Dude, this is awesome! Last year I did it manually line by line, and of course that didn't carry over to this year.
Tally rocks! Thank you.
741 karma · joined August 21, 2009
Tally rocks! Thank you.
For private companies at around $1Mn-$3Mn ARR growing sub-20% YoY there are very few buyers in the first place.
Popper = create hypothesis and falsify
Carnap = see instances and use induction to create hypothesis
Everything else they say about the scientific method is the same.
Herbert Simon, in thinking of sciences of the artificial, used the Carnap method to create a ton of valuable science.
It's not that post-facto is bad - carnap showed otherwise.
It's about the quality of the science and the specificity of the recommendations, that lead to bs.
For instance you can mitigate for survivorship bias by studying the dead as well as the living, and driving deep into the differences. But that's a lot of work!
As a theory, effectuation studies the difference in decision making processes between expert entrepreneurs and corporate CEOs. The result, while similarly post-facto, is delightful. See effectuation.org - Vinod Khosla remarked it was the first useful study on entrepreneurship he had ever read.
So one and more of
WhatsApp vs Instagram vs fb vs messenger
FB video vs FB ads vs fb news
FB EU vs US vs India vs...
FB identity vs fb communication vs fb ads
There was no precursor to regulating standard oil in the last century, and no precursor to regulating Google, FB, Amazon, this century.
Doesn't mean it's not warranted.
Writing off experience on the path to becoming an entrepreneur glorifies the unique challenges of being an entrepreneur, while underplaying the 99% of other work that makes a business successful in the real world.
If you're addressing fresh grads, then telling them doing a startup vs learning about a startup vs working in a startup are of different value, would be better. Even Mark suster and Ben horowitz and Steve blank suggest working in a fast growing startup is very useful before doing your own. So there is a way to learn those skills without risk, with a good salary and some small upside potential. As one of them has it, a time to learn and a time to earn...
I guess I reacted a bit to the language which speaks about taking risk very lightly.
For one counter narrative, you should understand why serial entrepreneurs are more successful, why almost the only correlation with success is how many startups a person has done before.
Another counter point is why there's a PayPal mafia and a whole host of successful founders coming out of specific startups.
Yet another counter point is how successful businesses built by people with experience in the same domain somehow don't get counted as 'startups' because they didn't take 'risk'.
Don't fall for the jargon and hype. Expert entrepreneurs have transferable skills that will reduce your risk of failure. It's your bravado and ego that's failing to recognize the difference.
More actionably, dev+fin+products = pm in a fintech company or bank. Or fin+products = evangelist for fintech api startup Or dev+fin = dev at fintech Or dev+prod = product manager anywhere. Or fin+startup = coo for an ops heavy startup at series b+ Check out pmarca archive on careers for support.
I spent my next 4 yrs at two of the big 4 sw companies as a product manager. Best choice ever, huge pay, lots of resources. got lots of shit done at a much faster pace than they are used to. Not stressful compared to startup life. Helped me get a new network, new perspectives, new resources.
Four years to the month, I quit, and now doing a startup again ,and this time it's going much better so far :)
So it ain't the end of the world, just a blip on your journey to eventually building something big.
Will it be your third or fourth or seventh startup that makes it big? Who knows?
The key is to survive that long and make each startup better and you sound like the kind of person who will.
May the force be with you!
The idea is to start with who you know, what you know, and who you are. Then through conversations with people you know, ask them their problems that they are ready to pay to solve. Find common things that several of them are ready to pay for..
That's a great way to start, and will give you great problems that very few others might want to solve..
By doing more & learning more & meeting more people, you essentially increase your luck surface area in 3 different ways, increasing the odds you'll get lucky.
Many founders I've seen 'got lucky' when they were on the way to the 100th trip to meet customers. Did they get lucky or did they make their luck?
A. Go to customer/user conferences? YES YES YES!
B. Go to startup or generic conferences? Not more than once or twice a year.
Everyone in this thread seems to be mixing up the two.
Now unless you're selling to other startups, her advice is crystal clear.
While a work visa is not likely to be easy, the current tech scene has huge demand for programmers of all kinds. Especially if you're expert in Unity/Full-stack.
If it'll help, let me know here, and I'll connect you to someone in this very area (game programming, Unity SDK programming).
Other options would be Canada, Mexico, Vietnam, or anywhere else you can work remotely.
For visa details see http://www.immihelp.com/nri/indiavisa/employment-visa-india....
Luck #1: Pure stochastic luck. Roll of a dice.
Luck #2: Doing enough things that you get lucky. If you don't try, your chance of doing something = 0. If you try 10 things, it's non-zero.
Luck #3: Doing enough things, plus a prepared mind. You had the right background to recognise when luck knocked on your door, and seized it.
Luck #4: The things you did in the past, gave you an angle of attack that no one else saw or thought possible. You did these things, but then seemed lucky.
Now you could say the Paypal guys were lucky to do Paypal, or the Youtube guys were lucky to do Youtube.
But do you then attribute the Paypal mafia, and the Youtube mafia's further successes also to luck?
Go make your own luck!
I do think my vision is deteriorating a bit now. Although not enough to need glasses yet.
Pre-Uber (and Ola), operators used to pay drivers 60-90 days post. They would make arbitrary deductions, which the drivers could not protest.
Post-Uber, most drivers choose to go to Uber/Ola. Drivers say that the operators have cleaned up their act now. They pay 15-30 days post. They pay the right amounts, no deductions. In fact some drivers prefer to work with the operators..
Looks like in this case the interviewer pulled the cord and the seller/category was reviewed and several were banned.
This would most likely have been completely independent of the interview reject.
Didn't find things in one place.
The huge market in each city (Bangalore alone has 1 Million IT folks, middle class is ~5 Million), the high density (10K/sqkm), high Internet penetration, make this a market comparable to the largest US cities. These cities now have critical mass to kickstart new product companies.
The daily friction of life is so high, that home delivery/ecommerce is changing the entire retail landscape including in food and groceries, and soon in services too.
Bangalore is on par with SF on food/grocery delivery, and perhaps ahead on services delivery (see home medical service startups like Portea.com).
Startups are not a bubble per se. We need more startups to smoothen out the rough edges of life in India.
However, late stage valuations may be in a bubble. In the early stage, valuations are moderate.
I could get a job in a large company, at what I thought was an absurd salary, after I was done with my startups. At a time when I thought no one in their right minds would give me a job, given all the crap I'd done in my startups (and done no one thing for 3-4 years).
Are you in India? If you are please connect with me, and I will help you out.
1. Where you learnt PGMs
2. How you made it part of your 'personal everyday' toolkit
> Ken Ono, of Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. “Without either letter, we couldn’t write this story.”
Weird, and fascinating!
This is really easy to say and hard to do, if you've been pushed, prodded, poked into some direction or the other, by well meaning adults/role-models.
Being able to hear your inner motivations is very close to listening to your own thoughts == form of mindfulness.
Very very powerful idea, very very hard to stick to, in our present society of instant-everything, and addictive news cycles.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/heisenbug.html
Schrödinbug: The code should/could have never worked in the first place, but did. Once you saw the code, and realized it shouldn't work, it stops working.
Her learnings from talking to 'expert entrepreneurs' are that
1. they do not believe the future can be predicted, esp in the early stages of a new venture
2. they prefer to create the future in areas with high uncertainty by forging partnerships with people they know already, and who are also investing in the same areas
3. they go to the customer at a very low 'acceptable loss' as they can, building as little of the product as they can, investing as little as they can, and getting the first initial set of customers as partners.
4. they jump in to a fast iteration of execution/sales that helps them discover/create the market, relying on sales as market research.
5. they find pleasant surprises along the way that shape their execution/market/venture and they change to fit the new reality - and they shape that reality along the way
Finding great parallels with PGs essays here.. See http://effectuation.org/learn Read also http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/how-great-entrepreneurs... and the original paper at http://www.effectuation.org/sites/default/files/documents/wh...
Did my own startup; growth was insufficient. Ran out of runway (7yrs of doing startups).
Looked around & got a position as a Product Manager in AdTech, since I didn't want to get back into a dev role, and wanted to move more into the prod/mktg side.
Since then moved into an accelerator working with early-stage startups on mktg/prod.
Life's been much better than I expected when I failed.