Archive for the ‘things to ponder about’ Category

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Roll with uncertainty

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

A lot of time we spin our wheels going back and forth when faced with uncertainty in life. I know sometimes I tend to overanalyze and try to risk-assess something to death, and still get no closer to a decision. At the last Y Combinator Startup School in Berkeley, Mark Zuckerberg said (paraphrase),

“In a world where everything around you is constantly changing quickly, the most dangerous thing you can do is to not change”.

And that’s especially true in the technology business. As a technologist, if you don’t learn to love it, you won’t keep up. I’m a big fan of Tina Seelig and her famous talk at Stanford titled “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20” (I can’t highly recommend it enough, please check it out and you can thank me later). That talk has received so much interest that it’s now a book.

Going back to uncertainty, it just never stops. If everyone had equal visibility and the exact equal amount of information for decision making, then everybody would be able to make the same sound decision. Now making decision, with incomplete information .. that’s how you win; how you get an edge on the competition. Also not easy, but you have to roll with it.

In a recent Q&A with Tina on BNET,

Q: Your latest book is entitled What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World. So the inevitable question: if you could go back and give your 20-year-old self just one piece of advice, what would it be?

A: I would tell myself that the uncertainty of life never goes away. There are always choices in front of you, challenges to overcome, and failures from which you need to recover. If you embrace the challenges and view them through the lens of possibilities, then you will not only be happier, but will be much more likely to turn the inevitable obstacles into opportunities. The world is always changing, and it is up to you to be flexible and optimistic. With a positive attitude and creative thinking, most problems can be viewed as opportunities in disguise.

Yours truly is reading this book on my Kindle. I. highly. recommend. it.

What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World



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Posted in entrepreneurship, ideas, innovation, problem-opportunity, quotes, things to ponder about, things to remind myself | Comments

Can we contribute to a conversation without being present?

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

Update 12/16/2009 — My “minimum viable product” (or at least the first very rough iteration of it) is complete. Check it out here http://www.jaysernbot.com. See how my own Twitter account is own its own, chatting up people (screenshot of day 1) I have never discovered before. I would love to hear from you!

I’m a geek and I like to automate stuff, because it’s cool and I am lazy. Not that we aren’t already suffering from chronic email fatigue, but with the advent of social media / Web 2.0 – especially Twitter – the more you try to keep up, the more you actually fall behind.

This sucks.

Case in point: You have to be constantly checking Twitter about what’s someone’s saying about you, or saying to you, or what someone’s saying about something (perhaps a topic of your interest where you have some domain expertise) – if you want to participate in the conversation. If people are tweeting about the ice hockey game right now, and you chime in 3 days later, you’re already out of the conversation. It’s all real-time (or at least “near” real-time) now.

Does anyone else wish that you could participate in a conversation without having to be tethered to your Twitter client 24/7 ?

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Posted in problem-opportunity, things to ponder about | Comments

Flame out or become a $1Bil business

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

VCs take a porfolio approach to managing risk; individual company is largely irrelevant because of diversification effects. In fact, one of my portfolio companies was once rejected by Sequoia because, “You’ll almost certainly build a nice $100 million business. But we’d rather have a riskier investment that either flames out or becomes a $1 billion business.” Thus the key metric is expected value.

Quotable quotes, from 21 Million Reasons For Mint To Sell via CloudAve.

I’ve blogged before about Vinod Khola’s video here (iinnovate’s interview), where in it he says one of the problems he notices in entrepreneurs is that they don’t dream big enough. Just recently Sarah Lacy wrote that the consensus of the recent TC50 panel is that nobody was “swinging for the fences“, everyone just playing it safe–basically dreaming small.

Sarah writes:

Here’s why this matters: Start-ups by definition don’t have the experience, market position, funding or resources to tackle obvious market opportunities. If what they’re trying to do makes clear business sense, a bigger, better-positioned company would do it. A start-up’s only edge is that it’s not built into legacy businesses and preconceived notions and can do something, well, crazy.

There are entrepreneurs somewhere building the next big companies. But it’s probably just a wonky side-project that no one—not even the entrepreneur himself—realizes is the next big thing. That’s who we need to drag on stage next year.

I agree, if it’s an obvious opportunity, someone’s already on it. We need more crazy people working on crazy ideas.

Vinod Khosla on problem solving: You don’t solve all problems before you jump into a new situation. You just believe in yourself, and say, “I’ll figure it out, one way or another”. Vinod had no idea how he was going to pay for fees and rent when he got accepted to the Stanford GSB. To me, this is the “leap of faith” advice entrepreneurs talk about. You just got to jump.

Posted in changing the world, entrepreneurship, passion, quotes, startup, things to ponder about, things to remind myself | Comments

A Thriving App Economy Key To Telcos, Social Networks, and Handset Manufacturers Survival

Monday, June 8th, 2009
  • Amazon.com was started with the idea that they would make money by shipping physical products. Today’s Amazon makes money by building a market place where every link that take you to a product is in fact an ad (revenue share). They make more money, not by shipping goods, but by referring customers to other goods.
  • In 2008, 3 billions apps where downloaded on the Internet, most on social network and mobiles. That’s 40-50 million daily active users
  • Today < 5% are paid apps, but that's ok because numbers shows that paid apps are trending up
  • Average app price people pay for is the price of an iTunes song, $0.99 – $2.99. There may be a threshold where people won’t pay
  • Many people have call-waiting which cost them $3.99/month, but do they even use it once a month? But you don’t hesitate paying for it again because they want the convenience of having it. Users will pay for apps
  • An app economy is emerging, with lots of little companies. There probably won’t be a big winners, but if you look at the aggregate, this could be a 1 billion revenue stream opportunity, perhaps a $10 billion market cap business.
  • It’s opportunity is viable, real, out there, just won’t support a large company today. A real trend that will continue grow. As Facebook grows, as smartphone industry grows, there’s going to be a need for new revenue sources to support these companies & activities.
  • Telcos: as voice rates continues to drop for telcos, flat-rate data plans begin to fill in these revenue gaps
  • Facebooks of the world: ad won’t support the model, need app-based economy
  • Take off your US-centric lens. People in other countries may not have iPhones but they do consume a lot of data apps
  • AT&T’s of the world: walled-gardens are coming down, because they are seeing the revenue opportunity. They will build their own app stores and take their 30% margin on the apps
  • As iPhone prices come down, AAPL will not be able to make money from hardware, they will increasingly need to rely on revenue from apps

The above is Ram Shriram‘s technology trend prediction, from the 11th Annual Top Ten Tech Trends at the Churchill Club. I couldn’t find the transcripts from that 2-hour long debate, so yours truly had to hit the YouTube replay a few hundred times over to capture the above. Too good to not capture!

You can watch the entire thing here:

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Posted in apps, mobile, problem-opportunity, silicon valley, social networking, technology, things to ponder about, trends | Comments

The meaning of meaning

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

“Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.”

From “Personal Renewal” by John Gardner, posted on PBS. It’s a long post, but full of gems:

“We tend to think of youth and the active middle years as the years of commitment. As you get a little older, you’re told you’ve earned the right to think about yourself. But that’s a deadly prescription! People of every age need commitments beyond the self, need the meaning that commitments provide. Self-preoccupation is a prison, as every self-absorbed person finally knows. Commitments to larger purposes can get you out of prison.

Another significant ingredient in motivation is one’s attitude toward the future. Optimism is unfashionable today, particularly among intellectuals. Everyone makes fun of it. Someone said “Pessimists got that way by financing optimists.” But I am not pessimistic and I advise you not to be. As the fellow said, “I’d be a pessimist but it would never work.”

I can tell you that for renewal, a tough-minded optimism is best. The future is not shaped by people who don’t really believe in the future. Men and women of vitality have always been prepared to bet their futures, even their lives, on ventures of unknown outcome. If they had all looked before they leaped, we would still be crouched in caves sketching animal pictures on the wall,”

“You’ve known such people — feeling secretly defeated, maybe somewhat sour and cynical, or perhaps just vaguely dispirited. Or maybe they just ran so hard for so long that somewhere along the line they forgot what it was they were running for [...] Life is hard. Just to keep on keeping on is sometimes an act of courage.”

“We learn by accepting the commitments of life, by playing the roles that life hands us (not necessarily the roles we would have chosen). We learn by growing older, by suffering, by loving, by bearing with the things we can’t change, by taking risks.” 

(more…)

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Posted in failure, fear, goal setting, mentoring, perseverance, quotes, regular reads, self improvement, things to ponder about, things to remind myself, values | Comments

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