“A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable, repeatable business model.” — Steve Noble.
“A startup goes through three phases: first, the search for the business model, (dysfunctional families are an advantage), second, operating exec to take from startup to operations. From operating to scaling.”–Steve Noble
Trying to get my arms around a pitch (or even whether I want investors at all),
Source date (UTC): 2015-01-18 20:03:00 UTC
ANGEL INVESTING
Listening to other Angels right now. I invest 10K to 100K in businesses I can understand, can understand how to take to marketing, that I could take over if I had to, with people I enjoy spending time with. It’s not complicated. I can only understand a limited range of things. I can only afford so much time to understand anything I already don’t. But it is very rarely a question of the ‘goodness of the idea’. Its only a question of whether I can figure out if I will get my money back, and possibly with some profit.
Source date (UTC): 2015-01-18 10:16:00 UTC
http://www.fastcompany.com/3040943/fast-feed/facebook-rolls-out-a-platform-for-professionals-called-workYammer Clone
Source date (UTC): 2015-01-15 17:22:00 UTC
Your next startup… Uber meets Hummer, complete with para-mil drivers.
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-27 19:30:00 UTC
VIRTUOUS PARANOIA
(technology)(making my men laugh)
“It’s your job to be optimistic. It’s my job to be paranoid. Did you know it’s my job to be paranoid?” Laughter. No eye contact. “Yes.” See?
If you aren’t paranoid and in fear that something is wrong with your project then you are just ignorant of what’s wrong with your project. lol
Steven Salta was always big on that. I’m hella’ good at paranoia. And I’m hella’ paranoid about money, time, means, technology and market. I’m just not hella good at knowing when it’s the customer I should be paranoid about. 🙂 Gotta use other people for that. I just don’t have the hardware for it.
Division of labor, knowledge, consideration and perception and all that kinda’ thing.
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-18 05:20:00 UTC
AMAZING WOMEN IN BUSINESS
In business, in negotiations, V would eat most women twice her age like Pringles in a man cave on new year’s day. Not because she’s competitive. Not because she’s flirtatious or feminine. Not because of any ego. But, just because she’d just work harder, longer, and smarter.
Women have a particular advantage at certain layers of business: they obtain their status elsewhere and so can compete for results at a discount. The women at the top tend to be outliers and other than as outliers, not terribly impressive. But I still contend that women, in the main, hold the center better than men do.
Women seem to need a protector – perhaps men do too, but I don’t see it. And if protected they can do amazing things. Men do not need to feel safe to act. Make women feel safe. (And they will start to adopt your framing unconsciously.
It’s weird. Women can rationalize their mate’s biases, find the best in them even if it’s not there, and find ugly, stupid, annoying, children beautiful and charming. Good thing. Someone has to. They can rationalize anything if it makes ‘peace’.
They can gather and allocate many micro tasks at once that men cannot even imagine a mind can do.
Politics and theory are, however, masculine talents. And while female outliers exist they are only outliers, not general rules.
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-04 09:44:00 UTC
Anyone want to buy a Kiev nightclub with me? (Cheap)
One of the best? I can’t justify it because I can’t give it that much attention. Best management, best property available. Right in the center. $20-25k buy in. I don’t need to remind you of the various benefits. :).
I really want to do it but not alone. I’ll do 50k but not the rest. This would leave us with lots of working capital and runway.
I wouldn’t do it myself if it wasn’t a good idea.
Cheers.
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-03 05:17:00 UTC
GAMIFYING THE WORKPLACE : OVERSING BRINGS UNIVERSAL STANDING TO THE ENTERPRISE
Oversing has many uses, and many features, and tries to help the user get work completed, but overall, the idea is to treat your business as a series of weekly (or longer) ‘sprints’, in an effort to teach you to understand your predictive (or non predictive) ability, and therefore posses a more ‘true’ vision of your business, the staff, and yourself.
And yes, by organizing your company as a dynamic set of projects, it is possible to reorganize your company more easily and constantly, in response to strategic ambitions and market demands. Bureaucracies calcify around rent seeking, but project based organizations cannot so calcify. Like market entities they can perish easily if no longer needed.
But, Oversing is at its core, a bit of libertarian social engineering: it provides an information system that increases transparency, and decreases if not eliminates the need for (expensive) middle management. Now this saves money. Sure. And it crushes office politics. Sure. But it also empowers the individual employee to speak the truth. And by speaking the truth, build trust. And by building trust build a workplace that better serves employees, customers, management, owners and investors.
Universal standing in law means that all citizens can take up lawsuits on behalf of any other, or any commons (say, pollution). And he pays the consequences of losing, or enjoys the benefit of winning. The same is true for the workplace. We have found that transparency matters both directions. Management has to be willing to tell employees ideas are stupid and unprofitable, or simply economically impossible. But again this builds trust.
And yes, there are businesses where trust may be impossible. I just can’t think of any. Or at least, none that are legal.
It will not take us the three years we had thought to finish Oversing’s core feature set. If we go to market this March as we anticipate, we will be able to get most of the now-known features finished this coming year.
The most extensive of these is career building – which oversing is uniquely designed for – again, to eliminate management bias. We just cannot get it done this spring. We are six months past our ‘financial’ target date already. Adding products – or at least, product sales, to the product is not challenging. We just cannot get it done this release either. And our CRM functionality (Sales scripting) is somewhat limited, because honestly, I find that kind of work offensive – I hate spam sales and I prefer marketing. We can import and export to accounting systems but I am not confident that we can get the accounting api done before summer if not fall.
We will have to evolved the features for all of the business processes – but we will have created an application platform that solves the needs of the entire white collar enterprise – front to back.
And brought liberty and universal standing to the workplace.
And that is really, really, cool.
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-01 03:59:00 UTC
Dear Budding Entrepreneurs:
Smart people have a disease: they are lazy. They think too much. And they gather too little information. If you’re thinking rather than researching you’re just lazy, not smart. The same is true of Rationalism versus Empiricism: if you’re thinking rather than researching, then you’re just lazy (and not very bright).
Smart people exhaust all possible knowledge until the answers all come back the same. Talk to people. Get information. Look at details. As advice. Analyze competitors.
Smart people don’t plan so much as have clear goals, do lots of research, and seize opportunities. And why to some people fail to do this even if they think they’re smart? Because despite the fact that other humans are the source of knowledge and you need to seek to understand others, to empathize with them, and to work with them – and it’s something you’re simply avoiding.
If you think you’re smart and efficient – you probably aren’t either of them. You’re avoiding work and avoiding social interaction. And the primary reason you avoid social interaction is fear that your bubble will be burst.
Advantages are found in unpredictable outliers.
A plan is a bubble to be burst. A goal is merely the end point obtained by seizing identified opportunities.
Business plans are sh_t. The ultimate business plan? Find customers. Sell them what they need.
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-30 09:11:00 UTC
CRITICIZING PUBLIC SPEAKER’S DEMANDS
(cross posted for archival purposes)
So and so speaker, actress, musician, diva etc, demands these things from his/her hosts.
You know, this stuff is pretty normal – its not demanding. When you come to talk somewhere they ASK YOU what you want for intelligent reasons. You write it into the agreement. For me I want apples, pears, bananas, coca cola, Evian. No local bottled water please. Coke is safe world-round, grapes contain allergens that set off my asthma, and other fruits are too challenging to be sure are safe. If I can’t eat local-anything, I can survive on Evian, fruit and coca cola for a few days – especially if I can find granola bars.
If you haven’t lived your life in planes, airports, taxis and hotels over many time zones – and done so for extended periods, then you don’t really grasp how important it is to have ‘anchors’ – things that are familiar. I stay in five star hotels for an extra two or three hundred dollars a night. I fly business class. And I eat very carefully. Because otherwise I can’t PERFORM my function when people pay a LOT for you to perform your function. (and get really angry if you can’t.)
Now if you’re just an average joe that doesn’t matter. But when people pay you real money for your time, and when their time is precious, the RISK of non-performance is a serious issue for everyone involved. So rooms that are away from elevators (noise) above a certain floor (noise) without the hindi-family next door (noise), where you can count on the heat, air-conditioning, and cleanliness (disease). Where fans, prostitutes, scam artists, paparazzi, thieves, and whatever are trying to put you on the defensive or get your scarce, tired, attention.
So it’s not self appreciation that these things are meant to serve, but SELF PRESERVATION.
Only privileged […insert derogatory….] who live life in a western-bubble fail to grasp this kind of thing.
Anchors matter.
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-29 05:35:00 UTC