Awaken Your Entrepreneurial Spirit

Most of us have some amount of entrepreneurial blood in our body. It is good to awake this spirit once in a while to spice up our work life and our creativity.

Last night I attended a meeting hosted by The Silicon Valley NewTech Meetup group and it was a blast (the event is free by the way). I came early and was able to grab a seat. The room was packed by 7pm and those came in late had to stand along the walls. The first hour of the meeting was for young Web 2.0 startups to demo their idea and the fruits of their labor and the second hour was for announcements and mingling.

Four companies did the demo of their product/website. The business ideas from these four companies were very different. You can checked them out at the website above.

It was amazing to see the entrepreneurial spirit flying around the room during the mingling hour. Peoples were exchanging business cards, business ideas, and questions and answers. There were about 300 to 400 people, so it was pretty loud. You basically had to stand pretty close to the person you are talking to in order to hear them.

I met one musician, who has an interesting idea, and he is looking for folks to help him out on the technical side as well as on the marketing side.

I was really glad I attended the meeting last night and planning to go to next month’s meeting. I felt more energized after hanging around with the attendees and may be something good will happen. Let’s hope

Startup – Live and Learn

This post is about the learning from a failed attempt to develop an idea into a possible start-up. My friend and I invested a considerable amount of time in trying to develop a prototype for an idea that we had. And at the end, we were not able to launch it.

As newbies in the start-up world, we made several classical mistakes. One of the mistakes is we didn’t follow the rules listed in the blog Loic Le Meur’s Ten Rules For Startup Success.

Rule #7 is something that is commonly advocated by other folks in the start-up world as well as Web 2.0 community. Among them is the folks from the 37signals.com. If you haven’t checked out their book Getting Real book, I would highly recommend it. It is a treasure. You will find all kinds of great ideas and resources about developing successful web based applications (more on this later).

The Art of Innovation Presentation – Guy Kawasaki

I heard about this presentation from one of my co-workers a couple of months back and I even wrote it on the blackboard in my cube. For some reason I haven’t able to get around to watch it until now. I must say I am really glad to finally able to watch this video. It is about an hour long, but every second spending watching this video is totally worth it.

I learned, I laughed and I am inspired from watching this presentation.

Eleven steps to the art of innovation:

1. Make meaning
2. Make mantra
3. Jump to the next curve
4. Roll the DICEE
5. Don’t worry, be crappy
6. Polarize people
7. Let a hundred flowers blossom
8. Churn, baby, churn
9. Niche thyself
10. Follow 10 (slides) / 20 (minutes) / 30 (font size)
11. Don’t let the bozos grind you down

Here are the links to video and presentation slides.
A couple of interesting sites that were mentioned in this presentation:

• Dilbert’s mission statement generator
• iStockphoto.com

Enjoy.

Want To Work For Startup?

Working for a startup is not for everyone, but if you are thinking of joining a startup, you may want to use some of the questions that were written in Information Week magazine:

1. What is founder(s)’s background?
2. When was company formed?
3. How is company funded?
4. Can I talk to an early customer?
5. Who are are competitors? (very important)
6. What’s the road map?(it could change with time, but must have one)
7. How do you make money?(something it is hard to figure this out)
8. Do you expected to be acquired?(answer will determine founder’s management experience)
9. Can we meet? (absolutely should meet face-to-face)

Looking To Start a Social Networking Startup?

Six good advices from Information Week for people looking to start/invest/work for a social networking startup.

1. Start with friends While social networking offers a wide pool of potential contacts, talking to strangers or making new acquaintances isn’t the main draw. Users are attracted to these sites because they want to communicate with people they already know. Therefore, job one of a successful social networking company is to facilitate interaction among a close-knit, pre-existing circle of companions. There’s no doubt that users will make new connections, but a good site will be built on a foundation of existing relationships*(see below for an exception).Facebook and Twitter are great examples. Users are drawn to these networks by the promise of enhanced communication with friends.2. Enable users’ narcissism and vanity
Many people, especially 18 to 25 year olds, entertain the conceit that they are unique and interesting. A compelling social network lets users construct an idealized self out of random thoughts, iPod playlists, lip-synching videos or drunken party photos, and then invites others (especially their friends) to endorse this conceit.

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube exemplify the narcissism/vanity characteristic. Facebook lets users construct paeans to their own good taste. Twitter provides a public billboard for users’ interior monologues. AndGoogle ( GOOG) spends millions of dollars on data storage to preserve a flood of home-made comedy sketches, skateboarding tricks, and confessionals.

3. Enable users’ voyeurism
The flip side of the human compulsion to gaze into the mirror is the desire to peek into windows. A successful social networking sites remove the physical barriers and social conventions that otherwise discourage our ability to sift through other people’s lives.

It’s telling that neither Twitter nor YouTube require visitors to register — the unfettered ability to troll through posts keeps users coming back. Facebook, while providing some control over who is allowed to join your network, lets you see who is in your friends’ network.

4. Enable user judgments
Following closely on points 2 and 3, people love to evaluate, criticize, and pass judgment on others. In addition to satisfying this urge, social networking sites also can classify and tally judgments to help direct others to the most popular — or most reviled — content on the site.

YouTube and Twitter exemplify the judgment characteristic. YouTube members don’t hesitate to write “You suck” in the comments section. Twitter’s “Followers” tally serves as a crude indicator of a person’s status within the community.

5. Enable expansion
Once your friends are in your network, it’s time to branch out and meet new people. Users will broaden their connections around common points such as shared interests or geographic proximity.

Facebook and Twitter exemplify the expansion characteristic. Facebook makes it easy to add friends, while Twitter continuously exposes users to new posters and lets users follow each other.