Alex Ragalie

we have a saying in Romania that goes like “ori la bal ori la spital”, translated as “either to the ball or to the hospital”. i’ve always used it to describe to myself and to others the entrepreneurial path i’ve decided to walk. the reason i love it is because it describes perfectly the type of mentality one needs to have in order to take the amount of risk involved, to work and hope for brilliant success but stay prepared none the less for utter failure.

for a bit of perspective, my startup adventure with Win the Planet began three years ago out of a random conversation about having an online global lottery that invests all the profits in sustainability projects. it was a highly idealistic concept derived from the optimistic, and sometimes downright naive, mindset that followed my AIESEC experience in the Dominican Republic. i tried putting together a team to deliver on this idea, but it was soon evident that we all had different things occupying our time and consuming our energies. i persevered none the less, moonlighting on it along with my full time job; during this time i started to have this strong feeling that i could not really work in a team where decisions were taken based on consensus; if i were to be part of something, to really believe in it and dedicate myself fully to it, things had to, needed to, be done my way.

after about one year it became evident to us that lotteries in particular and gambling in general were a highly regulated and almost impossible market to get into as a bootstrapped startup, especially if you wanted to do things online. we tried to “soften” the concept and do raffles instead of lotteries, but those too proved to be a strongly protected market, especially in Europe. i had two lovely ladies who more or less continued to believe in the vision and worked with me throughout this period. at that point i realized that it’s very hard, if not downright impossible, for most people to believe in your idea as much as you do and to thus work on it as hard as you do.

then, i decided that Win the Planet will do a “pivot”, a BS word in the startup world that basically means you are changing the startup idea. this is how we moved into the social “gaming for good” market, a change that cost me the support of the two lovely ladies i mentioned earlier, who slowly started drifting away. needing an experienced technical person to help me on the programming side, i convinced Javier to become my co-founder; it was March 2011 and we were highly motivated. both of us still needed to keep jobs that paid the bills, so we were working part time on Win the Planet. out of a random conversation with a friend came up the first game idea, which Javier implemented a few weeks later: it was ugly, with a clumsy interface and a quite difficult (but slightly fun) gameplay. the summer came and went, and towards autumn i became very focused on getting some investment capital for Win the Planet. i applied to the top incubators and startup accelerators, but none of them selected us. at the same time, i decided to take the bull by the horns and quit my corporate job. 2011 taught me that working part time on a startup for too long can cripple the team.

the beginning of 2012 was a very interesting time for me, but not very productive for Win the Planet. Javier was mostly focusing on finishing his Masters studies, while i decided to get involved part time in helping out projects at The Hub Vienna. while working with the people there i realized that, even though i might like the concept of “consulting” in the sense of working for a predetermined amount of time and with set objectives, i am an absolute control freak who doesn’t really care that much about other people’s opinions. this experience also cemented my belief that taking decisions by committee is the surest way to failure; being an autocratic asshole that does everything his way might not be a comfortable manner of working for most people, but it sure beats the flaky, political gaming and passing around of responsibility that you get when using a “democratic” process to manage your team. and i also learned in a painful way that one needs to always ask for some downpayment when working project-based, before one puts in significant amounts of work; otherwise, if things go downhill (and they usually do) people suddenly forget their promises, along with the value of your work.

during spring i continued to apply to incubators, with the constant refusals which i came to expect by now, stemming partly from the fact that i always had to mention in applications that Javier will not be able to join the startup full time until the summer, when he would have finished his Masters studies; as you can imagine, not having the founders work full time on their startup is something that no incubator wants to hear. none the less we kept at it, applying even to Startup Chile, the very last option we had on the list. and guess what? we got in! it meant that we would get a guaranteed amount of seed money in return for which both myself and Javier needed to be in Chile for six months, from August 2012 to February 2013. in parallel, i was also trying to find an angel investor in Europe; thanks to the help of a few great girls and guys in The Hub, i managed to get a quite sizable offer from one of the top angel investors in Austria, valuing Win the Planet at several million dollars. but, as luck would have it, at the exact same time when discussing with this Austrian investor, i also took a trip to Silicon Valley. that experience made me see much clearly our potential as a startup, along with the jarring differences between the European and the American startup scenes and investor mentalities. with that in mind, and also due to restrictive share ownership requirements from our potential investor which we believed would have severely limited our ability to raise money later on in Silicon Valley, we decided to respectfully refuse the money. the potential investor was quite understanding of our decision, and we parted ways in the friendliest of manners, along with the mention that his offer was still valid should we change our minds later on.

at this point both me and Javier were highly motivated (they don’t call it the startup roller-coaster for nothing), with enough seed money guaranteed from Startup Chile to take us through the next months and a multimillion dollar valuation for our startup to help us raise money later on. we hired two of Javier’s friends as software developers, moved to Santiago and started working properly. and that’s when things really started to go downhill: everything was much more challenging that we initially thought, due to the guys needing to learn the new tools we were going to use, along with their difficulty of adapting to the productivity requirements of a startup. the game we spent two months developing turned out to be very hard for people to play (it seems that my notion of “casual gameplay” was not as casual as i thought) and the website we made was quite ugly (mainly because we decided to implement my crappy ideas instead of paying for an experienced designer). overall we kept missing the timelines we set for ourselves, and we weren’t really gelling as a team either. 

as 2012 came to an end, it began to dawn on both myself and Javier that it might not make any sense to continue. one needs to make a clear distinction between the inherent valleys in motivation, what Seth Godin calls “the dip”, and the chasms of real failure. i understood that perseverance is a good thing in certain doses, but taken too far it becomes a one way road to perdition. and to spend yet another year working on something that clearly does not work would be exactly that.

on the sentimental side though, i’ve put my blood, sweat and tears in Win the Planet. for the past three years it was a huge part of my life, it was the thing in the back of my mind from the time i woke up in the morning to the time i went to sleep at night, at the end of countless 16 hours working days. it constituted one of the very few reasons for pushing forward, and it offered me huge motivational highs and constant demoralizing lows. the most important is that i loved what i was doing: all the obstacles, the frustrations, the failures, they were all justified by the fact that it was my thing, done my way and according to my rules. so you might understand why it broke my heart to seriously consider doing something that i’ve rarely done in my life: quit. 

but the voice of reason had become too strong to ignore, and as such we decided to shut the whole thing down.

            

how do i feel about it?

at first i was disappointed with myself. i kept trying to explain it all, to find the reason why i failed, why we failed. then i began to accept this outcome for what it is: just another step on a long and difficult journey. i know that i’m the main person to blame for this failure and i assume complete responsibility. but i also know that at least half of every success or failure is pure randomness, and that knowledge helped in mellowing a bit the pangs of remorse.

today, one month later, i feel relieved that this whole episode of my life has ended and i look very much towards the future. what’s done is done, i cannot change the past, and even if i could i most likely wouldn’t do it because i don’t have any regrets: everything i said and did, every decision i made and every risk i took was with full knowledge that we might all end up in the proverbial “hospital” i mentioned earlier. as the brits say, all one can do is keep calm and carry on.

but, before the final dot is placed and the story comes to an end, i want to take a few moments to acknowledge you my dear reader, along with those who stood by me during this period.

some of you were there all the way, from beginning to end, through the highs and lows. you know who you are and you know that i love you.

some of you were there at certain times, helping out to the best of your abilities. as i’ve said it then, i say it now: thank you for believing in me and for all the efforts you put in Win the Planet.

and most of you were only silent observers, supportive or not. to you i say that success and failure are but two sides of a coin called life. it matters a lot which side you’re faced with, but it’s much more important to simply throw it in the air and hope for the best. only in those moments, in those few seconds when winning and loosing are equally probable, will you feel truly alive.

i feel a very strong aversion towards the word “mentoring”.

for years now i’ve been witnessing people, who have absolutely no trace of success in their own work or any real prospect of having any, doing mentoring sessions with other people who are in the exact same situation.

along with reading useless blog posts on HN and seeing pictures of food and babies on FB, i find the time spent mentoring and being mentored to be a complete and idiotic waste of time.

the reason is very simple: 99.99999999% of mentor-mentee sessions are like “the blind leading the blind”.

     

but to better comprehend why mentoring in its current form is, not only an utter stupidity but also quite damaging to your chances of succeeding, you have to understand where all of this came from.

so let’s take do a quick review of history.

the beginning of civilization and how “all of you are stupid and i’m smart”

up until about the 1800’s, most of humanity was wallowing in a sea of bodily dirtiness and mental darkness. knowledge, from the earthly to the divine, was concentrated in the hands of very few people who were simply lucky enough to be born into families of means. those “chosen ones” were not necessarily smarter than the other poor people, it was simply a matter of access to books and information transmitted orally from father to son (women were not really considered persons back then, so we can ignore them). 

there was a clear separation between the educated and the stupid, and the fact that you were near someone who was educated meant that you almost inevitably became smarter.

society was at its most “unfair” distribution of wealth, health and education, driven by the natural animal impulse of leading and being led.

mentoring worked.

enter the “we all have valuable stories to share” concept

then books started becoming available to everyone, along with changes in all important social constructs, from democracy to feminism to breakthroughs in science and industrialized education systems.

in the space of two hundred years, the way in which humans relate, learn and interact with each other changed dramatically. in the developed world almost every child had access to a minimum amount of education. as information began to spread and be diffused easily, the number of people who were more knowledgeable than their counterparts simply because of privileged access to information decreased exponentially.

sometime at the end of the last century the notion that we are all “equal” began to spread into the subconscious of the masses. ideas like “everyone is special in their own way” and “we all have special things that make us unique” got hold of society’s mind.

fast forward to today, with events like TEDx, where mediocre people stand in front of other mediocre people and give them advice and motivation, sharing their “valuable stories” with the wide-eyed individuals looking with sheepish respect at the person on the stage. it doesn’t matter what he or she says, the simple fact of being on stage means that they were “chosen” to be there, that they are somehow better than the rest of us. 

society is at it’s most “fair” distribution of wealth, health and education in history. people are driven by the same animal impulse of leading and being led, but now there seems to be a thick layer of hypocrisy on top of society’s shared mind.

mentoring does not work.

human nature does not change

the need to be led and “shown the way” is so ingrained in our brain and our nature that i doubt we can ever get rid of it. even though we evolve as a society, improving almost everything which can be improved, there is one very important thing which we cannot and will not be able to change: human nature.

as such, people still feel the need to be given the recipe to success, to happiness and to a good life. religion, arguably the second most important driver of human evolution (after the need to survive and reproduce) is based on this inherent want of the human brain. mentoring (defined as “to advise or train someone”) plays perfectly to his need, and one might go so far as calling it a “religion of the 21st century Internet generation”.

a very big part of the people in my generation who grew up in first/second world countries developed a very skeptic view of dogmatic religion. we came to maturity in the age of explosive Internet growth, the discovery of the Higgs Boson, human genome sequencing and many other scientific breakthroughs. we believe less in the bearded guy in the sky and more in the immense capacities of the human mind. and herein lies our susceptibility to the fallacy of mentoring.

the fallacy of mentoring

we somehow assume that people who have been introduced to us from a position of superiority (this guy did an amazing job in X; he is a fill-in-the-gaps expert, etc.) have somehow discovered the keys to success. as the inherent inferiority complex in our human nature makes us assume that other people are better than us, we always fall prey to the mindset that they can impart some of that wisdom to us.

but the truth is that they cannot. they cannot because they have no clue on what it means to succeed.

let me say that again: absolutely nobody, alive or dead, has ever come even remotely close to understanding how to replicate success. as such, anybody going into a mentoring relationship hoping to come out closer to understanding “the secret” is poised to become disappointed.

let’s now go into why mentoring does not work with five specific reasons.

1- on average, your mentor is not a successful person

it blows my mind how some people don’t have the common decency to admit they are mediocre. for years now i have seen people who didn’t do anything noticeable in their lives doing mentoring sessions. at some point in my youth i was also guilty of this.

the fact that you’ve spent a few months/years reading blogs about startups, business model canvas, VC investing and company building  does not make you capable of mentoring others. this is especially valid for the newly minted university professors of “entrepreneurship”. reading books and watching movies is just a surrogate for real-life experience.

the fact that you have a small startup, design agency, construction company, whatever which is struggling to survive in the market does not make you capable of mentoring others. not having failed yet does not mean you are successful.

and the fact that you’ve been part of a success story (e.g an early employee in Google or Facebook) does not make you capable of mentoring others. if you were the assistant of Marie Curie or of Nikola Tesla does not mean that you discovered radioactivity or the alternative current supply system. or that you have any idea how to do it again.

2- truly successful people don’t have time for you

success rarely comes quick, and even if it apparently does, when investigated further one sees that any overnight success was years in the making. because of that, truly successful people are always busy in their own quests of discovery. the Bezos’s, Pages and Brins of the world don’t have time to mentor you, and even if they would give you their time you most likely will not benefit from their advices. 

which leads into the next point.

3- idiosyncrasies play a major role in our development

we are almost identical in all the major aspects of what it means to be human, but very different in small physical and behavioral details. they make us unique, giving us charm, personality and looks.

as such, any attempt to explain or reproduce your success with another person has to take into account these idiosyncrasies. but because they play such a major role, it’s virtually impossible for the human mind to compute the changes that would need to be made to adjust the mentoring “advices” to other persons.

4- success (or failure) is at least 50% randomness

any person who succeeded or failed in his or her life owes at least half of it to luck. this in itself is sufficient enough reason to understand that success cannot be either replicated or taught.

5- you cannot live all the possible outcomes

it’s a highly researched fact that the average human mind is almost incapable of understanding statistics. particularly, statistics that have to do with averages, medians and possible paths. deducing from the simple fact that you’re reading this post it’s highly likely that you, my dear reader, have the same mental handicap. so allow me to illuminate you.

any action which you take comes at the expense of other possible actions. by reading this post instead of Socrate’s Apology you might have deprived yourself of an epiphany moment which could have potentially changed your life for the better. your decision to take the path of reading this post rendered all the other paths void. 

also, by it’s very nature success is rare, which means that very few of those possible paths lead to it. 

at the same time, your life has a very limited span, and the number of possible paths you can take are necessarily limited. ergo you cannot derive from your own experience any statistically significant piece of advice to share with others.

all this means that you have to rely on generalized statistics to tell you what is a relatively accurate chance of success for an endeavor in a certain field. if calculated properly (an esoteric art form in itself), that statistic takes into consideration hundreds/thousands/millions of paths taken and not taken by people in that field. this is how you come to the dreadful 10% or less chance of success for an Internet startup. 

now, if you apply rationally this percentage to the mentoring subject, you realize that, as a mentee, even if your mentor is a highly successful person (very unlikely), his or her advice gives you a 10% or less chance of you succeeding as a result of applying said advice. but keep in mind that, due to the minimum of 50% influence of randomness on any outcome (point 4) and the individual differences (point 3), the 10% chances of success that you “get” from your mentor are NOT adding to your own chances.

in effect, if your mentor does not give you anything else other than advice (contacts and financing can and do indeed increase your chances of success; that’s why angel investors exist), he or she is not statistically increasing your chances of success. you still have 10% or less chances of succeeding.

so if the chances remain the same, then there is no rational argument for wasting your time in an average mentor-mentee relationship. and if you think that your mentor-mentee relationship is not average, then keep in mind that there is yet another statistical handicap of the human mind called the overconfidence effect which might lead you to overestimate just how average you are.

and that’s it for my rant on mentoring. again, as with all of my posts, you need to take everything i say with a grain of salt and the acceptance that you might have been better off reading a book instead of this blog.

Photo credits: The blind leading the blind by Squonk11

     

today it hit me: when you’re working on a startup, you will end up investing a lot of time and effort upfront without any measurable benefits. sure, you learn a lot in the process, the developers learn a lot, but if you do not get results (arguably the only thing that matters), then it’s wasted time!

you as a founder, along with your team of engineers, have to be acutely aware of the fact that you need to be in it all the way to the end to really see the benefits of this upfront effort. i do not personally believe in all the bla bla about how the “journey is more important than the destination” or how the 2^nd place is not a looser but the “2^nd winner”. if you do not get results (users and revenue) than you’ve failed, no matter what mental masturbation techniques you use to justify the failure.

even if you do the whole lean startup thing, use scrum methodology and develop in short sprints, apply customer development and all other startup buzzwords, you still need to invest a lot in the beginning to develop that elusive MVP. i’m talking about very basic things: website design, user management, minimum viable functionalities for the product itself, implementation of measuring tools, setting up the cloud architecture, etc. all this needs to be done before you can do anything, before you can “growth hack” and test the customer response. and it takes weeks! 

we’ve spent the past 1 month and a half here in Santiago as part of the Startup Chile program, myself on the product side and my team of three engineers on the development side, and we’re still not done with the MVP of Win the Planet’s new platform.

a bit disappointing, but it’s the truth.

you might argue that it happened because we’re not experienced enough, or not smart enough, or not fast enough. my view is that a team comprised of people completely new at this startup thing simply cannot skip the learning curve. and even if we could have been more productive, we still wouldn’t have been much farther than where we are now, due to the simple mechanics of learning how to do something new.

i’m really hoping that my guys will get to writing their own blogs on the initial experience of joining a startup after being employees all their lives, but here are some of the things i’m noticing and learning from the point of view of a business-side founder (which also understands a lot of software architecture) managing a team of experienced developers:

• if this is your first startup, as an engineer you will be faced with the (quite impactful) realization that your experience in the prior jobs as an employee is not extremely valuable in what you’re trying to do now.
• after this realization, you get to understand that your startup needs “full stack programmers”, meaning that you should be able to both understand and code on all the layers of the platform (from the html/javascript side, through the service layer, down to the database queries). that means you have shitloads of learning to do, and fast.
• you have to accept that you most likely have a lot of habits from your past life as an employee that seriously impact your productivity (mostly in a negative way). getting rid of that is not very easy as old habits die hard.
• the startup needs you to ideally work 24/7. as that cannot happen, you need to make sure that your personal time management is very strict, and that you eliminate all distractions from your working day. 
• accept that there is no notion of personal life, vacations or leisure time. you’ve joined the startup to change the world and become a millionaire in the process, and achieving that will require you to push yourself to do things you didn’t think you were capable of. as someone once said, doing a startup means sacrificing a few years for the prospect of getting to enjoy the rest of your life doing whatever you like.
• one of the perks of working in a startup is that you are free to set your own schedule. but don’t overlook the fact that this freedom comes with a great responsibility. as i read somewhere, most people wouldn’t even know what to do with themselves if they were truly free.
• do not underestimate how complicated it is to build something from scratch. even if you’re building a simple game (like us), when you add all the layers that need to be created to make that simple game playable by tens of thousands of people, you will end up with something quite complex.
• multiply any time estimate you come up with (either yourself as a product/business guy or your engineers) with 3, then add an extra week, and you will maybe get close to a realistic deadline.
• as a startup, thinking about outsourcing your software development is similar to being a car manufacturer and thinking about having your engines built by someone else: a very very bad idea! believe it or not, we’re seeing a lot of people here in Startup Chile trying to do that for their own startups.
• as a product manager, make sure you think long and hard before you ask your engineers for any new functionality or change to something already built. you will be surprised at how many things get screwed up by changing “just” a check box.
•  make sure that everyone in the team understand from the very beginning the fact that building a startup is extremely hard work and extremely likely to fail (most experienced founders and investors agree that you have around 90% chances of failure).
• there is a HUGE difference between telling your team something and having them internalize it. by internalizing i mean that “aha” moment when what you just heard sinks in and you really “feel” what you understood. for example, make sure that your team understands that “being in the cloud” actually means “if we are lucky enough to get 100k users in 24h, then the costs of the Amazon servers will rip a new one into the bank account”. 
• be very open with your team about how much money and how much time you have left until you cannot pay the bills anymore. it’s the only way to get everyone to internalize the seriousness of what’s happening.
• stress about failure but also make sure you’re prepared for success. it might seem simple to say “hey, if we get 100k users in 24h, then we can easily get $1 million in investment!”; could happen, but keep in mind that those investor money will hit your account at the very earliest in a few weeks or more likely months! so make sure that you do the math beforehand (hint: 100k users might mean you need to pay thousands of dollars in AWS costs at the end of the month). going viral and getting lots of users is awesome, but don’t forget the horror stories of the countless startups who could not handle it.
• be patient. Rome wasn’t built in a day and your startup will most likely take years until you reach success. i’ve been working on Win the Planet in one form or another for the past 3 years and i realize that i’m just getting started on building something that MIGHT have a chance of success. i wanted to quit the idea tens of times until now, but somehow i kept finding the perseverance to continue and hope it will all pay off someday :)

to end this post, i want to remind you that i’m just a guy working on a startup which doesn’t yet have any trace of success, so you might want to take everything i’m writing with a grain of salt.

technology and the Internet are the physical and conceptual embodiments of what it means to be human. like it or not, being able to use such tools to make our lives easier constitutes the biggest part of what separates us from the other animals. and your life, from the daily minutia of finding a place to eat or a bar to meet a friend to the biggest things like love, education or spirituality, is impacted enormously by how you use and interact with technology.

with that in mind, what should then your expectations be from the most valuable company in the history of human kind, a technology company? what should you demand from an entity that has more than 100 billion dollars in cash in it’s coffers, a mind-bending profit margin of 30% on it’s products and which operates what is arguable the most efficient production and distribution chain on the planet?

answer: a whole fucking lot!

what i’m talking about is the pure and unadulterated expectation of greatness! i’m expecting the most valuable technology company of our civilization to achieve nothing less than amazing things, constantly and preferable at set times (beginning of each 3rd quarter).

i can already hear the howls of criticism coming from your mind. “it’s not possible, because innovation cannot be only revolutionary, it also has to be incremental. it cannot happen, because consumers always ask for too much. it’s not feasible, because the world is very rarely prepared for technological breakthroughs.” 

but i do not care.

i do not care about the problems that they’re facing in consumer acceptance. i do not care about the fact that their products genius, the man that built the company, is no longer there. and i also do not care that their market is now more crowded and more competitive than ever.

let me say that again.   I    DO     NOT     CARE

when you are, as a company or as a person, at the very pinnacle of the human pyramid, my expectations of you are, and should be, outstanding. if you are the best and the biggest, then all of our expectations should be the highest.

so it’s with a big amount of disgust that i’ve gotten the news yesterday about the iPhone 5. are you fucking kidding me? you had 2 whole years as a company to come up with something revolutionary (as per our outstanding expectations) and all you’re giving us is the same phone but a bit longer??!?!

as a good friend was asking, what the hell was Jony Ive doing after he decided to “photoshop” the iPhone 4 into a longer version? nothing much it seems.

you’ve probably noticed that i’ve been for quite a long time now an Apple fanboy, but i’m now beginning to be majorly disappointed in them. 100 billion dollars in the hands of the best designer on the planet, and this is what we get? a longer screen and 5 icons at the bottom???

i can hear again what you’re thinking. “Ive is just a cog in the whole Apple machine. this is Steve’s legacy, this is what he wanted. how much better can you make a phone. Cook is just a number cruncher, what do you expect?”

I DO NOT CARE

you can put fucking wings and a tail on it, then make it fly in circles while calling it the new PegasusPhone. whatever it takes, but give me real, palpable, mind-blowing innovation. make me go WOW. this is what you’re promising right? this is what you’re branding is all about, this is what Apple is no?

the reality is not marketing though, and it’s much more disappointing. the reality is that Apple is just a corporation as any other, built by a brilliant man, an “illuminated despot” who did whatever he wanted, when he wanted and how he wanted it. he was brilliant and lucky enough to have incredible success, and in the meantime he tried to build a company that will survive after he is gone.

well, now he’s gone. and the company is doing quite a shitty job at it. sure, they’re stock price is as high as ever and they have shit loads of money. but they’ve began to fail at the most important reason for existence: making things that push the human race forward.

i will still buy Apple products, as long as they are really better than those of the competition, no matter how mediocre they’re becoming. but i’m still hoping they will wake up and start doing things worthy of the most valuable company in human history, worthy of our high expectations, worthy of the man who made Apple what it is today.

two years and a half have passed since breaking my leg. 

during this time i ran 2.000+ kms, completed my first marathon, did my first 6h+ run, pulled 13h training weeks and learned that mind-over-matter works only to a certain extent. 

even though it was a quite “standard” fracture, it none the less had a major impact on my life, especially during the first year. 15 days in the hospital, two surgeries and a temporary titanium improvement. a very interesting journey, a lot of twists and turns and an ever present sensation of pain. 

so you can imagine my joy in letting you know that this episode is now officially over! 

today i had a final leg checkup, 8 months after they removed the tibial nail. the doctor’s verdict was the most beautiful latin expression i have ever heard: “restitutio ad integrum”.

doesn’t it sound great? :D

you talk to someone, see a photo or watch a video, like any other time in your daily routine. all of a sudden your reptilian brain gets disconnected. all your animal fear and greed fades away into the background. all the worries, the stress and anguish of living life, the muddling throughout of daily misery, everything suddenly forgotten. in its place, a vision of such clarity, such inspiration and such insight that you are frozen in awe for the briefest moment.

that’s when a real miracle happens. a thing so great, so unique and so amazing that it most likely bears no resemblance to anything in the Universe. the product of billions of years of evolution and natural experimentation. it occurred from the randomness of space and time and it will likely vanish in the same way. but while it exists, while it moves and changes and aches and hurts and worries and hopes, while it lives….there’s nothing more beautiful. 

the human thought.

stringed together, one after the other, intermingling and intertwining, human thoughts represent the highest potentiality your will ever encounter in your meagre and insignificant life. thoughts make and break things, they create and destroy, they give life. thoughts made everything you see around yourself and most of what you see inside your mind. but all these achievements are like an anthill next to the tallest skyscraper. they all fade in comparison to the most incredible occurrence, the culmination of the merger between the hunger for development of our animal self and the rational enlightenment of our thoughtful self.

the human vision.

and this is when you stand in awe. the very moment after, when you wake yourself from the immenseness of your vision and your rational brain shudders at the realization. it can’t be done. it’s too far, too hard, too expensive, too dangerous. billions of electric pulses ignited instantaneously in your brain, all trying to convince you that it can’t be done. you repeat it to yourself over and over again, in a futile effort to dismiss and discount it. but it’s too late. like a virus of the upper sentient dimension, your vision can no longer be forgotten. for once you’ve seen it, once you’ve felt the cold grip of possibility, there is no way back. your humanity enslaves you to the visceral grip of possibility. like an insect blown in the wind, there is no escape. there is no denial and no hiding. because now….now you know. you know that with enough effort, enough dedication, enough luck then maybe, just maybe …. it could be done.

welcome to the brotherhood. like many who went and many more who will come, you are now possessed by your vision. there is no escape and no hiding. you have only one choice, and it is simple. do whatever it takes to bring your vision to life, or ignore its calling and be haunted for the rest of your days.

it can be done.

Photo credits: Sun, moon, stars by Andre Kuipers, astronaut aboard the ISS

     

and your digital life will never be the same again!

sometime in the summer of last year i became annoyed at how much i was using the Delete key. thinking about it, i realized that typing is something i do for most of the day, and that i’m not very good at it. even though back then i was already able to type without looking at the keyboard, which is anyways much more than most of the people, my error rate was still very high (20-40%) depending on speed.

if you really give it some thought, typing is an activity that permeates throughout our digital lives. it’s quite amazing to see that most people still do it in a “hunt and peck” style (with 2 fingers) at a horrendously slow word-per-minute rate. as a comparison, imagine what it would be like if you were to speak with 40% errors? most likely people would still understand you, but your quality of conversation would be very, very bad.

reversing that, you can now imagine how much better your digital conversations would be if you were to take some time and learn to type properly. with that objective in mind, i started looking for  free tools/websites/courses to improve my typing.

in the research process i learned that the QWERTY layout of our keyboards is far from optimal (it was actually created to slow your typing speed), i flirted with the idea of learning to type Dvorak-style (faster layout than QWERTY),  but i nevertheless decided to stick with QWERTY for obvious portability reasons.

after several attempts at cumbersome and complicate desktop-based typing tutors, i ended up on Peter’s Online Typing Course. it is a very unpretentious, extremely smart made and best of all- free website with courses that are of increasing difficulty. at the beginning i was a bit deceived by the apparent simplicity of the exercises, and i estimated that it would take me a couple of weeks to move through all of them. but very soon i realized that improving my speed while keeping the 100% accuracy requirement will take much, much more time than i expected! after about 3 months of at least 1h per day practice, i was at the end of all the lessons.

and boy of boy do i feel happy about this time investment! it’s kind of hard to explain it without seeming to exaggerate, but it opened a lot of “doors” that i didn’t even know were there.

for one, there’s the ability to get into a “writing flow”. no more stopping to correct the text, no more frustration at thinking too fast for your writing speed, no more Delete key.

another thing is the ability to focus on your work instead of your fingers. maybe you don’t realize it now, but if you are like most people, you spend A LOT of time focusing on your keyboard instead of the thing you are supposed to be doing.

then there’s the overall “fluency” of it all. if you’ve ever learned a foreign language and became fluent in it, you will know what i mean. it’s that sweet moment when you move from embarrassing pauses and messed up words to actually making sense and being able to speak your mind in one continuous process.

so, if your line of work is heavily dependent on computers and typing, do yourself a favour and invest some time into a skill that will serve you very well for the rest of your life.

Photo credits: Typing by austin.tahiliani

The following is a guest post by John Doe. John is a circus juggler turned entrepreneur. As he didn’t have any success yet with his startup, he is now involved in angel investing and mentorship at one of the newest chicken startup incubators in the Valley.

Right before i started my juggling world tour, my old coach in high school would come up to me, smack me over the head and say “life is like a game of dodgeball: you never know who’s gonna hit you next”. Years later, as i was a CJO (chief juggling officer) for the Guzzini Brothers in Argentina, the lesson was still ringing in my ears, probably due to the eardrum fracture he gave me.
When i was 36 and i was back living in the trailer with my parents, i started seeing on Twitter that more and more of my old friends were getting into entrepreneurship. All these great ideas like next-day puppy delivery, glocal services for octogenarians, video advertising for blind people and many more were being brought out into society, changing the world forever and making dents in all kind of places in the universe. This made me decide to go all in and start my own thing. I then sold my old pair of sneakers with great effort, bought some old army boots with straps on them and took a loan from the local mobster to buy a ticket to the Valley. I knew that my SAAS cupcake juggling platform would change the world, and that’s the only place where it could happen.

Here are some of the lessons the past 5 years of living with AirBnB hippies and sleeping on park benches taught me.

         

 

1. Keep your startup lean and don’t get fat, because nobody likes fat people 

Staying lean, hungry and foolish is always a good thing, not only because most investors don’t like fat people (how many fat successful entrepreneurs have you seen on TechCrunch? Arrington doesn’t count), but also because it’s kind of hard to match hipster glasses to a belly. It’s a proven fact that wild game meat is better than a serial entrepreneur, so always make sure that you look good.

I cannot emphasize how crucial it is for your success that you and your team look hot. This is one of the reasons behind the recent buzz about having more women get into entrepreneurship: boobs always make negotiations easier!
Another important thing to remember is that being coachable is one of they key success traits of every entrepreneur, the same as for circus monkeys or horses. So make sure that you are always iterating, pivoting and focusating (that’s a new meme i invented for always bringing your attention back to the thing you are doing).

 

2. In funding as in dating, dumb money are easy and fast to hook up, but smart money, even though not very pretty, will stick with you long term
During the first months, all my mentors at the AA meeting were encouraging me to go out more, meet people in clubs and network with them. I know that many of you don’t like to do it, but networking is the single most important activity one can do before friends come over with their laptops to play Starcraft.

 Investors come in two main flavors: dumb and smart. You can recognize them by the amount of blogs that they write, and also based on their Twitter following. The general rule is that you only want to take dumb money for things that don’t really matter, like seed round or series A. After that, as you get closer to the IPO, you need to attract smart money. They will always make you look good and can also help you figure out what is a “peenel” and if your startup is making a loss or not. If you are indeed loosing more money that you are making, which is highly likely and a very good thing,  make sure the dumb investors don’t figure it out.

At Jugglingcupcakes.ly, we took smart money from the beginning, and we later regretted it. We always needed to answer to a stupid board of directors about our internal trampoline and the blow-up dolls in the office.

 

3. Talk about it, to everyone, everywhere, even if they don’t care 

As the saying goes, “a loud mouth is always right”. So you should always make sure to brush your teeth properly. A fresh breath is mandatory, because as an entrepreneur you should always talk to people. The train conductor, the lady at the cashiers, the homeless at the corner, each of them can be a referrer of future business for you. The acronym here is ABT: always be talking. Everyone in this world needs to find out about your world-changing startup, so talking incessantly is the only way to spread the news.

Another point worth remembering is virality. I remember when i was still at the circus and the bearded lady caught a nasty cold. The next day all the stable boys and four of the Guzzini brothers were sick, and in one week we spread it to a whole county. You should always make sure that your viral coefficient is above 1, as anything below that will make you seem retarded. And avoid PR agencies. Money on marketing is wasted for an early stage startup, so you should only use free things like word of mouth, word of Twitter and word of Youtube. 

 

4. All successes have an explanation, and luck ain’t it

Now i could tell you a story about one of my great successes in which i leave out the part where i was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time, but i will not. I don’t have any of those, so i will share a story of a friend of mine from Facebook. 

Njubela is a young African who started primary school in a small Rwandan village. One day, as he was coming back home, he pointed the right way to a nice American lady who’s Hummer H2 was lost in the savanna. It turned out that she was the wife of a rich VC, so they adopted Njubela and brought him back to the US. When he turned 15, he had the idea of delivering sandwiches through the Internet, so his adoptive father invested 20 million dollars in his startup instead of buying a yacht. In 5 years the business grew and Njubela had an amazing exit for 300 million, after a media conglomerate owned by a rich friend of his dad bought the company. My point is that you can all be like Njubela. You just have to work long hours, sleep under the desk and eat ramen noodles.

Luck is just something the European entrepreneurs blame in order to justify their failure to raise capital, but in reality luck doesn’t have any impact on your success. Anyone reading this can make it big in entrepreneurship, you just have to pay your taxes and stay lean.

 

5. ABCF- always be commenting and firing

The reason why HackerNews was invented is because entrepreneurs need to express their opinions on other people’s mistakes. It’s not something you can stop, it’s just the normal behavior of A types. And A types always want to hang around A+ types, not like the B type loosers who work 9-5 jobs. That’s why you should make sure that you have at least 3 blogs (your company blog, your personal blog, your secret personal blog) and that you post to them often. It creates a ramp for you to launch your brilliant ideas, judgements, preconceptions and prejudices. Also you can use the blogs to talk trash about your competition.

And firing. Firing is the single most important thing an entrepreneur should do. Make sure to meet people often, hire them and then look for excuses to fire them. It keeps your company always on it’s toes and creates a competitive environment. Fire fast and hire slow, especially if you are in a country which has impossible laws relating to work permits.

 

6. Focusate more on making money and less on making an impact

You might have heard quite often that successful entrepreneurs do all their focusating on impact and not on making money. But that’s just propaganda. Impact is for cars and punching bags. Real entrepreneurs focusate (i think this new meme is really starting to take off) on cold hard cash. It’s the only way you will be taken seriously.

I hope these advices will help move your startup forward and will not prevent you from always doing B/C testing (because testing, as in “the website is down because we didn’t pay the hosting company” or “we have no customers because our product sucks”).

Photo credits: Entrepreneurship by Michael Lewkowitz

it never ceases to surprise me how some people simply cannot see how biased they are!

i was reading this article today about John Ham, the ex-CEO of Ustream. it goes on and on about how Ham was overstretching the company by asking for “ridiculous deadlines that were practically unattainable”, about how he was spending 200k per year on company lunches (from the same catering company as Twitter), how he moved his company to a new and luxurious office building and how he was displaying “erratic behavior” by “wanting the same celebrity status like Biz Stone or Ev Williams”.

i personally have no idea who John Ham is, and as a matter a fact this is just the second time ever i’ve heard about Ustream (i know, i am an ignorant Eastern European too far away from SF). but what struck me as VERY odd is how the description of Ham fits for Steve Jobs and multiple other “erratic” but highly successful CEO’s. but in Ham’s case, because he failed, this is seen as a very bad thing, a shameful flaw of character. in the case of Jobs, because he succeeded, these traits were at the foundation of his achievements.

and what about the “advice” that a lot of VC’s and angel investors give young CEO’s, the likes of “act like a billion dollar company if you want to become one” or “do more faster”? how is what Ham did different that all the BS crap you hear peddled on every startup blog?

        

                                                Success by Zaraki Kenpachi

this just goes to show that the press will always spin it’s story, and that no matter what you do, how you are or what people think of you, in the end it all comes down to success.

failures suck and successes rock. and so will you in the eyes of the world!

have you noticed how a lot of text-heavy blogs and websites are written with very small fonts? i would actually venture to say that most famous content website have too small letter sizes.

considering how much most of us geeks read during each and every single day, i’m convinced that long term wincing at those puny letters is detrimental for eyesight.

         

                                                 Magnify by Anna Leo

as such, i’ve happily began using Cmd-+ (zoom in option for Chrome) in every page which has sub-pleasant font size. and the beauty is that Chrome remembers your zoom level, so next time you’re on TechCrunch or any other blog, the zooming remains. et voila, problem solved!