Lifehacker’s list of skills important to succeed:

1. Public speaking
2. Writing
3. Self-management
4. Networking
5. Critical thinking
6. Decision-making
7. Math
8. Research
9. Relaxation
10. Basic accounting

I don’t really agree that skills are most critical factors for success (vision is), but surely many of these are important.

The ones I personally plan to work on in nearest future are relaxation and self-management.

From September I will have no choice but to master “basic accounting”, too.

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See article in Gazeta Prawna. Provident, provider of home-delivered and rather pricey cash loans, accuses Monetto, a social lending startup, of unfair comparison of interest rates on its loans.

If Provident’s goal was to give social lending additional publicity, then it greatly succeeded. Average reader will remember from the article that you can get cheap loans on the Internet and that Provident is expensive and therefore afraid of social lending sites.

Fortunately for Provident, Gazeta Prawna is probably read by a tiny percentage of their target customer base.

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Is working in a corporation a waste of life and learning opportunities?

Paul Graham attacks corporate way of work in his essay You weren’t meant to have a boss. The essay starts rather strong with the analogy based on observing a group of programmers taking part in corporate team-building event. He compared them to the programmers that he typically works with, who typically happen to be founders of their own companies:

I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I’d only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They’re like different animals. And seeing those guys on their scavenger hunt was like seeing lions in a zoo after spending several years watching them in the wild.

Then he goes into more detail and argues that people are not meant to work in too large groups. Of course, corporations are aware of this and divide people into small teams to avoid management problems:

Companies know groups that large wouldn’t work, so they divide themselves into units small enough to work together. But to coordinate these they have to introduce something new: bosses.

These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure. Your boss is the point where your group attaches to the tree.

The tree structure implies, according to him, that at a group (represented by a manager) should work as if it were one individual, otherwise a higher level group composed of managers would not be able to operate.

As a result, the higher the tree, the less freedom of action is available to individual team member:

Anyone who’s worked for a large organization has felt this. You can feel the difference between working for a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.

His conclusion: corporation does not provide a good learning environment, specifically for programmers. In corporation, programmer will see his ideas blocked by the structure and legacy way of doing things. As a result, he will learn less. Best way to start is through own startup or joining organization which is small enough.

Statements like this can provoke some strong responses. Jeff Atwood, for example, attributes all this talk to Graham’s narcissistic (and self-interested) idea of a perfect career path. It’s true, but Graham spent a good deal of his essay admitting his bias.

Almost everyone would agree that working in a founding team of 10 gives the individual more freedom than working in 75,000-strong organization. But not everyone would agree that one cannot learn anything useful in a corporation. Actually a lot of people, including me (though I’m not a programmer), treat working in a corporation as a learning stage before going after own ideas.

Also, corporation provides resources unavailable in a startup. Joshua Haberman commented about benefits of working in Google:

All the boring sysadmin stuff is taken care of. There’s extremely good components you can use for your projects so you don’t have to reinvent the basics (RPC, storage, monitoring, etc) yet again. Your job is to solve big, hard problems and your toolbox is filled with the best of what the brilliant programmers around you have come up with. They’ve iterated many times and solved problems you wouldn’t have even imagined at the outset. And yet there’s always more to do, because the data gets bigger and the appetite for bigger problems grows.

Then again, does knowing that all this stuff exists make it easier or more difficult to start your own company at some stage?

It’s better not to know that something is impossible because then you simple go ahead and do it. In other words, if you are going to start from scratch, maybe better start earlier, while you are happily unaware of all the reasons why you shouldn’t.

Looking at the people who went startup way from the very beginning it’s hard for me to tell if they are better off, because I still work in the corporation. But I’m going to find out.

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Internet Standard published interview with CEO of Inteliwise, a Polish company which deals with AI technologies in search. On market since 2005.

The company plans to debut on NewConnect, a Polish stock exchange for high-tech companies.

I don’t have time to investigate it’s products at the moment, but the Company seems to understand what is most important for the AI:

A decent front-end.

Other thoughts: looks like an interesting company to watch (or even invest in).

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Between burger and an ice cream in Hard Rock Cafe I jotted down notes from today’s bootstrap. I needed them in electronic form anyway. I wrote down stuff which seemed useful for me, so it’s not guaranteed to be complete.

This time it was in an unusual for boostrap form of a panel. Meeting took 3 hours, but I found it very interesting. Technical people might beg to differ, though, as tax/legal discussion was really exhaustive (exhausting).

I made some comments below in the notes, but here I can also share my “first impression” of the P2P lenders present. It is really first impression because I didn’t bother to check them myself, so some doubts below might be result of this.

• Finansowo - approach to start as simple as possible, no collections or support in executing transactions between peers. The biggest risk is that some things that they ignore seem critical (collections).

• Monetto (blog)- most advanced approach, ensured partners from the beginning, including bank (mBank) and collectors. The biggest risk is that they start with a very complicated machine that no-one will use.

• Kokos - midway between the two, with the advantage that it is already up and running.

On a first glance I like Finansowo and Monetto, because they follow clear-cut concepts of simplicity and exhaustiveness, while Kokos was less clear, at least as much can be judged from the presentation, and also takes cautious approach regarding some legal challenges (e.g. possibility to grant anonymity and stick to electronic contract form).

(read more…)

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Today I visited Bootstrap meeting for the first time, so now I feel obliged to write a post about it. Even better to write it before Albert does.

In fact, I thought I would be horse riding at the time of the meeting. But you have to live by your principles, and one of my principles is, don’t ride horses in a shitty weather. The weather was awful all day.

The place

Chlodna 25. Nice place! Never been there either. It’s a cafe and there is also a room downstairs, where the presentations took place. And there are lots of board games available that you can play.

I arrived exactly at 12, took a chair from above because there was already no free places in the basement and ordered an apple pie (12 was early enough for me to miss breakfast), and the presentation started. (read more…)

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Article by David Hornik (VC) on his impressions from trip to China.

One line summary (I’m in a hurry:): Chinese market is great, but there are few real entrepreneurs. And there is no effective legal protection for investors, so you have to count on the culture not to get screwed by Chinese entrepreneurs. But unfortunately the culture makes it ok to screw foreign investors.

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?To succeed in business it is necessary to make others see things as you see them.?? John H. Patterson, 19th century industrialist and founder of National Cash Register Company (NCR). Patterson established one of the nation?s first sales training academies. (through FoundRead)

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Just reading an interesting structure to evaluate ideas by Evan Williams (summary by FoundRead):

• Tractability: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?
• Obviousness: Is it clear why people should use it?
• Deepness: How much value can you ultimately deliver?
• Wideness: How many people may ultimately use it?
• Discoverability: How will people learn about your product?
• Monetizability: How hard will it be to extract the money?
• Personally Compelling: Do you really want it to exist in the world?

Might come handy (I plan to check my latest ideas against these points).

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Now it’s getting difficult, because though I set up as second blog for “visioneering” stuff, some topics just feel like being posted on both of them.

One is Fellowforce, a site in which you can solve a challenge posted by a company and get rewarded if your idea wins.

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Article in the New York Times by Gary Rivlin. Stories about entrepreneurs who got rich extremely fast, but still keep on building new companies.

Interesting part:

?It?s easier to start the next company than it was in the past,? said Marc Andreessen, who was a co-founder of Netscape Communications in 1994, when he was 22. It is also potentially more lucrative than it was even a dozen years ago, said Mr. Andreessen, who despite a net worth estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars is now at work on his third start-up, a social networking company called Ning.

?For the first time in history, you have a global market of 1 billion-plus people, all connected over an interactive network,? Mr. Andreessen said. ?The opportunities are bigger than ever before.?

Yup. But also see the quote on working 15-18 hours a day. Got to have these hours first, though.

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It’s been a while since I read something work quoting on Guy’s blog, but today I found lots of good stuff in this guest post by Glenn Kelman:

4. Good code takes time. One great engineer can do more than ten mediocre ones especially when starting a project. But great engineers still need time: whenever we?ve thought our talent, sprinkled with the fairy dust of some new engineering paradigm, would free us from having to schedule time for design and testing, we?ve paid for it. To make something elegant takes time, and the cult of speed sometimes works against that. “Make haste slowly.”

5. Everybody has to re-build. The short-cuts you have to take and the problems you couldn?t anticipate when building version 1.0 of your product always mean you?ll have to rebuild some of it in version 2.0 or 3.0. Don?t get discouraged or short-sighted. Just rebuild it. This is just how things work.

Right on time. There is one more hidden gem in this post but I will not comment on it.

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The recent thing is Truemors, a site founded by Guy Kawasaki.

The idea of the site is to allow people to post and vote on rumors, short snippets of content which may or may not have anything to do with truth.

So far it’s filled with spam and auto-promotional stuff.

I don’t find anything special in the idea, but it get some publicity because of its founder. If it gets anywhere, it’s because of this asset, as it was rightly noted on Deep Jive Interests.

This newest idea of a site makes me think.. if I couldn’t have a better idea for a site.

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Read some comments of Torres on simplicity, relating also to Don Norman’s “Simplicity Is Highly Overrated”.

Never too much talking about simplicity.

I’m a fan of simple things. But does simplicity sell? Sometimes I wonder. To give example from consulting playground, I like to make excel models which are straightforward and well commented and pyramidal in structure, so they are easy to follow from the top to the details. Typically excel models are anything but easy to follow and it takes less time to build a new model than to understand one made by someone else. Then again, maybe complex models that you cannot understand seem smarter in the end.

Don Norman:

Why is this? Why do we deliberately build things that confuse the people who use them?

Answer: Because the people want the features. Because simplicity is a myth whose time has past, if it ever existed.

Make it simple and people won?t buy. Given a choice, they will take the item that does more. Features win over simplicity, even when people realize that it is accompanied by more complexity. You do it too, I bet. Haven?t you ever compared two products side by side, comparing the features of each, preferring the one that did more? Why shame on you, you are behaving, well, behaving like a normal person.

Why then:

People buy ipods? I bought ipod. I doesn’t even have a radio. Even my nokia phone has a radio.

People do not buy hybride products? They do buy things that do one thing well.

Why Google rules and not the portals?

Torres:

Simplicity is primarily around the first-run user experience and making sure to optimize the high-volume scenarios. A great example of this is Microsoft Photo Story 3. This tool makes creating videos out of photos a complete no-brainer, even for someone who has never touched a digital camera.

Simplicity is something that everyone wants… but not forever. The simplicity of Photo Story is actually limiting once you want to do something a little more advanced, like running a macro or applying a custom transition. For that you need Windows Movie Maker 2 or Adobe Premiere.

I would argue (and I do quite often) that simplicity in the long run is over-rated for most users, especially for users who actually know what they are doing. (…)

The MSN Search team did loads of research while developing their search service, and what they found is a testament to this. They discovered that search engine loyalty isn’t earned through stellar results for routine queries, but rather through an amazingly unique response to an off the wall query. (…)

Now, “it just works!” is something completely different - and even more important in my opinion. When you plug your digital camera into your Powerbook and your photos are automatically copied into iPhoto, it “just worked”.

It feels strange to me, listen Microsoft people talk about simplicity. And that they did a lot of research into this. Surely they did a lot of research, focus groups and everything on branding. Look at the results. Still, though, for the theory, fine.

Simple on outside, complex in the inside (if you insist), that is, features are there. I’m not Korean and my toster doesn’t need lcd. But I use Google as a calculator and no one I know does it.

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Gazeta Wyborcza published an interview with Tad Witkowicz, one of the richest Polish immigrants (worth estimated USD 250m).

In your life, did you follow the golden rules from the various business gurus?

- Yes and no. Such advice is sometimes a trap. When I was bracing for launching my first company, I was reading a ton of books about business, tutorials, memories of the famous managers. And I was becoming more and more frustrated. Everyone wrote that you need to have a grand, breakthrough vision, which you follow consequently.

While I never had any vision. I thought - damn, from the start I’m probably doomed for failure.

So what did you do, without this vision?

- Some time ago Ray Strata, the founder of a known technology company Analog Devices, told me: “Do not believe in what they write. Later, while writing a book, it is easy to attach impressive vision to the memories and even believe in it. But in the beginning, a normal person doesn’t have any grand visions.”

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