath of viewers, McCollum may get the kind of public credit for helping to build up the “next Facebook” that he shied away from after working on the original one. If it doesn’t work out, he may simply be known as the guy who left.

Read more here :: http://mashable.com/2015/02/04/andrew-mccollum-facebook/

Related Posts

  • 17 Facts About Warren Buffett And His Wealth That Will Blow Your Mind
    80
    Warren Buffett has been incredibly successful, and he's extremely wealthy. Warren Buffett's wealth jumped by around $12.7 billion in 2013 alone. But how much is $12.7 billion anyway? And how good an investor is Warren Buffett really? We've put together some facts that really put him in perspective. Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/mindblowing-facts-warren-buffett-2014-8?op=1#ixzz3BZbB6BSz
    Tags: trading, success
  • Bill Gross’s Style of Investing in Bond
    75
    Bonds have never been an attractive type of Investment. People consider them boring, conservative, with the least potentiality and the maximum uncertainty of the risk of losing money. Bill Gross, the co-founder of PIMCO (Pacific Investment Management Co.) managed to win the fear of the Bond market. He took his…
    Tags: trading, success
  • Warren Buffett's Right-Hand Man Reveals His Secrets for Success
    74
      Have you ever wondered what the secret to Warren Buffett's success is? It turns out Charlie Munger -- Buffett's right-hand man at Berkshire Hathaway  -- is happy to share.   he remarkable success Much has been said from outsiders -- like myself -- about Buffett and the various things…
    Tags: success, trading
  • girighet är dåligt för vanliga aktieägare.
    72
    Girighet, av individer eller av företag, är aldrig, någonsin bra för aktieägarna. Det kan erbjuda vissa kortsiktiga vinster i aktiekurserna men det kommer oundvikligen att hamna i katastrof. Här är ett enkelt tips: de flesta företag har idag ett visst uppdrag som förklarar vad de står för. Om det talar…
    Tags: success, trading
  • Virtu Financial seeks billions from listing
    64
    Virtu Financial, a US electronic market maker, is poised for a stock marketlisting this month in a move that will test investors' attitude to the controversialpractice of high-frequency trading. Its success or otherwise will help decide if some asset managers and long-terminvestors - who are often cited as the victims…
    Tags: trading, success
Startup, Success

Good and Bad Reasons to Become an Entrepreneur

Source : https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/good-and-bad-reasons-to-become-an-entrepreneur-decf0766de8d

Recently we hosted a Q&A at Asana that I participated in with Ben Horowitz, Matt Cohler, and Justin Rosenstein. Marcus Wohlsen from Wired attended and wrote an article that discussed our views on the culture of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. This is an important topic, so I want to take some time to clarify what we meant in this blog post. Before I do, I’d like to emphasize that we were talking exclusively about Silicon Valley culture and not the more general ‘small business entrepreneur.’ So for our audience at the time, entrepreneur meant “Silicon Valley startup technology entrepreneur.”

Even given that context, it is notable that we all said you “probably” shouldn’t be an entrepreneur, not that you definitely shouldn’t. This is explicitly a directional position; we believe there are too many startups and entrepreneurs in the SV ecosystem, but that is very different from saying there shouldn’t be any. Many people think there should be more, and we are counterbalancing that view. Whenever you counterbalance an extreme view, you tend to also come off extremely, and certainly do in the media (which is related to the point I made about integration in my last post).

The reason we like best for becoming an entrepreneur is that you are extremely passionate about an idea and believe that starting a new company is the best way to bring it into the world. The passion is important because entrepreneurship is hard and you’ll need it to endure the struggle, as well as to convince other people to help you. Believing that starting a new company is the best way to bring it into the world is important to ensure that resources—including most importantly your own time — are being put to the best possible use. If the idea is best brought into the world by an existing team, then it is tautologically optimal for the world for it to happen that way. Of course, not everyone is actually trying to optimize their impact, but many entrepreneurs are, by their own admission, and it is important for those people to consider this angle.

If you’re not trying to maximize impact, then it seems like a reasonable assumption that you are instead optimizing around personal lifestyle preferences of some kind. You want total freedom to choose how you make your living, regardless of if it necessarily provide large amounts of value to other people or perhaps is even redundant with something that already exists. Or you want extreme flexibility in your schedule, maybe including the ability to stop working altogether for long periods of time at short notice. Or you want to work on a certain kind of problem or with certain kinds of people. For many kinds of preference, you likely can actually find a company able to give them to you, but certainly starting your own is a great shortcut and I personally think that’s totally reasonable. I like people who are seeking to have big impact on the world, but it is not the only path worth taking, and I have no reason to denigrate this type of entrepreneur.

So with all that in mind, here are some of the bad reasons to become an entrepreneur that we were actually trying to speak to:

“People have this vision of being the CEO of a company they started and being on top of the pyramid. Some people are motivated by that, but that’s not at all what it’s like.

What it’s really like: everyone else is your boss – all of your employees, customers, partners, users, media are your boss. I’ve never had more bosses and needed to account for more people today.

The life of most CEOs is reporting to everyone else, at least that’s what it feels like to me and most CEOs I know. If you want to exercise power and authority over people, join the military or go into politics. Don’t be an entrepreneur.”

  • You think it’s glamorous. The media does a great job idolizing various entrepreneurs, crowning Kings and designating Godfathers of various mafias, but this is all colorful narrative. The reality is years of hard work, throughout which you usually have no idea if you’re even moving in the right direction.
  • You believe you’re extremely talented and that this is the way to maximize your financial return on that talent. Why wouldn’t you want more of the cap table? This is flawed logic, since the 100th engineer at Facebook made far more money than 99% of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Small slices of gigantic pies are still themselves gigantic. If you’re extremely talented, you can easily identify a company with high growth potential and relatively low risk and get an aggressive compensation package from them. If you turn out to be wrong after a few years, you can try again. Within 2 or 3 tries, and likely on the first one, you’ll have a great outcome and can be confident you contributed serious lasting value to the world. If you instead try to immediately start “the next Google or Facebook”, there is a very high likelihood that you will fail completely, or be forced to settle for a much smaller outcome. It will take a long time to reach success or failure, so you won’t have many tries.

Related Posts

  • Jack Dorsey Interview
    82
    Intressting Jack Dorsey Interview.
    Tags: success, startup
  • Uber’s Brilliant Strategy to Make Itself Too Big to Ban
    80
    The question of how Uber would spend its billion-dollar investment was never really much of a riddle. More rides in more places has always been the plan. But with its ten-figure cushion, the San Francisco-based ride-hailing startup can be more cunning about how it tries to get huge. Uber wants to grow…
    Tags: success, startup
  • See how these fast-growing, innovative companies are redefining money lending, e-commerce, and more.
    79
    Often, the only way to get ahead is to have a great plan. Which is exactly what makes the companies below so special. It's not just that they're making the big bucks (and they are doing that). This small group of companies from the Inc. 5000 class of 2014 are notable for their…
    Tags: great, success, startup
  • 10 Movies Every Entrepreneur Needs to Watch
    79
    No one ever said being an entrepreneur would be easy. A million obstacles seem to stand in the way each and every day. The naysayers and budget woes can be enough for the average person to start waving the white flag. But you are not an average person: You’re an entrepreneur.…
    Tags: entrepreneur, success, startup
  • Interview With Bill Gurley: The Guy Who Backed OpenTable, Yelp, GrubHub, Twitter, Zillow And Uber
    77
    What do OpenTable, Yelp, GrubHub, Twitter, Zillow, and Uber have in common? Bill Gurley, and of course his firm Benchmark. In my opinion, Bill’s at the top of the top venture capitalists today. With a deep background in engineering, capital markets, and venture (not to mention basketball), he’s got all the…
    Tags: great, entrepreneurs, success, startup
Startup, Success, trend

Google’s mission is to organize the worlds’ information, but they won’t stop there

( Source : http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2015/02/03/google-enters-the-collaborative-economy-in-a-big-way/ )

Here comes Google, with a series of five market moves injecting them as a central player for the collaborative economy.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. But it doesn’t just start and stop there. They also want to organize the world’s logistics, commerce, local transportation, service economy, and even how people obtain and receive loans.

In the past, our perspective of the Collaborative Economy has been through startups, like Airbnb, oDesk, Lyft, Uber and Lending Club that enable people to get what they need from each other, using commonly available technologies like online marketplaces and mobile apps.

Today, Google has entered the Collaborative Economy with a series of announcements that leave a casual reader scratching their. But placing the announcements line by line, you can see an organized attempt to enter this space traditionally dominated by early stage startups.

  1. Google is a major investor in Uber and Lending Club. They started with investments, a great way to test the waters. Google Ventures made their largest investment in Uber ($258 million), lending promise for a future of a lifestyle and logistics app which enables people to bypass car ownership and more. Then, Google invested in the P2P money-lending platform, Lending Club ($110 million), which enables individuals to bypass traditional banks. This gives Google additional market insight and a foothold from which to deploy.
  2. Google plans to roll out self-driving cars, competing with car manufactures. Last year, Google unveiled their friendly-looking, self-driving car, which they suggest will enable anyone to be mobile, reclaim time driving, and reduce the need for car ownership. In Silicon Valley, I often see self-driving Google cars whizzing around in Mountain View and on the major freeway, U.S. 101. Google suggests that these will be available in mass production for the public within five to 10 years.
  3. Google now resells P2P loans, competing with banks. P2P marketplaces of buyers and sellers are in every aspect of society. Take a look at the Collaborative Economy version 2.0 to see over twelve industries that are impacted. Last month, Google announced they’re going to resell bank loans from Lending Club, reducing the need for individuals to get loans from banks, competing directly on ease and price.
  4. Google partners with Airbnb and Lyft, challenging hotels and taxis. Last week, Google announced the expansion of “Google Now,” a mobile app that intends to be the starting point for our daily needs. They will aggregate Airbnb and Lyft data and more, enabling us to quickly and efficiently find the right on-demand services in real time. Don’t expect the partnership to stop there. Just as Google leaned into Open Social to connect with many social networks, they’ll partner with many startups who want to connect their API. Imagine Homejoy, Yerdle, Sprig, Instacart, TaskRabbit, Munchery SpoonRocket, and others.
  5. Google is reportedly building a ride hailing app to compete with Uber. It has been suggested that self-driving cars could be idling in our neighborhoods, waiting for us to order food, groceries, electronics, or even get a ride. With this new system, people are sharing ownership of cars with neighbors, hailing them on demand. It’s worth noting that Uber was absent in last week’s announcement of Google Now, although a partnership with Lyft was announced.

What it means to the Ecosystem:
Google’s announcements, in sequence spell considerable impacts to the entire ecosystem of startups, purists, investors, businesses, merchants, and of course, to the people, here’s how each ecosystem player is impacted:

  • Google will be in a dominant position if they can successfully deploy. Google is the homepage of the internet and, as a result, the start of the Collaborative Economy, as they own the ‘intent’ phase with Google Search. In the future, they’ll organize information about what people need, and be able to deliver in real time, dolling out links and customers to startups, sometimes through their self-driving vehicles.
  • Google and Uber are in a tenuous relationship. Over a year ago, I predicted that Uber + Google is a threat to Amazon. In reality, it looks more like Google may be a threat to Uber and Amazon, as they could potentially offer the same things, but on a broader scale. Google has greater ambitions and, perhaps, the business models (or egos) don’t align at Google and their investment, Uber.
  • Startups have no choice but to evaluate partnering with Google. By connecting to Google Now’s API, they can quickly gain market expansion by potentially being listed in search results, tapping a verified set of Google users, accessing new data types (like intent and location), and accessing historical customer data, all on a proven platform that will stand the test of time.
  • Sharing economy idealists feel threatened as large, tech companies embrace the concept. The notion of quaint neighborhood sharing will quickly be supplanted as Google makes it easy for ordinary people to participate in this new economy. The one difference is that, when sharing is efficient, it actually looks like an on-demand delivery model. I’ll stand firm, that this is tech-based commerce and capitalism, not neo-socialism.
  • Investors embrace Google’s streamlining of the market. This injection of such a large entity further validates the investment thesis that collaboration of unwanted resources in two-sided marketplaces is a profitable business. With Google’s multi-million dollar cash injection and shared offerings of search, apps and self-driving cars, they’ll provide additional market acceleration.
  • Brands seek to separate hype from reality with new commerce models. Many are already deeply hooked into Google’s ad business. Eventually, they’ll have the opportunity to offer their wares, services and solutions on the Google Now platform, as well as connect to various APIs to expand their business reach. Google+ self-driving cars spells opportunity for local merchants, restaurants, and retailers who seek solutions for the ‘final mile’ of delivery.
  • For the people, this mainstreams access to real-time services rather than ownership. Most importantly, for the public, and I mean mainstream, normal people, this provides validity for the Collaborative Economy. Using commonly available search tools or apps, people can quickly get services, rides and products from companies in one trusted space: Google.

Google’s mission is to organize the worlds’ information, but they won’t stop there. They’ll also organize our delivery, our transportation, our food service, our money, and our lives.

Here comes Google. Get ready.

Related Posts

  • Jack Dorsey Interview
    72
    Intressting Jack Dorsey Interview.
    Tags: success, startup
  • Uber’s Brilliant Strategy to Make Itself Too Big to Ban
    70
    The question of how Uber would spend its billion-dollar investment was never really much of a riddle. More rides in more places has always been the plan. But with its ten-figure cushion, the San Francisco-based ride-hailing startup can be more cunning about how it tries to get huge. Uber wants to grow…
    Tags: success, startup
  • See how these fast-growing, innovative companies are redefining money lending, e-commerce, and more.
    69
    Often, the only way to get ahead is to have a great plan. Which is exactly what makes the companies below so special. It's not just that they're making the big bucks (and they are doing that). This small group of companies from the Inc. 5000 class of 2014 are notable for their…
    Tags: success, startup
  • WhatsApp becomes most popular messaging app with 600 million users
    68
    WhatsApp CEO and founder Jan Koum tweeted that the popular messaging app user-base has now been increased to 600 million. Earlier in April, it was announced that WhatsApp had 500 million active users. Surprisingly, the instant messaging space has been growing by leaps and bounds. It is worth noting that WhatsApp…
    Tags: success, startup
  • Who bought, funded or exited the most Bay Area startups?
    67
    Orginal post here  : http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/08/15/who-bought-or-funded-the-most-bay-rea-startups.html?page=all The venture investor that has backed the most startups in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco area in the past five years is 500 Startups. But the one with the most exits of companies it has backed is Sequoia Capital, and the company that has bought the…
    Tags: google, success, startup
Startup

Twitter struggles to get new users, its revenue side is killing it

In 2009 Twitter was a 50-person company punching way above its weight in cultural impact, its micro-blogging platform blasting its way into the public imagination. But its ambitions were even higher. According to leaked internal documents, the company had privately set goals over the next few years of a billion users and well over a billion dollars of annual revenue. Many people thought that the first goal was inevitable and that the second would be a slog. After all, Twitter’s user base was skyrocketing much in the way of other Internet phenoms like Facebook and Google. But there was virtually no income and no monetization plan in sight. When a Twitter co-founder appeared on the Colbert Report that spring, the host remarked, “So I assume that ‘Biz’ in ‘Biz Stone’ does not stand for ‘Business Model’?”

It wasn’t only comedians who held that view. In that summer’s Sun Valley mogulfest, media icons Barry Diller and John Malone, on a “Making Money on the Internet” panel, called out Twitter as an example of a fad product that might never generate serious cash. Cable-TV pioneer Malone said it was unlikely that the company could build a significant advertising business.

Twitter now is a public company with a headcount of 3600 and a valuation of over $23 billion. But it has not come close to a billion users (not even 300 million). The shortfall has unleashed a torrent of criticism, and even intimations that an executive putsch will be required to address endemic product woes.

On the other hand, in 2014 Twitter did generate that billion dollars in revenue. (The final number will come in when the company reports earnings later this week, but its earlier estimate was $1.375 billion.) And the stash has been rising at an annual rate of over 100 percent. Twitter’s bottom line is not in the black, but blame that on continuing expenses in growing its business and (mainly) paying out huge amounts of “stock-based compensation” to employees. That’s not uncommon in the Internet world: more notable is that Twitter has cracked the code to making money on the net.

You heard that right: while the headlines about Twitter describe a company in crisis, the business end of the company has been nailing its targets, and its revenue team is the envy of the industry. “Twitter sold the wrong thing to investors — it sold the user story,” says analyst Brian Weiser of Pivotal Research Group of the company’s emphasis during the 2013 IPO rollup. “In spite of obvious evidence that user growth was slowing, they picked that as the story, and they failed to deliver. But revenue is doing what it should do.”

So how is Twitter making its money? The obvious answer is advertising — those “Promoted Tweets” that appear unbidden in a user’s timeline. Getting there wasn’t easy. And it takes effort to understand how those ads work. But in contrast to the well-documented turmoil in the company throughout its history, the road to revenues for Twitter has been a steady, coherent, patient and innovative path. And more recently, the company has embarked on a strategy to go beyond those ads to make money from selling products directly, and even monetizing people who don’t use Twitter. (More on this in Part Two of the series.)

What’s more, Twitter has turned this trick in its own unique way, creating a system that’s true to its peculiar culture. So here, in somewhat more than 140 characters, is the tale of Twitternomics.

In mid-2009 Twitter’s CEO was co-founder Evan Williams. (Williams is still on Twitter’s board of directors — and, I should disclose, he is also the CEO of Medium, which makes him my boss.) Just after that Sun Valley panel — Williams was in attendance— I asked him about the incident in an interview for a story for Wired. “I didn’t argue my case, but all the Internet guys I talked to were laughing at the media guys,” he said. “Are you kidding? There’s obviously a huge business there.” Later in the interview, though, he blithely admitted that Twitter had made little headway in that direction, mainly because it wasn’t yet a priority. But he noted that since Twitter was widely used by corporations to connect with their customers, the transition would be natural.

Read more here : https://medium.com/backchannel/how-twitter-found-its-money-mojo-1d170e3df985

Related Posts

  • How AIRBNB or PINTEREST and other startup started
    81
     
    Tags: startup
  • What are the top reasons why startups fail?
    80
    Tags: startup
  • Billion-dollar club in trouble ?
    78
    Like the fictional animal, unicorn companies are supposed to be rare and magical. Last month, the Wall Street Journal compiled its own "Billion-dollar club" - a listof 78 venture-backed private companies with valuations of $1 billion or more. When a company hits a billion dollar valuation, most people assume the company is…
    Tags: company, billion, revenue, startup
  • Square Feeling Squeezed From All Sides
    76
    Square is starting to look oddly hollow. The payments company, set up and run by Jack Dorsey, is set to raise $200 million in new financing, according to Bloomberg. That would value the company at $6 billion. While big, it’s a deflated figure, considering Square’s former hype, the small amount…
    Tags: company, business, billion, startup
  • The Startup Story You Didn’t Hear About Billion Dollar Company Eloqua: It Was Four Days From Going Bankrupt
    75
    Hear stories from the gritty frontline of entrepreneurship with Eloqua Co-founder and the CEO of Influitive, Mark Organ. A self-described serial entrepreneur, Influitive is Mark’s 7th business. Mark dove into entrepreneurship head first after realizing he couldn’t hold down a regular job. His first ventures gave him exposure to everything from bootstrapping a business to…
    Tags: business, billion, company, startup
Startup, Success

Brilliant advice for anyone running a business

If you want to build a successful, sustainable business, don’t ask yourself what could change in the next ten years that could affect your company.

Instead, ask yourself what won’t change, and then put all your energy and effort into those things.

That’s the advice of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, highlighted in an interesting post about Uber’s big ambitions by venture capitalist Bill Gurley.

Bezos suggests that you should build a business strategy around the things you know are stable in time — like that customers will always prefer lower prices — and then invest heavily in ensuring you are providing those things and improving your delivery of them all the time.

“When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it,” Bezos says.

To help it achieve lower prices, Uber has poured time and money into the back-end routing algorithms of its app and an intelligence system for demand prediction, congestion prediction, supply matching, supply positioning, smart dispatch, and dynamic pricing, Gurley points out. It has launched UberPool — a ride-sharing option that Gurley argues has become one of the company’s defining initiatives.

As Uber hustles away on making UberPool a success, it is perfectly achieving Bezos’ strategy. It is making a big investment in something that will never change (people wanting to pay less for transportation).

The things Bezos predicted would always be true for Amazon customers is that they’d always want lower prices and speedy shipping. So, the company has spent the last 11 years investing in those things— often forgoing profits to do so.

To work towards those things, Amazon has spent billions on building fulfillment and sortation centers all over the US and the world, a topic which came up on its fourth quarter earnings call on Thursday.

“What’s happened over the course of last several years, with all the fulfillment centers that we have added, is we have actually gotten selection closer to customers,” CFO Tom Szkutak said. “And so that’s helped us from a delivery speed standpoint. And it’s helped us from a cost standpoint too —in terms of transportation cost — because of being closer to our customers.”

It’s been a long, un-ending effort, but worth-it, since customers will always value Amazon’s fast delivery options.

Here’s the full Bezos quote, via Bill Gurley:

“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. … [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’ Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

Read more: http://uk.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-brilliant-advice-for-anyone-running-a-business-2015-1

Related Posts

  • If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old
    70
    “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old” ― Peter F. Drucker A strategy is a plan of action to achieve a major aim and future result. It requires commitment because making change is difficult. To describe what’s involved, Peter Drucker said: “Strategic planning is the continuous…
    Tags: strategy, business, success
  • Rovio's 'Overnight' #Success with #AngryBirds Came After 51 Failed Attempts
    62
    With the simple flick of its finger, Angry Birds was the launchpad for the multi-billion pound mobile games industry we see today, but while many see it as a an overnight success story for Finnish startup Rovio, the truth is somewhat different. Speaking to IBTimes UK at Rovio's colourful headquarters…
    Tags: company, success, time, will, true, years, spent
  • AMAZON: NOT AN E-COMMERCE COMPANY
    62
    Let’s start with the premise that Twitch, the video-game watching network, is the next ESPN – you know, the jewel in Disney’s crown that, by itself, is worth $50.8 billion. Like ESPN, Twitch is about live competition, and, like ESPN, Twitch does exceptionally well in the highly desirable young male demographic.1 Obviously…
    Tags: amazon, company, success
  • Uber’s New BHAG: UberPool
    60
    January 30, 2015: In their seminal 1994 book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, Jim Collins and Jerry Poras coined the term BHAG (pronounced BEE-hag) — an acronym that stands for “Big Hairy AudaciousGoal.” Collins and Porras suggest that the very best companies set an audacious, very long-term…
    Tags: uber, company, uberpool, lower, prices, success
  • Bill Gates Reveals The 3 Most Important Business Lessons He Learned From Warren Buffett
    59
    I’m looking forward to sharing posts from time to time about things I’ve learned in my career at Microsoft and the Gates Foundation. (I also post frequently on my blog.) Last month, I went to Omaha for the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting. It’s always a lot of fun, and…
    Tags: business, time, lot, things, success
Startup, Success

The most successful tech products have one thing in common

How Facebook and Candy Crush Got You Hooked

Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. World of Warcraft. Angry Birds. The most successful tech products have one thing in common: They’re addictive. And users don’t get hooked by accident. Just ask Nir Eyal. A Bay Area entrepreneur turned desire guru, Eyal has worked with some of the top tech firms in Silicon Valley, teaching them how to apply the system he developed for engineering habit-forming apps, services, and games. His blog, Nir and Far, has attracted tens of thousands of subscribers hungry for insights, and his writing has appeared in both the mass-market pages of Psychology Today and the insider club of TechCrunch. His inaugural Habit Summit, held last March on the Stanford campus, drew 400 participants. Eyal’s book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, self-published in January 2014, shot immediately to the top of Amazon’s product-design list. Penguin acquired it and released it in November.

At the heart of Eyal’s system is a four-step cycle he calls the Hook. These steps were derived from his observation of online products and services, as well as a wide range of psychological and neurological research, from B. F. Skinner to B. J. Fogg. The Hook, Eyal says, is the magic behind just about every icon of the consumer Internet, from Google to WhatsApp.

1 | TRIGGER

2 | ACTION

3 | REWARD

4 | INVESTMENT

Full story here : http://www.wired.com/2014/12/how-to-build-habit-forming-products

Related Posts

  • Jack Dorsey Interview
    74
    Intressting Jack Dorsey Interview.
    Tags: success, startup
  • Uber’s Brilliant Strategy to Make Itself Too Big to Ban
    72
    The question of how Uber would spend its billion-dollar investment was never really much of a riddle. More rides in more places has always been the plan. But with its ten-figure cushion, the San Francisco-based ride-hailing startup can be more cunning about how it tries to get huge. Uber wants to grow…
    Tags: success, startup
  • WhatsApp becomes most popular messaging app with 600 million users
    72
    WhatsApp CEO and founder Jan Koum tweeted that the popular messaging app user-base has now been increased to 600 million. Earlier in April, it was announced that WhatsApp had 500 million active users. Surprisingly, the instant messaging space has been growing by leaps and bounds. It is worth noting that WhatsApp…
    Tags: whatsapp, users, january, facebook, success, startup
  • 10 Movies Every Entrepreneur Needs to Watch
    71
    No one ever said being an entrepreneur would be easy. A million obstacles seem to stand in the way each and every day. The naysayers and budget woes can be enough for the average person to start waving the white flag. But you are not an average person: You’re an entrepreneur.…
    Tags: entrepreneur, thing, march, success, startup
  • See how these fast-growing, innovative companies are redefining money lending, e-commerce, and more.
    71
    Often, the only way to get ahead is to have a great plan. Which is exactly what makes the companies below so special. It's not just that they're making the big bucks (and they are doing that). This small group of companies from the Inc. 5000 class of 2014 are notable for their…
    Tags: successful, success, startup
Startup, Success

WHEN YOU START A SMALL BUSINESS, IT’S HARD TO KNOW WHAT SUCCESS OR FAILURE LOOKS LIKE

In 2011, I started a book business with my best friend called Emily Books.

We were qualified to start a business in some ways, not so much in others. We had some expertise in our field: We’d both worked at the intersection of publishing and tech for years, and we wanted to start an online bookstore that sold a small collection of books and allowed readers to subscribe and receive a carefully chosen book per month automatically. Our idea was that this would provide an online version of what we loved about shopping at independent bookstores: the great taste and careful curation of expert booksellers, which no algorithm can replicate. We had no management experience, though, and had never created a PowerPoint presentation or written a business plan. We also, probably more importantly, had no ambition to found the kind of startup that barrels toward acquisition or IPO. We wanted to test waters, grow organically, and pivot on a dime in response to customers’ needs like a startup, but we also wanted to stay independent, avoid gimmicks, and build a sustainable business that would stay true to its core values.

That was three years, many gray hairs, over 5,000 sales and 36 excellent books ago, but we’re still pretty much just as far from the point of being able to pay ourselves any wages as we were when we first started.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3036907/this-is-not-a-start-up-story

Related Posts

  • See how these fast-growing, innovative companies are redefining money lending, e-commerce, and more.
    76
    Often, the only way to get ahead is to have a great plan. Which is exactly what makes the companies below so special. It's not just that they're making the big bucks (and they are doing that). This small group of companies from the Inc. 5000 class of 2014 are notable for their…
    Tags: business, small, great, plan, it's, success, startup
  • Jack Dorsey Interview
    76
    Intressting Jack Dorsey Interview.
    Tags: success, startup
  • Uber’s Brilliant Strategy to Make Itself Too Big to Ban
    74
    The question of how Uber would spend its billion-dollar investment was never really much of a riddle. More rides in more places has always been the plan. But with its ten-figure cushion, the San Francisco-based ride-hailing startup can be more cunning about how it tries to get huge. Uber wants to grow…
    Tags: success, startup
  • 10 Movies Every Entrepreneur Needs to Watch
    73
    No one ever said being an entrepreneur would be easy. A million obstacles seem to stand in the way each and every day. The naysayers and budget woes can be enough for the average person to start waving the white flag. But you are not an average person: You’re an entrepreneur.…
    Tags: business, start, success, startup
  • WhatsApp becomes most popular messaging app with 600 million users
    72
    WhatsApp CEO and founder Jan Koum tweeted that the popular messaging app user-base has now been increased to 600 million. Earlier in April, it was announced that WhatsApp had 500 million active users. Surprisingly, the instant messaging space has been growing by leaps and bounds. It is worth noting that WhatsApp…
    Tags: success, startup
Startup, Success

How Bill Gates Thinks

Author Steven Johnson talks to the engineer turned philanthropist about the future, technology, ice, capitalism, and optimism.

When interesting people hang out, interesting things tend to happen. So when we found out that Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From andThe Ghost Map was going to sit down and talk to Bill Gates, whom you’ve probably heard of, we thought we’d like to eavesdrop. So we did.

Gates and his eponymous foundation are launching the 10th year of their Grand Challenges initiative—a program that provides grants to projects looking to solve problems like malaria and malnutrition. Johnson’s most recent book, How We Got to Now, tackles the history and future of innovation, and is the basis of a six-part PBS series that launches on the 15th of this month. Over the course of their conversation, Johnson and Gates touched on everything from capitalism to ice. Here’s what they said.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/how-bill-gates-thinks/381287/?single_page=true

Related Posts

  • Google’s mission is to organize the worlds’ information, but they won’t stop there
    65
    ( Source : http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2015/02/03/google-enters-the-collaborative-economy-in-a-big-way/ ) Here comes Google, with a series of five market moves injecting them as a central player for the collaborative economy. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. But it doesn’t just start and stop there. They also want to organize the world’s logistics, commerce, local…
    Tags: trend, success
  • Forget 'the Cloud'; 'the Fog' Is Tech's Future
    59
    I'm as big a believer in the transformational power of cloud computing as anyone you'll meet. Smartphones, which are constantly seeking and retrieving data, don't make sense without the cloud, and any business that isn't racing to push its data and software into someone else's data center is, in my…
    Tags: things, sit, future, trend
  • The 5 Books Every Entrepreneur Should Toss in Their Beach Bag
    59
    Entrepreneurs work hard all year long to ensure their businesses become successful and stay successful, but everyone needs a break to relax and reflect. If you start feeling guilty about heading to the beach this summer don’t. Here is a list of summer reads that will keep you thinking and inspired --…
    Tags: year, success, book
  • What Television Will Look Like in 2025, According to Netflix
    57
    In the future, Netflix will know exactly what you want to watch, even before you do. You won’t have to spend all that time browsing through endless lists of shows on your television. That’s according to Neil Hunt, Netflix’s chief product officer. It’s just one of many predictions for the…
    Tags: future, technology, trend
  • Bill Gates Reveals The 3 Most Important Business Lessons He Learned From Warren Buffett
    52
    I’m looking forward to sharing posts from time to time about things I’ve learned in my career at Microsoft and the Gates Foundation. (I also post frequently on my blog.) Last month, I went to Omaha for the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting. It’s always a lot of fun, and…
    Tags: people, things, good, thought, foundation, success
Startup, trend

Finance: ‘We Can Reinvent the Entire Thing’

Twitter. Facebook. AirBnB. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the $4.2 billion venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, has backed them all — along with dozens of others. His latest project? Upending finance. Bloomberg Markets magazine interviewed Andreessen at the firm’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

Out With the Old

“We have a chance to rebuild the system. Financial transactions are just numbers; it’s just information. You shouldn’t need 100,000 people and prime Manhattan real estate and giant data centers full of mainframe computers from the 1970s to give you the ability to do an online payment.

‘‘You would not today, starting from scratch, invent any of these financial businesses in the same way. To me, it’s all about unbundling the banks. There are regulatory arbitrage opportunities every step of the way. If the regulators are going to regulate banks, then you’ll have nonbank entities that spring up to do the things that banks can’t do. Bank regulation tends to backfire, and of late that means consumer lending is getting unbundled.”

In With the New

“We’re not going to go backward. When people start doing things a better way, it kind of doesn’t matter what the old way was. You can find people who will say that this is all just an arbitrage on the current trouble in the financial system, and I’m sure the big traditional banks will fight back and try to get things outlawed.

‘‘But think about the scenario of a loan officer talking to a prospective client. To software people, that looks like voodoo. The idea that you can sit across the table from somebody and get a read on their character is just nonsense.

‘‘Lots of industries are changing in a similar way. There’s been a qualitative approach, and now, there’s a quantitative approach. Everybody who grew up in the qualitative approach hates the quantitative approach and considers it a giant threat.”

Big Data

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-07/andreessen-on-finance-we-can-reinvent-the-entire-thing-.html

Related Posts

  • Trends coming in 2014.
    69
    This is the third year in a row that I’ve asked friends and colleagues of mine to make predictions for the coming year.In the past, when I’ve done these predictions, I’ve turned to mostly traders who follow public stocks.  The predictions have been about the best long ideas, the best…
    Tags: people, idea, read, trend, startup
  • Google’s mission is to organize the worlds’ information, but they won’t stop there
    59
    ( Source : http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2015/02/03/google-enters-the-collaborative-economy-in-a-big-way/ ) Here comes Google, with a series of five market moves injecting them as a central player for the collaborative economy. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. But it doesn’t just start and stop there. They also want to organize the world’s logistics, commerce, local…
    Tags: trend, startup
  • Twitter struggles to get new users, its revenue side is killing it
    47
    In 2009 Twitter was a 50-person company punching way above its weight in cultural impact, its micro-blogging platform blasting its way into the public imagination. But its ambitions were even higher. According to leaked internal documents, the company had privately set goals over the next few years of a billion…
    Tags: twitter, billion, startup
  • How AIRBNB or PINTEREST and other startup started
    46
     
    Tags: startup, airbnb
  • A Simple Framework To Recognize A Great Business Idea
    46
    (Source : http://outthinker.com/outthinkerblog/?p=250 ) Picture this scenario. A bomb has exploded. You’ve been working for the last two weeks in a remote part of Mongolia. Your boss promised this short-term assignment would prove your commitment and accelerate your career. But now, unsure of what happened or which coworkers were injured or…
    Tags: idea, ability, startup
Startup, Success

Entrepreneurs that Spotting the Hot Spot are the winners

This is an ever changing economy, in which new scenes and niches constantly emerge. A handful of pioneers jump on it, often purely for fun. One, or maybe a couple of them, figure out a way to turn the idea into a profitable business. Others follow suit, and try to replicate the original idea. Most of them are not successful however. This is a cycle that keeps repeating.

The important thing to note is what distinguishes the successful entrepreneur from all others. Often it is “Spotting the Hot Spot”. That is, they have the ability to spot the right opportunities, at the right time. They have to be careful to not be too early, or too late in entering the market. The key is to look for signals that indicate that an opportunity is arising and keeping an eye out for a combination of two factors– momentum and imperfection.

If we look at a couple of examples, it may become clearer. In the online marketing industry, while today, blog posts are easy to upload and and necessary to direct traffic to your product, it is no longer enough to make you stand out. However podcasts are still complicated to use and not fully developed.

Hence what it takes to be able to spot this unique combination of momentum and perfection is not freakish talent or magical powers but simply the result of learning what to look for and keeping your eyes open.

 

Related Posts

  • Jack Dorsey Interview
    78
    Intressting Jack Dorsey Interview.
    Tags: success, startup
  • Uber’s Brilliant Strategy to Make Itself Too Big to Ban
    76
    The question of how Uber would spend its billion-dollar investment was never really much of a riddle. More rides in more places has always been the plan. But with its ten-figure cushion, the San Francisco-based ride-hailing startup can be more cunning about how it tries to get huge. Uber wants to grow…
    Tags: success, startup
  • 10 Movies Every Entrepreneur Needs to Watch
    76
    No one ever said being an entrepreneur would be easy. A million obstacles seem to stand in the way each and every day. The naysayers and budget woes can be enough for the average person to start waving the white flag. But you are not an average person: You’re an entrepreneur.…
    Tags: entrepreneur, business, thing, easy, stand, success, startup
  • See how these fast-growing, innovative companies are redefining money lending, e-commerce, and more.
    76
    Often, the only way to get ahead is to have a great plan. Which is exactly what makes the companies below so special. It's not just that they're making the big bucks (and they are doing that). This small group of companies from the Inc. 5000 class of 2014 are notable for their…
    Tags: successful, business, success, startup
  • Good and Bad Reasons to Become an Entrepreneur
    75
    Source : https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/good-and-bad-reasons-to-become-an-entrepreneur-decf0766de8d Recently we hosted a Q&A at Asana that I participated in with Ben Horowitz, Matt Cohler, and Justin Rosenstein. Marcus Wohlsen from Wired attended and wrote an article that discussed our views on the culture of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. This is an important topic, so I want…
    Tags: entrepreneur, time, entrepreneurs, idea, success, startup