Tag Archives: entrepreneurship

Business

Objectives And Key Results

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At Google (and many other companies) we are working with OKRs. From the company level down to the personal level. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. It is a method of defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes. Its main goal is to connect company, team and personal objectives to measurable results, making people move together in the right direction.
Let’s see why it might be a methodology you would like to use in your startup.

What?

First, you wish to define what is the goal (or the top 1-3 objectives) you try to accomplished. Continue reading →

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Business

#LPA17 First Week – Quick Summary

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We just finished half of Launchpad Accelerator boot camp #3!
It’s a lot of work but great fun.

As I wrote in the past. I’m having a real fun to leading Google Launchpad Accelerator. If you don’t know what we do and didn’t click here. The goal is to help tech startups build successful business. We focusing on emerging markets and working with a group of talented mentors (from Google and outside) to bring real value to the startups.

How?

We are running this program by working closely with these startups and helping them with the most critical challenges. You can see below all the startups that are taking part in this class.

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The analysis and guidance are being done by mentoring sessions. In these sessions we leverage the vast experience of Google’s engineers and other external mentors from top companies and venture capitals in silicon valley.

We covered topics like: Progressive web apps, Android, Firebase, Growth hacking, Business, Fundraising and any other challenges that the startups wanted to get help with. It’s a packed two weeks, but the beauty is (that in most cases), the mentors giving the entrepreneurs hooks and not fishes. Our goal is to learn from these sessions and share the finding publicly. So I hope to have a lot of new posts for you in the next several months.

This week we had some inspirational talks and lots of productive sessions. A quick browse in the photos (or this growing set of photos) below will give you a glimpse to the magic that is rolling in our startup space in San Francisco. Continue reading →

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Business

How To Ask Good Questions?

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When you are helping entrepreneurs and developers, you want to lead them after you understand their specific situation. Asking a question is an important tool that will let you investigate what are the strengths and weaknesses.

It’s a skill, so like any other skill, you can improve it. I found that there are (almost) no ‘dumb questions’. In many cases, the basic questions are the most revealing ones. Similar to the “5 whys” that are helpful to get to root cause of a problem.

Before you asking the question, do some homework and try to find the answer yourself. Later, when you ask the question, say what you did in order to find the answer. This will help you to establish the conversation and show that you did some homework on the topic.

Some suggestions that will improve your questions: Continue reading →

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Business

Lean Canvas Basics

The lean canvas is a tool that helps entrepreneur with forming their idea into a macro plan and later (hopefully) a full function service or product.

You can use something like a good pitch deck to do the same. The core in these tools is to help you articulate what are you going to do and how you are going to win with it.

Let’s have a look at the page below. You can click on it to see it on a full page. If you wish to work with such a template – scroll down and print the clean one that we got in the bottom of this post.

lean canvas

The idea here is to think on our idea and to break it down to the different aspects.

We will fill in short bullet points each section. If you have a co-founder or advisor/mentor to consult with, please do so. It will improve the final result. Also, show the result to many people that you respect. Each might give you a point of view you didn’t think about. Continue reading →

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Business

Grit And Startups

look carefully

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up.
The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”
– Thomas A. Edison Continue reading →

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Business

The Idea Factory Review

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I’ve just finished “The Idea Factory” and although it was long, I really enjoyed it.

It deals with a question that kept me (and many others) busy in the past few years: What causes innovation? and it’s doing it by telling the history of the most productive scientific laboratory on the planet (between 1920 to 1980): Bell Labs.

How did this organization become such a success story?

Bell labs produced seven Nobel Prizes and contributed important innovations: the transistor, transatlantic cable, the laser, UNIX, C++, photovoltaic cells, error-corrected communication, charged-coupled devices, digital communications and the mobile phones. Continue reading →

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Business, Chrome

Go North Innovation Event

The founder of Research In Motion talking about quantum computing research

The founder of Research In Motion talking about quantum computing

I’ve just finish to give me talk at the Go North event. The goal of this talk was to expose young entrepreneurs to the power of the web platform and how they could leverage progressive web apps in order to improve their businesses. It was very cool to meet with a lot of developers and entrepreneurs that are passion about the mobile web. One of the interesting questions I got was around AMP and PWA and how to bridge between them. Here is the detailed answer. The shorter version is that you want to start with AMP as a great first impression that you give your users (it’s all about speed!) and later stay engage/productive with PWA.
The two scenarios below tell this story in a nutshell. Continue reading →

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Business

Progressive Web Apps For Startups

Today I gave a talk at our Startup Space in San Francisco to a group of startups from Mexico.

The goal of this talk was to expose young entrepreneurs to the power of the web platform and how they could leverage progressive web apps in order to improve their businesses. The first section is talking about ‘startups best practices’. Since most of them are in their first steps, I figure it would be valuable to them to hear what they can do better.

The second section is telling the story of progressive web app revolution and how it can help them.
The TL;DR is in the picture below. Continue reading →

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Business

Is Working For This Startup Is The Right Move?

Coming to evaluate if a specific startup is a good option for you?

You should check it from several different angles as the risk/reward is very different from a mature company. The critical aspects that I will look for are:

  • Do you like the people?
    Culture fit is the critical because you need to work with your team mates every day and spend a LOT of time with them, especially if the startup is early stage. If you aren’t having fun with them… will it be worth the time?
    How do you figure this out: Try to go out for a drink or lunch. When you hang out you could learn a lot by talking on life and see how they treat others.

    Screenshot 2015-05-13 18.03.41

Continue reading →

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Android, Business

How To Make Money From Your App?

What are the action items that will increase the odds in that battle to improve your monetization?

This is one of the most challenging aspect for every startups. After you build your application (or service) you need to measure all the actions that the users take. This is a learning mechanism that will let you iterate (hopefully quickly) and improve your product. Once you feel that you have a good product market fit and you are out of the alpha (or beta) modes it’s time to put efforts in the ‘Grow’ and ‘Earn’ parts.

Let’s see what are some of the tools that we can use.

develop, grow and earn! Continue reading →

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