Tag Archives: startups

Business

Decoding the VC Perspective: Navigating Startup Evaluation Memo

A VC memo is a crucial tool for venture capitalists to evaluate startups. It allows to:

  • Document the thinking: The memo forces the VC to think critically about the startup and its potential. This can help them identify potential risks or challenges and make a more informed decision about whether or not to invest.
  • Communicate with their partners: The memo can communicate the VC’s thoughts on the startup to their partners. This helps build consensus within the VC firm and ensures everyone is on the same page about the investment.
  • Track their investments: The memo can track the VC’s investments over time. This can help them assess their portfolio companies’ performance and make adjustments to their investment strategy as needed. It also helps to debrief the decisions in retrospect.
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life, Sport

Embracing the Underdog Mindset: Unleashing Drive, Grit, Scrappiness, and Independence

Being an underdog can often feel like an impossible challenge in a world dominated by giants, where success seems reserved for the privileged few. However, contrary to popular belief, being an underdog is not a disadvantage (in some cases) but a powerful mindset fueled by drive, grit, scrappiness, and independence.
The idea to look at it from the strength perspective came to me, after reading Gladwell’s excellent book “David and Goliath.” 
The book uses individual case studies and comparisons to provide a wide range of examples where perceived major disadvantages, in fact, are the keys to the underdog Davids’s triumph against Goliath-like opponents.

This unique perspective is similar to the “Day 1” philosophy embraced by Jeff Bezos, which empowers individuals and organizations to defy the odds, break barriers, and achieve extraordinary results. 

In this post, we will explore the qualities of the underdog mindset and discover how it can be harnessed to unleash one’s true potential.

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Business

Framing Effect

The framing effect is a cognitive bias where people react differently to the same information depending on how it is presented. 
This effect can be used in business and personal life to influence people’s decisions and behaviors.

At Meta, it is one of the critical ways of thinking for managers. You wish to lead by doubling down on people’s strengths, which is a superpower that brings results and happiness. 

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Business, webdev

Get Things Done – Lessons From Yahoo, Google, Netflix And Meta

Google, Meta, and Netflix are part of a small elite group of innovative and successful tech companies of our time. They have made a name for themselves in business and technology. All these companies are pioneering new technologies, products, and services. 

Google

Google’s search engine is a household name synonymous with finding information online. The mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” They are doing a fabulous job on that. However, the future is still determined by Google’s Bard and the competition with OpenAI and Microsoft.

Meta

Formerly known as Facebook, Meta is a social media giant connecting billions worldwide. Meta has not only revolutionized the way we communicate and interact with each other, but it has also changed how businesses and brands reach out to their target audience.

Meta’s acquisition of Oculus has given the company an edge in the virtual reality space, and the prospects of the Metaverse are still in the ‘dust’ – but it will be interesting if the future looks like “Ready Player 1”.

Netflix

Netflix has disrupted the entertainment industry by offering a subscription-based streaming service and investing in original content. How will the competition with HBO and Disney shape the future? That’s a good question.

But what can we learn from them? 

In the following slides, I focused on essential aspects.
If I missed something, please let me know.

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Business, life

Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter 2022

Like every year, it’s a pleasure to read the words of wisdom from Warren. His annual letter gives us a glimpse into his mind and how he sees the world. It’s fascinating, and each time is surprising. Warren is an excellent writer who put a smile on my face.

I’m looking forward to watching his ‘Investing Carnaval’ at the beginning of May.

OK, here are the parts I enjoyed most:

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JavaScript, webdev

SkyMass: A New Way to Build Web Apps

If you’re searching for a fresh approach to developing web applications, SkyMass offers an innovative solution. It provides a more efficient method for swiftly crafting functional web applications for your internal APIs.

Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with SkyMass on multiple projects, and the results have been impressive. Instead of starting from scratch with a React app each time, SkyMass has enabled me to swiftly define the essential components and have a working prototype in a matter of hours or days, rather than the weeks or even months it would typically take.

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Business, webdev

Product Management – From Mission to Roadmap

When we are talking about a roadmap in the context of product management, we mean a shared source of truth that outlines the vision, direction, priorities, and progress of a product over time.
It’s a plan of action that aligns the organization around short and long-term goals for the product or project and how they will be achieved.

It is an essential tool for product planning and serves as a communication channel between product management and other stakeholders. Product managers need to understand how to create a product roadmap and how to keep it updated, and keeping it updated with reality is the challenging part.

As Mike said: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Or in other version (popular in the army) – “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
That’s why we must invest in keeping it as close as possible to the changing reality.

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Business, life

Second order thinking in practice

Some decisions seem like wins at first, but turn out to be losses over time. Second-order thinking is the ability to think about the consequences of one’s actions, and to consider how different courses of action can affect the long-term outcomes. It is a tool that will help you examine the long-term effects of your decisions.
In some cases, try to shift the timelines. Will this decision be impactful in 5 days? 4 weeks? 12 months? 10 years?

By doing this, you are looking at the larger picture and taking a longer-term view.
To do this well, you will need to look at both the direct and indirect consequences of your decisions

Second-order thinking involves taking into account the ripple effect of your decisions and how they can affect the future. It requires you to think beyond the immediate outcomes and consider the future implications of your current choices. This is especially important for business decisions, where a single decision can have lasting implications.

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Business, Crypto

Crypto 101 and a bit more

What is a blockchain?
Why is cryptocurrency the future of the finance world?
Below you can find a deck I was preparing for a lighting talk at ESGgo.
Since I got some positive feedback on it, I wanted to share it broadly.
Hopefully, you will find it valuable.

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Business

The ESG Data Ambiguity

TL;DR

ESG rating services are essential for investors. However, there is a high variance between them and when I’m saying high variance – it’s more like huge variance.
A good example is America’s most valuable automobile company – Tesla.
MSCI ranks it at the top of the car industry for sustainability, whereas FTSE ranks it as the worst car producer globally. 

Yes! 

You read it right. 

Tesla is both the best and the worst.

One rating agency claims “It’s the best” while another is putting it in last place. The discrepancy reflects the fact that MSCI judges Tesla to be almost perfect on carbon emissions because of its clean technology, while FTSE, which evaluates factory emissions, regards the firm as a serious offender. In this post we will see what are the characteristics of this challenge and how ESGgo platform can help to address them.

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