When Technology meets Design meets Business
It’s a short interview with a great entrepreneur. Elon Musk is part of the PayPal Mafia, but that is another story, that will touch on in the future. He started to be famous as the co-founder of PayPal and served as the company’s CEO. After they were sold to eBay, he was a bit busy, starting three amazing companies that are inventing and disrupting their industries – big time. Continue reading
How to pick the right (technology) tool for the job?
There are a lot of options out there. First, you need to decide where your servers will run: Google cloud platform, Amazon web services, and many others platforms that give you the ability to ‘run and scale’. Next, you need to think on the distribution platforms you wish cover and to prioritize them: Web, Android, iOS etc’.
Soon after these stages, you will hit the important questions, on your strategy. Is it going to be ‘mobile first’ or ‘mobile only’? How will you promote the product? Which channels? How to measure and tune them?
In this post, I will try to cover the tip of this iceberg. Specifically, what are some of the consideration you wish to be aware of when making the critical decisions that address your technology stack. Continue reading
What valuable start-up is there that no one is building at the moment?
This question is harder than it looks, because your new company could create a lot of value without capturing some of it. As a founder, you need to have expertise in few areas or find co-founders that will cover them. The tricky part is to find co-founders you really enjoy working with.
Why? Because start-ups are really hard. At the beginning, it seems like a great idea that will be good fun to execute against, but very soon you discover (a lot of) holes that are challenges. If you aren’t enjoying your partners to the road, it’s going to be very hard to work well at those crucial moments. At the beginning, like in relationships, everything is flowing and there are no arguments. But very quickly, in the rapid pace of the start-ups world, you will find conflicts. Make sure you can have a great communication channel with your partners, and you are able to move quickly in those cases that you don’t see eye to eye.
After we have our co-founders and we are set on the idea, we are likely to move forward and to shape it. The first thing is the Minimum Viable Product: It is that product which has just those features and no more that allows you to ship a product that early adopters see and, at least some of whom resonate with, pay you money for, and start to give you feedback on. It should be in the highest quality you can reach. So good, that you will be able to capture your users into it, with the value it’s offering to them. It’s important to put it out there as fast as you can and start collecting feedback from real users.
During my volunteering work at Campus TLV, I work with startups on entrepreneurship skills and technology. One of the popular topics is the subject of this post: “How to raise money”. It’s a challenging topic on many levels. You wish to raise enough money but not too much. Why? because at this point of the startup’s life you are giving a slice of your company (=equity) to the investors and you don’t want to sell too much or too low. Here are few guidelines:
2014 was a busy year.
In few moments of reflection, it feels more like 3-4 years. Anyway, let’s try to see where was the interesting stuff on this blog.
Today there are many choices when it comes to make money on the web.
Let’s take a closer look at each option and see when and how to use it. Continue reading
Since I’ve read “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility”, I found Talab’s ideas to be very interesting and practical. I appreciate the fact that he is not ‘only’ an academic scholar that is living in his ivory tower but rather an option trader that bring a lot of ‘street wise’ into his arguments. Here are two recent talks that he made that put some more light on these fascinating subjects: the concepts of antifragility and black swan events and their implications. Continue reading
In this TED talk, Malcolm Gladwell shares with us a new point of view on the famous story of David and Goliath. This new angle to look at the situation(s) reminds us of the state any startup is facing. It takes a lot of work to build a new service/product and sometimes to create or educate a market. However, again and again, startups do it while the significant (well-funded) organizations need to catch up. What looks, at first, as a disadvantage (e.g., limited budget, small teams, members that need to do ‘everything,’ no support from other players in the market, etc.’) is a true advantage when you look deeper.
It forces the startup to be frugal, think out of the box, and be as productive as possible.
There is a nice phrase in Hebrew that, in a direct translation to English will look like this:
“We do the most difficult things immediately. The impossible takes us a little longer.” Continue reading
This week in Google Developers Live Israel I’ve spoke about a topic I’m passion for long time – Startups and entrepreneurship. It’s always thrilling to create a new ‘thing’. It might be a new service, a whole new product or a company that is disrupting a segment in the market. As the founder, it force you, to think and take many decisions along the way. There is a certain risk/reward ratio to any new venture. In most of the cases, it will have an emotional aspect (subjective risk) and a more mesurable aspect that we can quantify. Here are 20 minutes that try to cover some of the main lessons I’ve learn in the past 20 years. Continue reading
Here is a list I’ve saw in the past and I thought it would be great to put it in the ‘air’ and gain more feedback on what you wish to see in a ‘must read’ book list that will open your mind to new ideas (and hopefully improve you in business life).
Please feel free to add stuff in the comments.
I had this list of “must read books” from one of the conferences I’ve attended back in 2010. There are some good ones over there as well. However, it covers more technical books for developers and less business books. Don’t forget “There is creative reading as well as creative writing”.
