Category: Startups

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PANALO! | Group of Pinoy coders win big in international coding tourney | Infotek News: InterAksyon.com

A great victory for local tech!!
 

Math and gamesThe veritable quartet all came from Kalibrr, a local startup that helps optimize the recruitment process of outsourcing companies through their cloud-based platform.Magno, who admitted as being the least technical person of the group, came from Ateneo de Manila University and serves as Kalibrr associate product manager.Both Atienza and Ayson are company developers, while Dumol is chief software engineer. All three are members of the University of the Philippines Programming Guild.Dumol said that he started out programming after chancing upon a book in elementary about building a website.“I was in grade six and I found a book on how to make a website. It’s very fulfilling to be able to translate your ideas and thoughts into working code and make a program basically out of nothing by typing on a computer,” Dumol said.Though Ayson came to programming at a much later stage in his life, his math skills carried him through.“I did not even know the Internet until fourth year high school. I did not know that you just double click the Firefox logo to launch the Internet,” Ayson said. “But I was discovered for my math ability. I like how programming and code solves many different problems.”Atienza, a familiar name in the programming community as a hackathon master, said that his love for gaming paved the way for programming.“Before college I did not know any programming… I thought this was entirely all about games and computer. But I actually love Math and problem solving,” Atienza said.If there is one more thing the group share aside from coding, it’s gaming. The group’s name – Liadri — was actually derived from the final boss in the online game Guild Wars.
via PANALO! | Group of Pinoy coders win big in international coding tourney | Infotek News: InterAksyon.com.

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rePost :: The Case for the Fat Start-Up | Ben Horowitz | Voices | AllThingsD

Every start-up is in a furious race against time. The start-up must find the product-market fit that leads to a great business and substantially take the market before running out of cash. As a result, the top two priorities are always to:
1. Find the product that 1,000 enterprise or 50 million consumers want to buy and grab those customers before your competitors do.
2. Raise enough cash and spend it intelligently so that you don’t go broke along the way.
Clearly, you can’t succeed if you don’t achieve both priority No. 1 and priority No. 2. So why is taking the market more important than not running out of cash? Because the only thing worse for an entrepreneur than start-up hell (bankruptcy) is start-up purgatory.
via The Case for the Fat Start-Up | Ben Horowitz | Voices | AllThingsD.

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rePost::Innovation Lessons in "Start-Up Nation" – O'Reilly Radar

I think tis is beginning to happen at least in th IT industry. Some people are emerging as leaders who start events, etc to help people connect, and learn. Give it less than a decade and the lower level people like me would probably be in a position to create a bigger more community focused industry!!!!!

Traits that other countries can emulate


Although Israel has special advantages, some of the elements to which Senor and Singer trace its innovativeness can theoretically be achieved elsewhere. Briefly, these are:
A loyalty to the entire community that goes beyond personal success. The authors point out that, for all of Israelis' notorious fractiousness, they expend enormous effort helping total strangers. All of Israel is a single team, even a single family. (Obviously, this family feeling does not extend to non-Jews.) Israeli entrepreneurs who give talks abroad often play up the strengths of their country as well as their company.
via Innovation Lessons in “Start-Up Nation” – O’Reilly Radar.

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rePost::Innovation Lessons in "Start-Up Nation" – O'Reilly Radar

Wow , High Praise. This book goes into the to read/ to buy list. I think I saw this at a Fully Booked branch.

Innovation Lessons in “Start-Up Nation”
by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 10
One might expect Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle to come from the pen of business school or economics professors, but the biographies of authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer reveal policy backgrounds. Both were advisors in the U.S. Federal Government.
These backgrounds give a clue that Senor and Singer aim beyond questions of how to be a successful entrepreneur or high-tech executive. In fact, their book is a serious investigation of the social, historical, and psychological traits that produce extraordinarily creative people–and significantly, creative people who can translate their cranial light-bulbs into technologies with the potential to change the world.
The book has garnered a fair amount of news coverage, but still not as much as it deserves, in my opinion. It took me only about three hours to read, and I highly recommend it as a refreshing–but not necessarily reassuring–perspective on a country that is profoundly misunderstood and misrepresented by media outside its diminutive borders.
via Innovation Lessons in “Start-Up Nation” – O’Reilly Radar.

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rePost::The $12 Startup That Was Sold On Twitter For About $100,000 – with Sean Percival | Mixergy – Online Business Tips from Successful Entrepreneurs

This is a story about how an entrepreneur can build an internet business on the side. The business Sean Percival launched wasn’t meant to be the next Google. He was just trying to make some money and improve his business skills.
Sean built a site that sold customize European license plates, the kind of plates you might see on cars speeding on the Autobahn or cruising down the Champs-Elysées. As you’ll hear in this interview, he spent $12 to buy the domain, customeuropeanplates.com. Then he built the site using a free ecommerce platform. To fill and ship his orders, he partnered up with a company that was already in the business of selling license plates online. And he got customers by teaching himself search engine optimization and developing link partnerships with related sites.
He ended up selling the business — which was profitable — after Tweeting that he was thinking of selling it.
We talked in this interviewed about how he built the business, and how he built up the kind of social capital online that helped him sell his business for about $100,000 via a Tweet.
via The $12 Startup That Was Sold On Twitter For About $100,000 – with Sean Percival | Mixergy – Online Business Tips from Successful Entrepreneurs.

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rePost:Vesess » The Second Age of SMEs

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Image by EssoPics via Flickr

Explains why the authors think that the present financial crisis is the start of the Second Age of SME’s. Excellent read.

Think small. Think efficient. Share the returns.
…
The point we’re trying to make, however, is that in an economic climate like this, only a SME could afford to offer such discounts, and that it is precisely this ability that will enable such businesses to flourish despite the problems we face. For the first time in years, small businesses have the ability to truly shine, and we’d love to hear how some of our fellow players are using small and efficient business practices to attract customers and grow, despite everything going on around them.
Vesess » The Second Age of SMEs.

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Cold Call

I Gave Myself 6 months to put things in order before trying the Startup route again, this time not as an employee but as founder.  The scars from the last startup haven’t healed completely but can’t sulk forever.
I know its a longshot but when I have finally done something/anything I think I’m gonna cold call/email Mark Cuban every little thing counts/matters for a startup and emailing him is not that much of a burden for me. I am expecting nothing , but hoping that I get a feedback, any kind be it the (f~ck you wasted 30 minutes of my life kind)!
I am quite excited just three and a half months to go!

from TechCrunch here:
How do people reach you?
Send me an email and in three paragraphs or less, tell me about your business. Dont say you need an NDA or want a call. Just tell me how youre going to make money and how I’m going to add value. Give me a URL if you have a website, I’ll figure it out. 5% of the people will hear back from me.
TC50 interview of Mark Cuban

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Selling Ourselves Short

from NYT here:

When he was a Harvard undergraduate, Mr. Gates lamented that so many of his fellow students pursued a “narrow track for success” instead of being willing to “take big risks to do big things,” recalled Michael Katz, a Harvard contemporary
I used to be a victim of this mindset. It was as if I didn’t have the right to “Dream Big” or to dream in general. It was in the way that people seemed to interact with you whenever you are in dream mode. The trying to take you seriously look, coupled with doses of Is this Guy Serious and is this Guy Crazy look. I’ve read the signs well enough that I generally show my dreamer side once and look for the reaction of the people I’m talking with and calibrate from their.
One of the things I love with where I am working right now is the fact that the people I hang with in the office are receptive to my dreams, they don’t encourage it overtly but they allow me my space. This is the reason why I am at their asses most of the time telling them to maximize their potential and stop wasting their time feeling inadequate.
Another place where I find people who allow themselves to dream is at out technology cooperative (aic). The hivecc as we fondly call our hq may be interpreted as a place where bold minds and daring hearts commune. It is a diverse community whose common denominator is that alone we may reach amazing heights but together we may dream of much bigger things.
Well the bottom line is never sell yourself short! You are allowed to dream , and if you are already dreaming why dream small when you can dream big. Limit your interactions with people who continually dismiss your dreams, foster an environment where you are allowed to make mistakes and to try. Find people you trust who can tell you when you are somewhat going the wrong ways, People who would act somewhat as a North Star.

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rePost: My Business Magazines Lied to Me

Excellent Article,
We succumb to the startup itch because of the promise of getting rich but most of the time we fail to understand that (I got this from a Paul Graham essay) people who succeeded from their startups were paid on account of their productivity and output. I distinctly remember my aha moment when I read in the footnotes that “what you do in a startup is compress a lifetime’s worth of work into a few years. .”
I think that the problem is you seldom know who would be extremely successful in a startup environment. You can see who would be successful but not who might be (explanation: If you knew Steve Jobs or Bill Gates before their success you would probably say they had a high chance of succeeding whilst the majority of people are like millionaire’s next door types you wouldn’t know they are successful if they didn’t tell you!).
And I believe their (magazines/bloggers/tech-evangelist) skewed views are somewhat sound because some people need to get started at doing before they get their groove and find that they were meant to do great/amazing things.
all in all read the whole thing!
from here:
Telling Us What We Want To Hear
Have you ever had a close friend whose engagement isn’t working out, and now they wonder if they should be concerned about getting married? Sometimes there are signs it isn’t going to last, but they don’t want you to tell them that. They are scared to leave the relationship, scared of failing, scared of being alone, and so they don’t want to you help them go down that path. They want you to tell them it will all be ok. They want to hear that he/she will probably change.
Likewise, people don’t want to read that hard work and discipline are the path to success. They don’t want to have to analyze numbers, because it isn’t as fun as going with the gut feeling. They don’t want to be told that the latest trend is just a fad, even though it almost certainly is. Business magazines that don’t cater to what people want will go out of business. The result then, is that business magazines (and books and blogs) tell us what we want to hear. Then we go off and implement that bad advice, and when it doesn’t work, we make up some other excuse. Or, if we come to realize the advice was wrong, but it is still popular, we keep it to ourselves, because speaking out about it is a quick way to get chastised and be labeled (negative, luddite, sour grapes, etc). People want to believe what they want to believe, and if you try to show them a truth that conflicts with that, you will most likely fail.

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On Creativity in Companies

An excellent post from Scott Berkun. If you are at all involved with a group of people as decision makers a must read.
from here:
some take aways:
…..
They mistakenly believe the problem is the quality of ideas, when in fact the problem is the conservative psychology inherent in democracy.


Pure democracy is not the political system that will create the most change – it’s a system geared for stability, not for innovation.
…..
if you ask for more innovation without changing the authority structure, I’ll call you crazy.