life

Factfulness – Book Review

It’s one of the best books I read during 2018. 

Hans Rosling was a great author (and a speaker) and he expressed his ideas in a very clear way. One of the great things that open this book, is the test that he gives you at the beginning. It comes to prove you, how little you know about the world we live in. It drives the point home very clearly.

Don’t believe?

Try it for yourself:

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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.

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Business

Startup Pitch Deck

In the past 5 years, I meet with hundreds of entrepreneurs and developers that were starting a new company.
In many cases, it was during a pitch or mentoring session.
I learn a lot from these meetings.

One surprising learning was a common intimidation from pitching your startup. If there is one thing that entrepreneurs are really afraid from is this moment of true, when they need to sell.

Let’s not get into the why here but focus on what can reduce this stress.

If you think about it, it’s a way for you to gain trust and show that you can deliver.
No one (with experience) want to see that you got all the answers but investors do want to see that you are thinking on the right issues and you have a plan. It’s true, that “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face” but it’s still valuable to see such a plan.

Here is the template for a good pitch deck.

The one I will use myself and tell my kid to use.
You can feel free to add slides but please keep in mind that your presentation should not be longer than 15 slides as you want to finish it under 20min and leave room for open conversation. Continue reading

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Chrome, HTML5, mobile, webdev

Enable Users To Call From Your Web Site

TelephoneOn mobile devices, there is 99.65% chance that they have a calling capabilities.
It’s true that modern mobile browsers will automatically detect phone numbers and convert them to links, it’s a good idea to do this directly in your HTML code. It’s a great way to allow users to call your business with one click and the way to do it is with this simple tel: scheme:

Amazing coffee Service
<a href="tel:+972-3-123-3344">+
972-3-123-3344</a>

The result will look like:

A calling from site examples

Click to Call

You can click on it in order to see the code in action. Continue reading

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Business

Startups Best Practices

Screen Shot 2013-03-12 at 10.22.07 AMIn the past 18 years I’ve started six companies (the last cool one is HighGearMedia). In this talk, I shared some of the best practices that I learned the hard way. There are few aspects that I did my best to covered, from technology to design to following your dreams with the best tools you can allow yourself in a certain point in time. In the slides, there is a section that is devoted to Campus TLV and what is the role (as I see it) of a mentor that works with startups on a daily bases. If you are going to visit the Campus in the future, please don’t be a stranger.
There are many more aspects for building a new company. I guess, one of the most critical success factor is finding the right partners and share the load of the work. It’s one of those ‘easy to say hard to do’ things but this is part of the fun.
Good luck!
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