Steve Poland (@popo) | Startup Homeruns I go for homeruns, not singles. I want to knock it out of the park. The problem with that is homeruns are very high risk. The chance of a homerun is significantly lower than simply getting on first base. I don’t want to stop dreaming for the homerun, but more training is in order to get there. There is a trail of dead startups behind me and a money trail that I have burned through. Extendy, Boughtly, ViewCues, ifluencer, Trackable Links, Sme, InSeconds, ThankYouTroops, PinkPinky, MyFavorites v1, MyFavorites v2 (haven’t given up on this yet), and there are more. As much as I have read and heard the same thing over and over and over again in the past 12+ years, I want to say it has never really sunk in or I have just never really “got it.” I have found myself working on ideas over the years that I think can be homeruns, but they really haven’t been problems — or rather, big problems of mine. So I pledge to only work on a startup in the future if it’s solving a real problem I have.
The New York Review of Ideas How to Do What You Love January 2006 To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. And it did not seem to be an accident. The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. Jobs By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to. Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? What a recipe for alienation. The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Bounds Sirens Discipline Two Routes Notes
Steve Poland (@popo) | Serial entrepreneur and former early @TechCrunch Writer. 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business We really can’t deny the fact that businesses are testing out Twitter as part of their steps into the social media landscape. You can say it’s a stupid application, that no business gets done there, but there are too many of us (including me) that can disagree and point out business value. I’m not going to address the naysayers much with this. Your mileage may vary, and that’s okay. Oh, and please feel free to reblog this wherever. 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business First Steps Build an account and immediate start using Twitter Search to listen for your name, your competitor’s names, words that relate to your space. Ideas About WHAT to Tweet Instead of answering the question, “What are you doing?” Some Sanity For You You don’t have to read every tweet. The Negatives People Will Throw At You Twitter takes up time. Some Positives to Throw Back Twitter helps one organize great, instant meetups (tweetups). What else would you add? By the way, Jeremiah Owyang has a great post on this, too.
Tips for Startup Companies The author of this article has started about six companies over the years with collective and cumulative revenues approaching $100 million. He has been a board member and advisor to young companies in software, materials science, and electronic hardware. Here are some tips for young people starting companies. Three Good Reasons to Start Your Own Company Don't start your own company because you want to be your own boss. Having rich parents is great. The most reliable source of supranormal profits is superior knowledge of one kind of customer (Way #3). If you don't understand customers, consider taking a customer-facing job (think "sales engineer" or "product manager" rather than "cubicle-dwelling system internals programmer") at a company that already has the kind of customers you think constitute an attractive market. Don't Get Too Good at Raising Money Suppose that you can raise $50 million in capital in four stages. Venture Capital and the Successful Company = High Risk
The World's Most Valuable Startups Guy Kawasaki’s 10 Questions to Ask Before You Join a Startup I realize that in this job market, maybe you can’t be choosy about a job offer, but you should still understand what you’re getting into. If you are considering working at a startup, you should ask these questions. 1. How much money do you have in the bank? 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Guy Kawasaki is the co-founder of Alltop.com, an “online magazine rack” of popular topics on the web.
Sergey Brin ( 7-Jan-1996) Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 (415)723-9273sergey@cs.stanford.edu Education September 1993 - Present: Stanford University, Computer Science Department Ph.D.: expected June 1997. September 1990 - May 1993: University of Maryland B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science. Publications "Near Neighbor Search in Large Metric Spaces", S.Brin, Proceeding of Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) 1995. "Copy Detection Mechanisms for Digital Documents", S. Research Projects GNAT's This project involved indexing multidimensional data for near-neighbor searches. I worked on a project with Hector Garcia-Molina involving automated detection of copyright violations. Current Research Directions and Hacks Movie Ratings A new project I have just started is going to generate personalized movie ratings for users. LaTeX to HTML Converter I've been hacking on a LaTeX to HTML converter which was used to generate the HTML versions of the papers above. Work Experience Dr.
Bush and French Word For Entrepreneur Claim: President George W. Bush proclaimed, "The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur." Origins: Yet another "George W. The source was Shirley Williams, also known as the Baroness Williams of Crosby, who claimed "my good friend Tony Blair" had recently regaled her with this anecdote in Brighton. Lloyd Grove of The Washington Post was unable to reach Baroness Williams to gain her confirmation of the tale, but he did receive a call from Alastair Campbell, Blair's director of communications and strategy. This is far from the first time Bush has been made the butt of a jibe meant to showcase what some perceive as his less than stellar intellectual abilities. Stories that illustrate this widely believed intellectual shortcoming will always waft after George W. Barbara "ears of corn" Mikkelson Last updated: 23 September 2007 Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2014 by Barbara and David P. Sources:
Mind Map: Best Online Collaboration Tools 2009 - Robin Good's Collaborative Map - MindMeister Ideas for Startups October 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School.) How do you get good ideas for startups? That's probably the number one question people ask me. I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to come up with ideas for startups? That might seem a stupid thing to ask. Well, maybe not. I think this is often the case. I also have a theory about why people think this. If coming up with an idea for a startup equals coming up with a million dollar idea, then of course it's going to seem hard. Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Questions The fact is, most startups end up nothing like the initial idea. The initial idea is just a starting point-- not a blueprint, but a question. There's a real difference, because an assertion provokes objections in a way a question doesn't. A question doesn't seem so challenging. Upwind Doodling What happens in that shower? Notes
LinkedIn, Viadeo, Ziki, etc : quel réseau social professionnel utilisez-vous ? Les réseaux sociaux constituent un très bon moyen d’accroître sa visibilité sur Internet. Ils jouent donc un rôle important lorsqu’on souhaite gérer et améliorer son identité numérique. Et c’est un fait, beaucoup de recruteurs utilisent certains de ces sites (ceux axés sur les relations professionnelles) pour faciliter leurs recherches et trouver la bonne personne. De nombreuses sociétés emploient également ces réseaux pour essayer de développer leur activité, trouver de nouveaux partenaires ou simplement se faire des contacts. Il y a donc beaucoup d’avantages à profiter de ces sites de networking. Je voulais donc vous soumettre ce petit sondage. Mon interrogation provient du constat suivant. Avec la version gratuite, il n’est par exemple pas possible de connaître le nom des personnes qui ont visualisé mon profil, ni de consulter le leur. Et quand bien même, je n’aurais même pas la possibilité de rentrer en contact avec eux directement car les mises en relation directe sont payantes.
randomnoise » Blog Archive » The Five Buck Idea Face it, startups are cool. Anyone that made it through the 90s remembers that startups were cool back then. Well guess what? They are even cooler now. So, how do you get in on the game? Maybe you were in graduate school making $1000/mo with no health insurance, working on some project that you thought was cool about two years ago. But you also remember all your other friends that graduated with a BS in whatever from your school. Ah, the good old days. That’s right. Like Paul Graham says, it’s really all in the idea. You aren’t looking to build a service that solves world hunger, or manages the schedules of entire companies, or does anything really that complicated sounding. You don’t want an idea that your mom would be proud to tell her friends about (my son works with lasers ). Once you have this idea, the only trick is getting it out there and doing a good implementation. Get it out there, and get people to use it. Don’t have a business plan. And why? So get out there. ($??) Yahoo!