Screw Twitter, Screw Facebook

My number one gripe with both Twitter and Facebook - services I love - has been that - fuck it - I can't even search through all of my own tweets, I can't even search through my own Facebook wall.

Looks like they both needed an outside party to come along and take care of the problem. Daniel Gross, you are a billionaire for doing this.

Greplin



Greplin: The First Y Combinator Company To Get Me Excited

Greplin: The First Y Combinator Company To Get Me Excited

Image via CrunchBaseDon't get me wrong. I am and have been huge on Paul Graham and Y Combinator. Recently I read the name of a friend - 19 years old - in a magazine article. She apparently had graduated from Y Combinator and had just raised a million dollars in funding. I emailed her. Hey, is that you? Yes, it is me, she said. You should also raise money, right now is a great time to do so.

Paul Graham, Brad Feld, Me, BBC

But I have said at this blog a few times that I don't see any iconic company emerging out of Y Combinator. Y Combinator has had a propensity to produce middling companies. A $200 million exist is not impressive.

Greplin

And let me make it very clear I have not been reading up on Y Combinator companies. There must be gems being spewed out every few months. But I only read about companies that show up in the news.

Very Much Would Like To Go Into Bihar

Image via WikipediaI just sent an email to my top microfinance contact in India asking her to look into the "license to transact debt capital cross border" thing that Matt Flannery, one of the founders of Kiva, has raised in a Quora thread.

This is someone I am going to get onto my team. She will telecommute. She has four plus years of experience in microfinance in India in the Chennai region. This has been a good catch.

It is not like I am never going into India. And so if I am eventually going into India, how would I do that? And if I will do those things then, why will I not do those same things now?

I'd be very willing to lobby top politicians in Patna and Delhi as necessary. The Indian government just put tens of millions into microfinance. My message is, take that money and build schools, hospitals, roads. Let someone like me bring money from outside to put into microfinance.

Some Serious Biking

VCA 2010 RACE RUN from changoman on Vimeo.

TED Talks: Wael Ghonim, Bill Gates

Passion For Microfinance, Passion For Social Media

Image via WikipediaWhen you are gelling the DNA of a young company, when you are laying down the rudiments of its culture, when you are slowly building a team, there are decisions you have to make.

Tony of Zappos has a few things to say about the topic. One thing Tony does is after he trains people, he offers them 3,000 dollars to leave. Another thing he does is he lets go the top talented people who deliver when they don't fit into the Zappos corporate culture.

Two obvious things I have figured out are that you have to have a passion for microfinance - duh! - and you have to have a passion for social media if you want to belong on my corporate team.

Walking/Running: Putting One Foot After The Other

Image via WikipediaDoing a tech startup is a lot like walking and running. You put one foot after another. And you can't do that unless you have a very good idea of where you are at a given point in time and where it is you want to go. Both those angles are important.

If you are just starting out, you can't act like you are in a position to hire 10 people. I have gone to events and met amazing people and I have told them I'd love to hire them. True, I'd love to, but right now I can't afford those 10 amazing people.

So the right thing to do would be to not look for amazing people to hire, right? Wrong. I could hire those 10 amazing people in my round two, which might happen in as much as six months, eight months, a year, or as little as four months after the first round of money is raised.

The right people will understand the language. I have talked to two major social media talents about my round two possibilities. And both of them took me seriously. The talk is informal, private, off the record, there is no concrete offer. But it's real.