Category Archives: Business

Business

Charlie’s Thoughts on Decision Making

I read a few years ago the Poor Charlie’s Almanack and found it to be a really great book for many areas in life. It’s also a long and heavy book so you might wish to get it it to your Kindle. Charles Munger is a brilliant thinker and it’s no surprise that the book is full of practical wisdom.

Some of the points I took and used many times:

Incentives – He talks about the incentives and how they are in the root of many systems. One of the more powerful statements is: “If you wish to see what people will do – look at their incentives”. It holds true both to people and to teams & companies.

Bias – How the human mind is closing itself after it ‘knows’ something. That might be really hard when you want to change your thoughts on a topic. You should embrace people who think differently and aren’t agree with you on every topic. It’s not easy but rewarding and will improve your decisions. Continue reading →

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Business, life

(Try to) Make Better Decisions

The lake and clouds near HWY 92&280

Thanks to @farnamstreet for these great points that he posted on Twitter. It reminded me of a good conversation with a friend about the ‘right’ and a ‘good’ decision.

A good decision is the best one you can make based on the evidence at hand when you need to decide. Only time can tell if it will be the ‘right’ one. By the way, it is good to remember that many decisions are reversible. With those types of decisions, you can use a lightweight process. You don’t have to live with the consequences for that long if you can change it (which is easy to say and hard to do).

You should improve your skills to recognize quickly that a decision is wrong. When you become good at course correction, you can ‘fail quickly and move forward fast. If you wish to improve and increase the odds of good decisions that turn out on the right side, here is a list of rules to help with the process.

How to make a better decision?

Continue reading →

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Business

Make Your Meetings Better

Empty meeting

In the past I’ve wrote about status meetings and why you should avoid them. As a basic productivity rule, you should replace meetings when emails or calls will do.

But there are many cases, where you wish to have a meeting in order to: brainstorm, inform, decide etc’.

How can you make it more productive? Continue reading →

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Business, life

Weapons Of Math Destructions

Weapons Of Math Destructions book

 

I have just finished this book “Weapons Of Math Destructions” by Cathy O’neil.

It’s an important book that deal with mathematical algorithms and models that control our modern life and where they threat to change many aspects of our social interactions. Think about cases like who is being selected to a certain collage and all the implications. She gives good stories and background to each example in the book.

To me, the bottom line is a call to developers, product managers, scientists (and anyone else who contribute to the creation of these systems) to take more responsibility when they building algorithms. I know it’s a real challenging aspect, as most people are not even aware to the tendencies that they got and influence their decisions. It’s also a call for the regulators to think and ask the hard questions about modern ‘AI‘ systems.

Overall, it’s a good book that is full with good stories and examples that drive her main points about the dark side of big data.

Give it a try.

You might like it as much as I did.

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Business, life

Good Podcasts

headset with colors in the backgroundYesterday I had an interesting conversation with a friend about ways to improve your knowledge in different topics.

I suggested to him to leverage his long commute or runs to listen to audio books and podcasts. I have been doing it over the last 15 years and it’s a great way for me to utilize time better. Suddenly the long runs become interesting and time flies. So his next question was what are the podcasts I like and why.

Here are the top ones:

  • Revisionist History is my favorite one. Gladwell does what he is excelling at… telling a story you think you knew but turn it on its head and during this process teach you a thing or two. In the last two seasons, Gladwell went back and reinterpret something from the past: an event, a person, an idea. Something overlooked. Something misunderstood. The one on Martin Luther King is fascinating.
  • Freakonomics is an award-winning podcast with a lot of listeners (which most, I suspect, like logic, economic etc’). Stephen Dubner has conversations that explore the riddles of everyday life and the weird wrinkles of human nature — from cheating and crime to parenting and sports. Dubner talks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, social scientists and entrepreneurs — and his Freakonomics co-author Steve Levitt. The last few episodes (as of March 2018) about CEOs are really good. Check it out.
  • Here’s the thing with Alec Baldwin – Alec really knows how to interview his impressive guests and listen to their ideas and stories. It’s great to follow him and learn about people that changed history, industries or ‘just’ put a smile on our faces.
  • Epicenter – I’ve been passion about the crypto world since 2012. Around early 2014 I found this one. It’s a podcast that takes you to the heart of this important technological revolution: the rise of decentralized technologies. Every week, they bring conversations with some of the brightest minds in this bourgeoning ecosystem of startups and open source projects. Good stuff if you want to learn more about decentralized technologies and the crypto world.
    Btw, Block Zero is a new podcast that deal with this topic as well. It’s still young but sounds good so far.
  • The Moth – The Moth Podcast features stories that are being recorded live on stage around the USA.
    Some of them are really good! Episodes are released every Tuesday.

Continue reading →

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Business, life

Books I Enjoyed During 2017

This year was full with good books.

I got to some books by mistake (e.g. Girl with a pearl earring during a trip to Zion national park) and others after getting a warm recommendation. Here is the list of the ones that I like most. There were at least ~12 other books that I didn’t like and stopped in the middle, but I guess, it’s part of life.

One of the best papers I read this year (again) was “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. The paper is quite short (only 8 pages without the references) but every word there counts and it’s giving a total picture of this powerful invention. It’s much bigger than ‘just’ cash system and in the future we will see this technology breakthrough changing many industries.

OK, let’s jump to the books. Continue reading →

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Business, life

Where The Best Ideas Win

I’ve finished reading one of the best books for this year: Principles: Life and Work.

It’s a long book but very well organized. You get a good background on Ray Dalio and how he arrived at where he is today. I have known him for 10 years but was amazed to learn he was broke in the early 80′. In a classic American dream story, he built one of the world’s most significant (and maybe, best) hedge funds that these days manage over $150B.

Things I liked:

  • Ray gives good explanations to each principal and how he got to it. There are many cases where he drives his points with a real-life example, which is helpful. You can think of this book as a recipe book for life and business. Ray wants you to follow these principles, get you to think about them, and develop a set of principles based on your idea, experience, and life lessons.
  • He provides the reader with a strategy and a roadmap to better thinking and dealing with problems and challenges.
  • He also gives tools and methodologies to accomplish goals you think are essential base on your values.
  • After over 40 years in the stock market, he learned that to be so successful, you need to be an independent thinker (because the consensus is baked into the price of assets), and you need to be more right than wrong. So the ability to learn from your mistakes and to keep improving is critical.
  • In the last part of the book, he talks about business and how to build a group or organization that will be transparent, self-improving, and able to bubble up with the best ideas. It sounds easy, but from the past 20 years, I know how hard it is to accomplish.

Continue reading →

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Business

Overcoming Limiting Factors: Essential #StartupTips for Success

In reality, we see many examples that too much capital makes your startup unfocused, and it’s a curse, not a blessing. Getting funds at the beginning puts you in the wrong position of ‘spending’ money and not earning it. Minimizing it as much as possible is a smart move that helps build a healthy business. One that is making money and spending only some of it. It sounds too basic, but you will be surprised how many founders forget it after raising the first round. You wish to start lean and mean and keep it as long as possible.

Limited capital makes companies focused.

This is important when you wish to build a business and make it profitable in a limited time.

The main limiting factors for startups:

  1. The management team – Can the founders and other leaders make the right decisions and drive execution that is focused and moving the needle to customers?
  2. Focus – Focusing on what to do and, more importantly, what not to do is critical.
  3. Part of that is keeping to play to your strength, not responding to others in the market, and failing to play their game. You can go deeper on the topic in Malcolm Gladwell’s book: “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants” in a nutshell, you (as David) want to move the battle to your expertise so the odds to win will be in your favor.
  4. Time – You got funding, and it’s buying you time to execute. If you can’t reach the milestone you put to yourself, it might lead to a path you wish to avoid (e.g., more rounds and no profitability).

As Henry Ford said:

“If you think you can do it or think you can’t do it – you are probably right.”

It’s always easy to come up with excuses and ‘reasons’ for why: more of X and more of Y could have been helpful, but if you are resourceful and got grit, you can win.

Knowledge, in this case, is half the solution.

Take ownership, focus like a laser, and good luck!

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Business, life

Einstein: His Life and Universe

I just finished to read this book and there are few aspects I really enjoyed.

It was a long book that the master of biographies (Walter Isaacson) wrote based on the newly released personal letters of Albert Einstein.

I liked to learn about Einstein personality and his private life as well as his academic achievements. His imaginative and ‘thinking out of the box’ approaches enable him to create a revolution. To me, the amazing part, is that he only used his mind. No experiments or ‘tools’ that will guide him.

The book explores how an imaginative patent clerk came with theories that changed the way we understand the universe. We get a description of a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn’t get a teaching job or a doctorate. I learned that unlike the pop culture that claimed he was an awful student, he was a good one. He wasn’t strong in french but in math and physics, he was a good student who got high scores.

One of the thing that I found as a surprise, was the fact that he knew that he is going to win the Nobel prize. He also promised his first wife the money from the prize. Continue reading →

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Business, life

You Don’t Need Status Meetings

The most valuable and scarce resource is time.

As a young startup you must do your best to use it as efficient as possible because you have limited time to show traction and become a profitable business.

Now, there is no doubt that you need to focus and try to spend most of your time on real work. However, we all did it in the past, we get into a room of 5-10 people and everyone is telling the group what they did.

It’s such a waste of time! Even if each person is talking for 5-10min you got here 50-100min of boring meeting which is equal to a waste of time.

Why not have this updates in a tool that let everyone in the team to see what all the others are working on? Continue reading →

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