nate's musings

“Fix Your Little Problem and Light This Candle”.

Be careful playing games in business.

This is a good lesson about being honest and not cheaping out.

Yahoo had a deal to buy Facebook for $1bil. They picked and chinsed away at the financials and pissed Facebook off. Facebook decided to pass on the deal. What did Yahoo miss out on? Um, about a $99 billion return in a few years. That’s not bad. The greatest deal missed in history?

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I’ll repost what I wrote about the NFL lockout last year:

We, the fans, full well understand that this is a fight all about money. It’s a money grab, we get that. However, there is smart negotiating & there is tough negotiating. The former means, leave a little on the table because you both have to work / live together. The latter means, one side tries to destroy the other, just to sweeten the deal for themselves, this is tough negotiating = extracting the most you can out of the other side. This method is counterproductive because it leaves bitterness & resentment. The most fair deal will be on that hurts and helps BOTH sides. { Throw the lawyers out a window and hash it out. Nothing will destroy a good deal faster than a lawyer, let alone many lawyers }

How is this going to get resolved? Courts? No. It will get resolved by BOTH sides giving in and leaving some on the table. Whatever deal that will be struck at a later date is a better deal RIGHT NOW! Why? Because you are destroying your brand, that’s why. The NFL is one of the best brands in the country. And locally each team is a great brand. None better than the most highly esteemed, illustrious Denver Broncos! ;) The longer this drags on the more we, the fans, will blame both sides. I don’t care what your squabbles are, work them out and get this resolved.

The definitive guide to Cloud storage: a pricing and feature guide for consumers via @arstechnica

http://su.pr/2hKnqy

Politicians & job creation. Do they take the credit when the sun rises too?

Facebook has started down the path to becoming publicly traded. FB is a remarkable company. It was started in 2004 by essentially one person, Zuck. In less than a decade the F-book:

~ Has over 3k employees.

~ Once public roughly 1/3 of it’s employees, say 1k will become millionaires.

Now I could list all sorts of other astounding stats about FB, but that’s not my point. What is my point? That politicians love to take credit for good economies and job creation. How many of the 3k jobs created by F-book, the 1k millionaires, and the billionaires, were created by politicians? Answer, ZERO. ZIP. NADA.

Bottom line = I don’t want to hear either party or ANY politician talk about creating jobs. The best role gov can play in job creation is to just stay out of our way and let the adults do the heavy lifting and “job creation”.

How to start a business, updated & revised

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1. You can start it in your *spare* time, just carve out x hours / day / week to do *damage*.

2. Keep your expenditures down, be creative. Money doesn’t create great companies. Hard work & great people create great companies. In fact too much money will make you fat & happy (that’s not good). Stay lean and mean as long as possible. And don’t sell your soul to the devil for outside money. They want control for their money. It generally is not worth it to give up your control. If you and your management team don’t have 51% of the controlling votes, be very worried and fix that asap.

3. Pick something you like doing, then it won’t be much of a chore to do.

4. Social media and networking (both online and in-person) take marketing costs down to zero. Again, it’s just a time investment. Network, network, network…

5. Test. Measure. Refine. Rinse, repeat.

6. Never stop learning. Become a student of your business, business in general and of life.

7. Give back, help others.

8. Now is the time to start, now is the time. (here is Seth Godin’s entry on “When to start”)

9. When you are hiring employees, hire people smarter than yourself & that share your values. Otherwise you will find out about the law of crappy people pretty quickly. The same applies to finding co-founders. This is like marrying, you need to court first. Don’t rush in, fools rush in as Elvis said. Try before you buy. If you are in doubt, pass. A lot of the best deals in your life are the ones you don’t make.

10. Outsource, automate and eliminate as many annoying non-core to your biz tasks as possible. Put your focus where it should be. If you are a designer, focus on design and the biz of design. If you are an accountant focus on accounting and the biz of accounting

Outsource automate and eliminate what others can do better and cheaper than you can. E.g., I handle all the essential but bothersome tasks of registering domains / hosting email and developing websites / web hosting (link). These are all tasks that can nickel & dime small biz’ time and energy. *shameless plug, over.*

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Resources:

How I spent a million bucks and ended up with 2 chairs.

David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08

Neil Patel has a pretty comprehensive list of resources.

The Entrepreneur’s Handbook – 59 Resources For First Time Entrepreneurs

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Web 2.0: Top 25 Applications to Grow Your Business

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham’s seminal essay  “How to start a startup“

Mark Cuban’s — A Couple of My Rules for Startups

In Mark’s post there’s a link to Jason Calacanasis’ “How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips)”

Kevin Patrick’s “Ten Commandments of Endurance”, I believe they apply to starting and running a company.

Simon Sinek’s presentation @ TED video: How great leaders inspire action. Start by asking why.

Rework

Built to Last & Good To Great

The 4-Hour Workweek & the http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/

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Summation:

Create very small goals that are attainable and scale up from there. You will become disillusioned if you decide you’re going to create the next huge company that’s a fusion of Apple, Google, Facebook & Walmart. Those are lightning strikes. Mark Zuckerberg says start by doing the easy tasks. This way you gain momentum, and before you know it you will be passing milestone after milestone. Paul Buckheit creator of Gmail & Friendfeed said with Gmail, they tried to get 100 happy users inside Google. It was harder than they thought, then they scaled up.

7 Things Highly Productive People Do

Via Inc, By Ilya Pozin |  @ilyaNeverSleeps  | article

I agree with everything save the phone. I’m allergic to the phone. As a computer geek I find it largely unproductive. Better to use project management tools, basecamp, lighthouse…

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1. Work backwards from goals to milestones to tasks. Writing “launch company website” at the top of your to-do list is a sure way to make sure you never get it done. Break down the work into smaller and smaller chunks until you have specific tasks that can be accomplished in a few hours or less: Sketch a wireframe, outline an introduction for the homepage video, etc. That’s how you set goals and actually succeed in crossing them off your list.
2. Stop multi-tasking. No, seriously—stop. Switching from task to task quickly does not work. In fact, changing tasks more than 10 times in a day makes you dumber than being stoned. When you’re stoned, your IQ drops by five points. When you multitask, it drops by an average of 10 points, 15 for men, five for women (yes, men are three times as bad at multitasking than women). 
3. Be militant about eliminating distractions. Lock your door, put a sign up, turn off your phone, texts, email, and instant messaging. In fact, if you know you may sneak a peek at your email, set it to offline mode, or even turn off your Internet connection. Go to a quiet area and focus on completing one task.
4. Schedule your email. Pick two or three times during the day when you’re going to use your email. Checking your email constantly throughout the day creates a ton of noise and kills your productivity.
5. Use the phone. Email isn’t meant for conversations. Don’t reply more than twice to an email. Pick up the phone instead. 
6. Work on your own agenda. Don’t let something else set your day. Most people go right to their emails and start freaking out. You will end up at inbox-zero, but accomplish nothing. After you wake up, drink water so you rehydrate, eat a good breakfast to replenish your glucose, then set prioritized goals for the rest of your day. 
7. Work in 60 to 90 minute intervals. Your brain uses up more glucose than any other bodily activity. Typically you will have spent most of it after 60-90 minutes. (That’s why you feel so burned out after super long meetings.) So take a break: Get up, go for a walk, have a snack, do something completely different to recharge. And yes, that means you need an extra hour for breaks, not including lunch, so if you’re required to get eight hours of work done each day, plan to be there for 9.5-10 hours.  [sic]

My friends or robots? I choose robots, or strangers.

Robots or ‘friends’? Answer; robots.

Friends or ‘the crowd’? Answer; the crowd.

Using my friends to discover movies, music, books…it’s fine in concept. However, I find the social graph an extremely flawed notion. E.g., I’ve rated nearly 2k movies @ Netflix. Their computers / robots / algorithms know what I will like better than my friends do. The problem with getting the firehose of updates (stream) on Facebook, et al., is that the feed is not contextually relevant. Say what? That is, it’s not segmented to your tastes, it’s scattershot.

I choose highly vetted and organized data vs. the F-book blast of banality. E.g., there are services where I found people with similar taste in music; Last.fm, the late great Imeem, and http://blip.fm/nateal33t I trust their judgement more than I do of my “friends”. Using a social service to cross reference and find me friends based on my musical taste, I can trust this method because it’s relevant data. This is why I love Yelp, nateal33t.yelp.com I have Yelp friends who have steered me to great restaurants, hotels, camping grounds, you name it. I see someone on Yelp who has similar taste to mine in X, I then compare that to what the crowd says. Then my chances of finding a place that I will like are exponentially better than just walking into a place off of the street.

Segmented social media friends by category (music, food, movies…) will deliver better recommendations than my friends will. Better yet, segmented friends by category, crowdsourced finds + robots = win. Think Amazon’s recommendations or Netflix’s recommendations along w/ user reviews = perfect.

The bottom line is that using these tools I expend far less energy searching for stuff. The right stuff will find me effortlessly.