Arhiva completă: engleză

I’ve been present to a Romanian event two days ago, in the panel on Online Entreprenurship in Romania. Along with me were people that are successful in the space (Alexis Bonte from eRepublik, Alexandru Lapusan from Zitec, Lucian Todea from Soft32). I was really honored by the invitation, since all these companies are companies that were started several years ago and they are examples that we looked up to (and still do).

One of the things that was talked in the panel started with the fact that the software companies relevant for Romania right now have hundreds of employees and if (or better when) are we gonna hire the same number of people.

The thing is that Eastern European countries (if not all) still see success in business as having lots of employees, big offices and that’s not true anymore, at least for most of the tech businesses that I know. Heck, I know at least 3 people that made more than $1 Million in the last 2-3 years all by themselves or with the help of 1-2 outsourced people.

Even more important, people that I know and talk to (especially investors) appreciate if you can grow a company by being lean, not getting into a hiring spree once you have a little bit of money, since that will make the company move a lot slower and you will lose the only competitive advantage you have: speed of execution.

MavenHut is a team of 12 people right now, and we really took our time with the hires. We are moving really, really fast and you can’t be part of the team if you can’t do that. I remember that once we interviewed someone from a big Romanian site and he couldn’t believe how fast we move(he really thought we were lying, he got into his head that we made fun of him and he left, basically thinking we were assholes).

And MavenHut is not the only case. Yes, we are small, but look at King or Supercell in gaming (King has an expected value of $5 Billion with just 400 or so employees, while Supercell just got valued at $3 Billion with a little bit over 100). And that’s not just in gaming, Instagram had 12 people when it was acquired for $1 Billion. Of course, different industries have different characteristics, but online product businesses should not have huge teams. At least in the initial stages, before having to hire hundreds for customer support. That is if you don’t outsource it.

I expect this perception will change in time. As someone in the panel said (I think Alexis Bonte), in the future you will not see one company with 1,000 employees, but 50 companies with 20 people employed. So your startup should hire slow. Really slow. :)

Photo taken by me, this is why I am not visible there :D

I was never too much of a fan of meetings, but I often found myself part of long ones. Some were my fault, I have to say, because I like a good story and we got lost in funny or interesting things

MavenHut changed all this, though. Cristi, one of my co-founder, forced on us (yeah, he really did force it :D ) the time box meetings concept.

What this means is that you set a specific period of time for that meeting and NO MATTER WHAT, when the countdown stops, the meetings stops. If people didn’t say what they had to, well, tough luck.

All of it might seem rough, but what I saw is that, in time, peer pressure started to act: people will force themselves and force the other ones to fit in time and that, in turn, will make people focus on what they want to say and what they want to find out. This will increase the productivity of the team and your own productivity.

So, if I could give you a great tip for any kind of business meeting: try to time box it. Obviously, you can’t do it all the time (good luck time boxing an investor meeting). This doesn’t mean, though, that you shouldn’t try.

Photo from ShutterStock

Last Thursday, the guys at TechHub had an interesting guest from MIT (Bill Aulet) to talk about entrepreneurship. Along with two Romanian entrepreneurs (Marius Ursache and Andrei Marinescu), they talked about the issues you could have if you do not start in a “beach head” market, how to bootstrap, where would you get cofounders (great idea: going to a Hackaton – Google is organizing one soon in Bucharest).

Here are some ideas from the talk:

In Bill’s perspective:

• entrepreneurship needs to be regarded as a profession
• the supply of quality entrepreneurship education today is very limited
• entrepreneurial education is contextual, so it’s difficult to teach
• entrepreneurship is experiential, it’s mentor-intensive
• the objective of education is to teach people how to fish, not how to catch a fish
• it’s easy to fail at doing education in entrepreneurship (Donald Trump has an entrepreneurship institute – storytelling and shark-tanking – now he’s being sued for that)
• you have to have the right spirit, to think differently, to be motivated
• you need to foster an environment of creative irreverence, like they do at MIT (hacking)
• hacking is about taking on Goliath, about swimming against the current
• we need not to make entrepreneurship sound easy
• we need the execution skills of a navy seal and incredible self discipline
• you can’t just have practitioners in an entrepreneurship education program; you also need researchers and hard date people
• if we want to make this a profession, we need the data to back it up.

Unfortunately I cannot embed it on my blog, so you can go here and look over it. It’s worth listening for 50 minutes (though they had some issues with the mic at some point and it was a little annoying, but the info is so interesting, it’s worth getting over it).

Of course, there is a short review of the talk here, on the TechHub blog (this is where the quote is coming from)

Recently the Romanian Simona Halep broke onto the tennis scene with a vengeance. She never won a WTA tournament until this year, but 2013 meant 5 finals and 5 tournaments won. This meant more interest in tennis in Romania.

Of course, this had nothing to do with the fact that, in the last 2 months or so, Grand Slam Tennis 2 is the game we at the office. The reason? 4 of us can play at the same time, a doubles game. And it’s so much fun! :))

Another fun thing is that you can play with 80s and 90s players (you have to see Bjorn Borg :D ). They look so out of place on the court, you have no idea. With their short (really short) pants or whatever they are called.

Most of the games, though, are something like Djokovici and Nadal playing against Roddick and Federer. I usually play Nadal since I play better with the player from the back of the court, but I would love to be able to play a more serve-volley kind of game.

We play the game on XBox, but it is also available on PS3 (and, I think, PC). So, if you want a game that you can play with your friends, Grand Slam Tennis 2 is great. Of course, you can do this in real life, but my back still hurts from such a try not long ago :))

A good friend of mine just got accepted to the Startup Spotlight competition for How To Web 2013. His startup is growing, he’s done all the “meet your customer, sell to your customer before writing one line of code” process and now he’s private testing the first version of his app.

I am not telling you who he is, I don’t want to put more pressure on him as it’s already difficult to present your idea in front of several hundred people :)

Anyway, Startup Spotlight is a great place to showcase your project (we’ve earned Best Pitch in 2012) since the audience is full of like-minded people and possible mentors.

Some interesting starups that will present on the stage of Startup Spotlight are (and this is my opinion based on just one line of description, all right?):

Daisy Pi, GameMatch, GloriaFood, KOLOS, Monitor Backlinks, Sportwavez.

Read more about the 32 startups involved in Startup Spotlight here, since you might find something else that interests you.

A little bit of disclaimer: while I am not interested in link building, Monitor Backlinks is backed by SOSventures, the same investors that backed our seed round and I am really interested in their evolution, since the grew quite a little bit since their early round.

This blog’s Facebook page is called I Am A Startup Founder. There are about 600 people that liked the page, so you should be the next one (hint, hint). If I read some interesting article, I post it there. This way I can separate the personal account and the fact that I mostly write in Romanian there from this blog, that is a more “professional” blog on which I write, as you see, in a comprehensible English.

So, every week I will take the most popular articles there (up to 5) and post them here, on the blog. I will post the links to the Facebook post, since this might also help in making the page livelier :D So don’t be too upset with clicking twice, it’s for a good cause :D

1. “It takes a team of imperfect people and a lot of time to make even a passable product. Even finishing a unprofitable product is an massive achievement in itself.”

An interesting article on why “overnight” success is a myth, with emphasis on the team behind the success.

See it here.

2. SaaS is becoming “the thing” on internet: more and more people that I know start growing small and medium businesses around SaaS and here is a list of bloggers that write about the subject (including some people that have done SaaS or are doing SaaS as they write).

The article is available here.

3. “This post is about how to get 1,000 people to try your site so you can find out what isn’t working, iterate and keep trying to build a site that people, other than your mom, actually come back to. ”

Yeah, this article is about how to get your first 1,000 users. The initial push that you need :) Find the link here.

Bonus:

Finally, every week I will also choose some that I personally think there are really interesting, but they lost on popularity. This week I’ve found a great article on churn and lifetime of your users. You need to understand this if you want to have a great business.

The article is available here.

Of course, hit like to any article that you think it’s interesting, subscribe to the page, you know, make me happy :P

Source: Vintage Books and Pen (selective focus) on ShutterStock

Recently I’ve had the opportunity to meet a guy that’s been really successful in his line of work. Thing is, before meeting him I’ve heard about him lots of stories from different people. And they all said: “I wish I was as lucky as him”. Or “I want to do what he does”. I didn’t hear once someone telling me “man, that guy works his ass off”. No. He was always lucky.

Well, after talking to him, it was obvious to me that nothing he did was luck in any way. He is a brilliant guy with an uncanny eye for opportunity. The last thing is a combination of about 10 years of experience and the understanding that he needs to learn new tricks all the time.

I am just amazed how much people want to see just the visible side of things and ignore the hard work behind the success.

Photo: Blackboard with the text Success, It Depends On You from Shutterstock

A good friend sent me this video of Malcolm Gladwell talking at Google and presenting his new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.

The talk starts with a different way of understanding the biblical fight between David and Goliath:
– the sling that David had was capable of great accuracy and of a similar impact as a .45 caliber bullet
– Goliath was probably almost blind and slow moving.

This means that, basically, the guy with the best technology and speed won. As it should :)

Watch the one hour presentation below. Another interesting thing is that Malcolm Gladwell was the first person to participate in the now famous Google talks :)

P.S.: a similar idea to what this guy is saying I’ve seen described in Brad Gilbert’s “Winning Ugly” book about tennis. It is a good read even if you are not a tennis enthusiast.

And, not related to this, I forgot to hit Publish on this post yesterday, so I am publishing it today (even if with an earlier date, to fit into Saturday Video).

This weekend I didn’t play anything. Didn’t really want and wasn’t in the mood. But the main reason was that I got lost in a book that anybody involved in gaming should read: Masters of Doom.

It’s not, obviously, a horror book, it’s about about the two Johnes: John Romero and John Carmack, the creators of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. They invented the First Person Shooter style of gaming, they brought deathmatch to millions of players and made the world of gaming much more visceral.

The book goes over a period of about 20 years, since the two guys met, until the launch of Daikatana and Quake 3 Arena, the titles that weren’t as successful as any previous work they’ve done.

One quote I found interesting is about gamers’ behavior when it comes to paying:

Gamers, he realized, might be a different breed from those consumers who actually paid for utility shareware. They were more apt simply to take what they could get for free.

Go, have a read. It’s a good way to understand the things happening inside a small team once it grows.

Talking to a lot of my entrepreneur friends I came to a conclusion: no matter how much you want, raising money is gonna take a lot more time than you initially expect.

When we first raised money, last year, we expected to have the money in the bank in the first 3 months. It took about 9, actually and, looking back and better understanding the entire process I can say that we were quite lucky.

Can you do anything to fasten things up? Yeah, up to a point: you can have all the financial and legal documents of the company place and this makes everything go faster. Other than that, though, it really isn’t up to you. Sometimes, not even up to the investors, but to the lawyers. So breathe deep and have patience :)

I know that most of the people say the same thing and that most of the people actually looking for investment think it’s a lot of BS. Well, it’s not.

Photo source: businessman hand pointing to investment concept on Shutterstock