Ideas for entrepreneurs

Though the article goes to some extreme examples, I don't know a single entrepreneur who didn't go through the ups and downs described here. And these low moments can be depressing indeed.

My take on this has been to consider than the good as the bad we're part of the same thing: something was happening (vs nothing). And that was what I wanted in the first place: make something meaningful of my life. But I have to admit I share what the author describes and that affect many founders: it's hard to speak about your tough times as they happen even with friends and family.

I met Rob Asghar a few weeks ago and we discussed among other things our pivot from Goojet to Scoop.it, when it is appropriate to pivot, when not and what happens when you realize your orignal strategy just won't work. 

This is how he very nicely wrote it up mixing music and surfing metaphors: two of my favorite topics! 

Pretty awesome data visualization by Visual.ly based on CrunchFund data. Would love to see exits in there too but gives a reallly interesting view of the VC/Startup/Founders graphs.

This is a long but great and beautifully written post by David McRaney. His story starts with the way the U.S. applied statistics to win the war through the example of measures taken to augment the odds of survival of bombers. 

The Maths geniuses of what was not yet "Big Data" came out with many recommendations that proved essential, one of which being to fight survival bias. If - like WWII Air Force officers - you had observed that most bombers returning from missions over Germany were crippled with bullets holes along the wings, around the tail gunner, and down the center of the body, where would you recommend adding protection?

If the answer's not trivial to you (or even if it is), read this.

And as McRaney extrapolates, this also explains why "All the Startup Advice You Read is Wrong" as Twitter co-founder Ev wrote.

As Elizabeth Yin, the co-founder of LaunchBit who wrote this on Andrew Chen's awesome blog, I also hear that very often.

Now what's great is that she actually acted upon this and surveyed developers about what would be their reasons for jumping ship and become a technical co-founder. 

The key to her great insights is one word: traction. To sell to your future co-founder, "you, as a non-technical entrepreneur, are not selling a dream or the vision.  You are selling traction."

Now, how do you get traction without even building a product? That's what she explains in the rest of her post building on some of the lean startup ideas. Enjoy the read! 

A great... story by Leah Busque, TaskRabbit's founder. 

Which are yours?

Nice recap by K. Tighe on what it takes to show thought leadership. Practical tips that make sense: visions deserve to be shared.

Couldn't agree more. Life is too short not to make something you're passionate about. But even better, what I learned is that the true risk is not taking any. I discovered that not instantly but through a double step process:

- As a grad student at Stanford, I discovered that most of the successful entrepreneurs who came to speak in the insanely great entrepreneurship class of the Engineering School had failed. Not always of course but they had at some point. To someone who thought starting a business was like playing the lottery, this was a revelation and it completely changed my horizon.

- 15 years later when economic disaster struck and left a lot of people I knew jobless while they were supposed to be safe in good, solid, established companies. 

Selling your time is perfectly respectful. But whether it's plan A or plan B is the real choice.

Very interesting analysis by Sangeet Paul Choudary on Andrew Chen's blog on how social products don't get traction by claiming to be a community anymore. 

Being quoted in the article as a example of this new type of products made me happy and proud: we've been careful to craft an experience on Scoop.it that didn't overwhelm people. While we are fundamentally a social product and have high ambitions for helping our users build their communities of interests, we know that very few people feels like they need yet another community. So we wanted to deliver an experience where new users would clearly see initial value (saving time, good looking content hub, cross posting to social networks) without the need to have a community, then reinforce the value over time (be discovered, grow their audience) independently of the social dimension of the platform while still helping them all along the process but in a seamless way to discover their community of interests.

Beyond that post, our data have validated this in a couple of ways:

- the more people use Scoop.it, the more they use it: the number of scoops per week increases over time since sign-up.

- social and content discovery features make users seamlessly get a bigger and bigger community of follower/followees over time.