ManIndyArena | Entrepreneurship in Indianapolis

What makes a good engineering culture?

Tue, 22 May 2012 19:02:51 -0400

10 Lessons for Young Designers

Sun, 06 May 2012 16:52:43 -0400

The ones I like (which are most of them)

1. Be Authentic. The most powerful asset you have is your individuality, what makes you unique. It’s time to stop listening to others on what you should do.

2. Work harder than anyone else and you will always benefit from the effort.

4. …Make things with your hands. Innovation in thinking is not enough.

6. Being original is still king, especially in this tech-driven, group grope world.

8. Instinct and intuition are all-powerful. Learn to trust them.

10. If all else fails, No. 2 is the greatest competitive advantage of any career.

Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 7 Notes Essay

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 12:23:12 -0400

Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 7 Notes Essay:

Choice quotes:

Understanding exponents and power law distributions isn’t just about understanding VC. There are important personal applications too. Many things, such as key life decisions or starting businesses, also result in similar distributions. We tend to think about these things too moderately. There is a perception that some things are sort of better than other things, sometimes. But the reality is probably more extreme than that.

—

Paul Graham: Founders. Ideas are just indicative of how the founders can think. We look for relentlessly resourceful people. That combination is key. Relentlessness alone is useful. You can relentlessly just bang your head against the wall. It’s better to be relentless in your search for a door, and then resourcefully walk through it.

—-

Roelof Botha: It is so rare to find people who can clearly and concisely identify a problem and formulate coherent approach to solve it.

—-

Roelof Botha: You can discover a lot about founders by asking them about their choices. What are the key decisions you faced in your life and what did you decide? What were the alternatives? Why did you go to this school? Why did you move to this city?

—-

Paul Graham: Another corollary to the power law is that it’s OK to be lame in a lot of ways, so long as you’re not lame in some really important ways. The Apple guys were crazy and really bad dressers. But they got importance of microprocessors. Larry and Sergey got that search was important.

—-

Peter Thiel: Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay called “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” It revolved around a line from an ancient Greek poet: foxes know many little things, but hedgehogs know one big thing. People tend to think that foxes are best because they are nimble and have broad knowledge. But in business, it’s better to be a hedgehog if you have to choose between the two. But you should still try and know lots of little things too.

"If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot..."

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:09:23 -0400

“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.”

- Jeff Bezos, Interview with Wired

The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:05:42 -0400

The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs:

“There are a few drivers for the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs, and here’s a summary of the top ones:

Customers respond to novelty, which inevitably fades
First-to-market never lasts
More scale means less qualified customers”

Instagram's First Investor Explains What He Looks For In Companies

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 21:15:00 -0400

Instagram's First Investor Explains What He Looks For In Companies:

He wants founders who are thoughtful, but then make forceful decisions.
Founders must be able to code, but he doesn’t have strong opinions about languages.
Don’t raise more money until you’re sure you have product market fit.
“most of the time entrepreneurs are realistic near the end and say this isn’t working. Those decisions aren’t that difficult. It gets more difficult in later stages when you’ve got millions of dollars in.”

Startups: How to communicate traction to investors

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 11:25:09 -0400

Startups: How to communicate traction to investors:

How to:

Compress your y-axis
Choose your x-axis
Lower expectations
Choose your y-axis
Use absolute and growth numbers
Tell a story of a customer
Benchmark against a known competitor
Annotate a graph
Using testimonials as traction (don’t)
Using press as traction (don’t)

How To Get Media Coverage For Your Startup: A Complete Guide

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 13:24:55 -0400

How To Get Media Coverage For Your Startup: A Complete Guide:

A very thorough guide and extremely relevant to tech startups.

Hiring Talent: 4 Traits Your Start-up Needs

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:07:07 -0400

Hiring Talent: 4 Traits Your Start-up Needs:

1. Adaptability

“ask where they want to be in five years. While most job recruiters look for candidates who know exactly where they want to be, we’re the opposite.”

2. Honesty

“we ask them if they’re nervous. If we ask someone whether they’re nervous and they say no, but they’re sweating, shaking, and breaking out in rashes, it’s pretty much a red flag they’re not being genuine.”

3. Confidence

“Say, for example, a candidate says they think the start-up down the street is building something awesome. Then I say, “that start-up is the worst idea since pink Vitamin Water. And that stuff tastes like Robitussin.”“

4. Enthusiasm

“Making sure that they’re not more enthusiastic about the idea of working at your company (free food, crazy team outings) than the reality of the job (disruptive ideas, talented co-workers) is super important.”

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann’s Lesson for Start-Ups: Go Your Own Way

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 21:40:24 -0400

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann’s Lesson for Start-Ups: Go Your Own Way:

My favorite parts:

Don’t take too much advice:

But here’s Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann’s advice: “Don’t take too much advice.”

“Most people generalize whatever they did, and say that was the strategy that made it work,” Silbermann said. In reality, there’s very little way of knowing how various factors contributed to success or failure.

Being comfortable as a non-engineer:

Silbermann is not an engineer, so at Google he worked in online sales and operations.

“I left, not because I didn’t love the company, but because [with] my particular background, it would have been really hard to built products,” he said.

The fallacy of fail fast, lean, and traction:

Silbermann said, “The hard part about that idea of ‘minimum viable product,’ for me, is you don’t know what ‘minimum’ is, and you don’t know what ‘viable’ is.”

In the early days, Pinterest had “catastrophically small numbers,” Silbermann said. Nine months after launch, the site counted 10,000 users, with few of them active on a daily basis.

Silbermann said he recently picked up Eric Ries’s “The Lean Startup,” and was grateful he didn’t read it at the time, because it might have convinced him to give up at that point.

Sir Jonathan Ive: The iMan Cometh

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:01:20 -0400

Sir Jonathan Ive: The iMan Cometh

Developing Product Ideas

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:55:07 -0400

Mark Prigg: When you are coming up with product ideas such as the iPod, do you try to solve a problem?

Sir Jonathan Ive: There are different approaches - sometimes things can irritate you so you become aware of a problem, which is a very pragmatic approach and the least challenging. What is more difficult is when you are intrigued by an opportunity. That, I think, really exercises the skills of a designer. It’s not a problem you’re aware of, nobody has articulated a need. But you start asking questions, what if we do this, combine it with that, would that be useful? This creates opportunities that could replace entire categories of device, rather than tactically responding to an individual problem. That’s the real challenge, and that’s what is exciting. http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/sir-jonathan-ive-the-iman-cometh-7562170.html

"One of my tricks for generating startup ideas is to imagine the ways in which we’ll seem..."

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 11:05:49 -0400

“One of my tricks for generating startup ideas is to imagine the ways in which we’ll seem backward to future generations.”

- Paul Graham

Airbnb: A $1.3 Billion-Dollar Startup's First-Ever Pitch Deck

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:15:46 -0500

Airbnb: A $1.3 Billion-Dollar Startup's First-Ever Pitch Deck:

Another good example of a quality, simple pitch deck, this time from AirBnB.

The First Pitch Deck Foursquare Ever Showed Investors

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 18:51:17 -0500

The First Pitch Deck Foursquare Ever Showed Investors

Almost Three: A Brief History Of Foursquare Time (And A Look At Its Future)

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 23:32:35 -0500

Almost Three: A Brief History Of Foursquare Time (And A Look At Its Future):

“With so many approaches to product management, I found but a single common philosophy that bound all successful products together:

Identify product opportunities.
Create products to seize them.”

Talk to Us About Your Problems

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:26:39 -0500

Talk to Us About Your Problems:

“And Mr. Cho kind of looked at me. I could see he was puzzled. He said, ‘Jim-san. We all know you are a good manager, otherwise we would not have hired you. But please talk to us about your problems so we can all work on them together.’”

"It is the human friction that makes the sparks."

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 21:57:57 -0500

"It is the human friction that makes the sparks.":

“I was part of a number of failed remote R&D attempts. The one time it worked was when we decided to abandon meetings, project documents, tracking tools, etc. Instead, we got a high quality speakerphone so everyone could overhear everyone else’s conversations, and we left it on all day, every day. It wasn’t the same as being together in person, but we did manage to get some of the human friction back.” -Chris Dixon

In Startups And Life, You Need Plan A, B, And Z

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 17:42:03 -0500

In Startups And Life, You Need Plan A, B, And Z:

“How can you be flexibly persistent in your startup or in your career? Here’s a framework I use: ABZ Planning. In business and in life, you should have three plans: Plan A, Plan B, and Plan Z.” -Reid Hoffman

How Companies Learn Your Secrets

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 23:59:46 -0500

How Companies Learn Your Secrets:

“Deciphering cues is hard, however. Our lives often contain too much information to figure out what is triggering a particular behavior. Do you eat breakfast at a certain time because you’re hungry? Or because the morning news is on? Or because your kids have started eating? Experiments have shown that most cues fit into one of five categories: location, time, emotional state, other people or the immediately preceding action. So to figure out the cue for my cookie habit, I wrote down five things the moment the urge hit:”