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:
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
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
I was lucky enough to be in the room for their final rehearsal (yep… it was in the same room that I gave my I/O talk). However, I could not focus on preparing, because their stories were so powerful and inspiring. Each and everyone had a story that kept the ‘wow’ effect. If you have time this weekend… you won’t regrat it. Continue reading
In 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.
It is a busy week (and we are only on TUE). First, we had the opportunity to host four founders from around the world (Sweden, Moscow and Israel) on GDL-IL. It was in a special episode about: Sartups, VCs, Angles and how to improve your pitch. I had the pleasure to host Eze Vidra, Head of Google Campus London who gave important feedback after each pitch. The structure of the show was like that: each founder got 3 minutes to pitch his startup and then we gave them feedback and asked more questions in order to understand the strengths better. I liked the fact that each founder choose a different way to pass his message. It was very interesting to hear the progress and learn about the key accomplishments that each of them made. I will write a more detailed summary of this conversation but for now you can enjoy it over here:
Second, last night, fresh from the oven a new podcast in hebrew on HTML5 and CSS3 New & Cool Stuff saw life. I had the honor to be a guest (again) on reversim.com and talk about new web technologies that I’m passion about. If you are a developer that wish to hear quality content in hebrew on subjects that relate to your profesional life. Give it a try, today they have more then 150 episodes that cover A LOT of topics. You can download the mp3 file from here.
How we can do things cheaper, faster, better?
This is a short lighting talk I gave in JPR 2011.
Ido Green 