Vivek Wadhwa On India's Success

Boss And Goddess

When you have a job, you have a boss. When you have a startup, you have a goddess: the market.

Tech Entrepreneurship: Public Service By Other Means

Bill and Melinda Gates during their visit to the Oslo Opera House in June 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I think of tech entrepreneurship as public service by other means, and I don't mean you make billions to give away (why, thank you Bill Gates!) way.

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Plenty Still Broken In The World

Image via WikipediaPaul Graham has a new blog post out. The guy has a beautiful writing style. And he tackles the most amazing topics.

Paul Graham: Schlep Blindness

Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a tedious, unpleasant task. ....... Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to talk to users, or negotiate with other companies, or deal with other people's broken code. Maybe that's possible, but I haven't seen it. ...... schleps are not merely inevitable, but pretty much what business consists of. A company is defined by the schleps it will undertake. And schleps should be dealt with the same way you'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in. ....... The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. Your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps. That's schlep blindness. ....... For over a decade, every hacker who'd ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was. .... Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments. ....... Though the idea of fixing payments was right there in plain sight, they never saw it, because their unconscious mind shrank from the complications involved. You'd have to make deals with banks. How do you do that? ...... That scariness makes ambitious ideas doubly valuable. In addition to their intrinsic value, they're like undervalued stocks in the sense that there's less demand for them among founders. If you pick an ambitious idea, you'll have less competition, because everyone else will have been frightened off by the challenges involved. (This is also true of starting a startup generally.) ...... there's plenty still broken in the world, if you know how to see it.

I have said a few times being an entrepreneur is like being gay. I have a suspicion people are born or not born an entrepreneur, because there are so few of them. And by some estimates 1% of the population is born gay. I think that is also the share of entrepreneurs in the broader population.

In this blog post Paul Graham establishes the 1% within that 1%. Most entrepreneurs stay away from the big ideas, the big problems that need to be tackled.

I read the blog post twice.

Hilary Rowland

One thing to admire about Hilary Rowland is she started really young as an entrepreneur - maybe 17 - and she has grown her small business empire organically. That speaks to me a lot because my tech startup - at least one of it - is very much in that organic growth mode.

Open Coffee MeetUp: New Location

Why Jack Dorsey Invented Twitter

I think Jack Dorsey invented Tumblr, sorry Twitter, is because so he could claim and hog the Twitter handle Jack. When you are on Twitter it feels like Jack Dorsey is the only Jack in the world.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There is Hugh Jackman. There is Jack Nicholson.

That 10X Return Thing

Image via WikipediaWhen VCs invest in your startup, they want a 10X return. So if they invest a million, they want you to turn that into 10 million dollars.

Why? Because they are greedy bastards? Maybe.

It's a numbers game. Say nine out of all 10 startups fail. That is pretty close to the actual numbers, by the way. So money was lost on nine out of 10 deals. One million turned into zero dollars. That stunt is still a lot of hard work on the part of many people, believe it or not.

But one makes it, and gives a 10X return. So 10 million dollars were invested in 10 different startups. Nine of them went down. One turned that one million into 10 million. That is a break even situation. The VCs started with 10 million dollars, they ended up with 10 million dollars. Where's the game?

The Proverbial White Male

I don't know if you have ever visited my blogroll, but it is a mouthful. It is the most elaborate, comprehensive blogroll of any I have visited. And because it is so elaborate and encyclopedic, I have had sections. That has not been good enough, and so I have had at the top a section called A1. Even that became a little too elaborate. So I just made a much shorter list called This Just In. These are people whose every blog post I want to read as soon as they come out, and preferably comment on them as well.

Third World Guy
The Arab Revolutions And My Rethinks On Britain And France
Minority Majority Nation?
To You I Offer Buddhism And Yoga
Social Media Is For Real
Obama 2012 Is On
New York City
Rootlessness And The City

I made the list. It is short. Every single person on the list is the proverbial white male. What's wrong in the picture? It also bothers me that most are VCs. I wish it were mostly entrepreneurs. But the best entrepreneurs don't blog. Some good ones do. And there are some out there who I just have not come across yet. Please suggest names.

Mike Yavonditte: An Hour Of Video

Okay so it is not an hour of Mike. When you have Jason Calacanis doing the interviewing, the guy feels like he is half the guest himself, and so this is 30 minutes of Jason and 30 minutes of Mike. But it's a good interview. Jason being an entrepreneur himself has really been able to bring out the story from Mike. It was an hour well spent for me.

Multidisciplinary Approaches

Image via CrunchBase

TechCrunch: Engineering vs. Liberal Arts: Who’s Right—Bill or Steve?: It takes artists, musicians, and psychologists working side by side with engineers to build products as elegant as the iPad. And anyone—with education in any field—can achieve success in Silicon Valley. ...... 92 percent held bachelor’s degrees, and 47 percent held higher degrees. But only 37 percent held degrees in engineering or computer technology, and just two percent held them in mathematics. The rest have degrees in fields as diverse as business, accounting, finance, health care, and arts and the humanities. ...... The most common traits I have observed are a passion to change the world and the confidence to defy the odds and succeed. ..... I never observed a correlation between the school of graduation or field of study, on one hand, and success in the workplace, on the other. What make people successful are their motivation, drive, and ability to learn from mistakes, and how hard they work. ..... Steve Jobs taught the world that good engineering is important but that what matters the most is good design. You can teach artists how to use software and graphics tools, but it’s much harder to turn engineers into artists. ... Our society needs liberal-arts majors as much as it does engineers and scientists. .... My advice to my students—and to my own children—is to study what interests them the most; to excel in fields in which they have the most passion and ability; to change the world in their own way and on their own terms. Once they master their domain, they can find the path to entrepreneurship. ...... Maybe they can team up with the hard-core engineers who develop the clunky, inelegant, over-engineered products that Bill is famous for

Vivek Wadhwa is making a lot of sense here. I have instinctively known this to be true. You need to look at a problem from many angles. As for what makes for an entrepreneur, that is a mystery. There is no correlation between someone's major or what school they went to and if they will become an entrepreneur. I think about 1% of the population is born to launch companies. As to where that ratio comes from, I don't know. I just observe that to be the case.

An entrepreneur builds teams. If they need someone with a particular major, they will go get that person. Have you noticed? 99.99% of engineers go work for someone else.

Venture Capitalists And Their Thesis

Image by paulamarttila via FlickrYou can waste time as an entrepreneur knocking the doors of the wrong venture capitalists. VCs tend to have sectors they are knowledgeable about and are interested in. If you are not a fit, you are not a fit. You might have a brilliant idea, a brilliant team, a brilliant product, but if you approached the wrong VC, you will still get a no.

Venture Capital Investment Thesis Myths For venture capitalists, an investment thesis states the main idea of their fund–essentially, why your venture fund exists, and what it proposes to invest in ..... does the company mesh well with our macro-economic analysis? Are they operating in a market we understand? What are the future expectations of the sector? .... many venture capital firms don’t have investment theses. Those firms also tend to not last. .... Like writing a presentation/business plan/executive summary, there’s no set procedure for creating an investment thesis. ..... investment theses only last a couple years ... investment thesis will most likely be constantly tinkered with

Normal People Easy To Get Along With

Image via Wikipedia

Fred Wilson: Difficult Is Good: He then said, "sometimes we make money with brilliant people who are easy to get along with, most often we make money with brilliant people who are hard to get along with, but we rarely make money with normal people who are easy to get along with."

I am so not a VC. I am on the other side. Fred Wilson's best MBA Monday post - according to me - is one where he got an entrepreneur - Charlie - to relate his story.

This quote from Dan Valentine makes total sense to me. And I understand it 100%.

The best entrepreneurs tackle the biggest problems. Those problems are, by definition, badass. Others have not touched them because they are big and bad. But we operate in paradigms. You already know what a McDonald's burger looks like. That is a paradigm. That gives you peace of mind. You know.

50 Hours Into One Five Minute Pitch

I might have a major pitch/presentation to make some time next week. And I think I will be putting about 50 hours of work into it. A lot of it will be bifurcated blogging. When I talk about the state of the global microfinance industry, that is a public blog post. But then the DNA formation that is taking place for my startup, that is stuff for my private blog.

There is also the no small matter of having a slide deck. I am not a huge fan of PowerPoint presentations. You can pack more into one blog post than you can into 50 slides. But slides have their place. And people still ask for them. So what I have come up with is a hybrid model. You get a slide deck, some words and phrases there link to some of my blog posts.

The Entrepreneur Does Have A Boss

Image via WikipediaA lot of people have this misconception that people who don't like to have to answer to bosses start their own companies. Entrepreneurs don't have bosses.

Perhaps it is the case that the entrepreneur does not have a boss. What the entrepreneur has is a goddess: the market. As an entrepreneur you have to meet your numbers. As long as you meet your numbers, you are in good shape.

Entrepreneurs do get fired. All the time. The entrepreneur version is to go out of business. The goddess can get mad at you and wipe you out.

There is a reason most people are not entrepreneurs. Someone once said being an entrepreneur is like being gay, it is not like you have a choice. I think there is some truth to that. It is a personality type thing. Some people are just more bent on doing the entrepreneur thing.

Who Owns The Company?

Image via WikipediaI have been meaning to write this blog post for a while now, months, possibly over a year. Finally I am getting around to it. It has become urgent. I have a pre-launch startup.

For conventional wisdom I am going to refer to this, but later.

Mark Peter Davis: Entrepreneur's Guide To Raising Venture Capital

I do know Mark, but that is not why. And this might or might not be the best guide out there to venture capital. But I expect it to be sufficiently good to provide me with the framework of the venture capital business as it stands today. But I have made a point not to read through his posts. I want to express my thoughts before I get corrupted by conventional wisdom.

So who owns the company? Just like I have a bias for Founder CEOs, I have a bias for startups that will go IPO. And it is those two scenarios that I have in mind. So my thoughts might not resonate with startups with other kinds of exits, which ends up being most startups.

You Have To Be A Little Wild

Image via WikipediaYou have to be a little wild to be doing the tech entrepreneur thing.

For one, the risks are high. All else equal you will more likely fail than succeed. The success stories make it to the press. The sob stories? There's not enough newsprint on the planet. And it is not one risk, one hump you get over. There are risks after risks after risks. Every step of the way. It is roller coaster. If you are not going to enjoy the ride, the solace of some day reaching the destination might be false. You might never get there. The journey is where it is at. The journey itself is the reward. If you don't think so, get into another line of work.

You have to be able to look at the establishment and look the other way. You have to be able to look at the status quo and sneer. You have to jolt. You have to give them the finger.

The Early Stages

During the early stages you are hoping to gain some little traction. You start with the germ of an idea. You try to build a small team. You put together the basic idea for the business. You produce a deck, a few slides. You read up, read up, read up.

You, of course, project success. Big success. But even when you make progress there are times when you fall, there are times when you are moving backwards instead. You try to do it a different way. You tack a little.

The Best Way To Deal With Venture Capitalists

Image via WikipediaVCs are money people. And many entrepreneurs fall for that stereotype. VCs are not rich people - well, many are - but my point is VCs are not big money people who are itching to get rid of the money that is, oh, such a burden on them. VCs are entrepreneurs themselves. They go raise money. They raise money promising to grow that money. The good ones do. The best ones grow the money like money were raining from trees. If you put that first 100K into a company like Google, you see a growth that is better than any winning lottery ticket ever.

There are many, many VCs out there. There are many, many, many would be tech entrepreneurs out there. As an entrepreneur you should not need money. You should be able to generate revenues and profits.

Vin Vacanti On That Techie Cofounder

Image via CrunchBaseVin Vacanti of Yipit, one of the hottest tech startups in New York City - not long back the not so hot, not so funded, but always promising tech startup - has produced a series of rather insightful blog posts on a topic that I have seen more early stage entrepreneurs in town struggle with than probably any other. The search for that techie cofounder beats the search for funding.

Ageism And Entrepreneurship

I believe you can start a company at any age. I believe you can join a startup team at any age. I don't believe a startup has to do with coding and coding alone. There is always room for startups in every industry, in every sector of the economy.