Arhiva completă

About a year and something ago, while in Dublin for Startup Bootcamp, I’ve found a video of Mark Zuckerberg speaking with Jessica Livingston at Startup School in 2011. I’ve looked for it this week to remember something and I’ve found that he also talked at Startup School in 2012, with Paul Graham.

Both videos are below and they are worth it, especially because Mark talks specifically about the startup part of the Facebook. Moreover, interesting, he says, in 2011, that he wouldn’t start Facebook in Silicon Valley if he would start again now. THe reasons? :) See below:

This month MavenHut is hitting some awesome fine round numbers and I am taking a break from the regular posting to revel on it:

1. We’ve hit 1 million Monthly Active Users for Solitaire Arena (we’re actually closing on 1.5 million)

For Facebook games, this is a really important milestone, since this means we are going to the 1-5 million tier, with the “Big Boys” :)

2. Since we’ve improved a lot on retention and acquisition, we keep growing really well and, as a consequence, we’ve hit, for the first time, top 100 Facebook Games. Which is awesome!

We’ve posted on our company’s site a little bit more numbers, but for the moment I am extremely, truly happy that the company is doing well. So bear with me for not writing something else and just enjoying the moment. In a startup, happiness rarely truly lasts, so I am taking as much as I can now :D

Yeah, it sounds like this is a post about religion. It isn’t.

Actually, this idea came to me after reading an article on Medium where a woman says that she finished a 24 hours running competition by believing that 90% of the women that started the specific race finished it. It said so in a book she read (Born to Run, I also enjoyed the book a lot).

The truth was, though, that only 45% of the women that started the race actually finished it. The information in the book was incorrect, from the lack of documentation (which makes you wonder how much of the book is incorrect, also). The thing is, though, that it didn’t matter. She finished the race because she believed she should and she could.

And I find a lot of similarities between this and business (especially startups): you rarely have enough numbers and facts to go on, but you hold on to the ones that give you the energy to keep going.

Like the fact that when you start your own business, you think you will have more time for yourself because, let’s face it, now you’re your own boss. But this is not true, you actually work a lot more, on worse hours, on a much smaller wage than you could get if you got hired. But the fact that you KNOW it’s gonna get better (even if it doesn’t, most of the time), makes you go through with it. And, yes, at some point, it MIGHT get better. So you keep hoping :D

Or the fact that businesses fail a lot in the first year (they say 95%). But, well, you find different numbers, that say a different story. Even if they are not suited for you (Y! Combinator ot TechStars companies aren’t a good example, because of the ecosystem around them), you still prefer to believe those numbers. After all, only 22% and 10%, respectively, of the companies failed. Which is a lot better than 95%, right? :)

In the end it doesn’t really matter. As long as you are getting closer to your dreams, who cares what leads you there and what kept you going? It’s only about what you believe…

Photo from Shutterstock

One thing you start to value a lot once you become an adult is sleep. Being a startup founder is like becoming an adult over again: it adds even more pressure. I’m sure there are other activities where you don’t get much sleep, also, but I am talking about what I know, so don’t be too mad about it.

Anyway, while a startup founder goes without sleep for long periods of time (no sleep or less, a lot less sleep), you realize, at some point, that you need to sleep better to get more productive.

This is something I rediscover these days, when I’m, again, starting to wake up at 6-7am. The problem is that you do not go to sleep as early as you should and, as a consequence, today I am little bit off. I still get done everything I started to do today, but I wish I would’ve slept more last night (and the previous, for that matter).

Even writing this article didn’t come easy.I have an interesting case study almost finished since Sunday and I wanted to publish it today, but in no way I could. I need all the energy I can gather for some number crunching that I’m doing for the company. Which is, frankly, more important >:)

Sleep tight!

P.S.: yes, that’s our cat :D

One of the most important skills of a startup founder is considered to be networking (Emi actually wrote on article on how important it is for a CEO).

When we talk about networking, people usually think about meeting business partners, investors and so on. And yes, it is one of the best ways to get to your targets, but I also take into consideration the smaller things.

Two days ago we’ve been expecting a huge traffic surge from Brazil on Solitaire Arena. While happy for it, one of my colleagues said: “Guys, you know we do not have the translations finished for Portuguese, right?”.

And all of a sudden, all hell broke loose, since we needed the translation in 4 hours, tops. Because not having it would mean worse retention, worse monetization, worse everything. So what did we do? Well, we went to our networks. I went to mine, of course. First option: Facebook (click on the image to see the bigger version). Initially as a simple status, then with a $7 promotion to all my 3000 contacts on Facebook (you can see the results and the reactions in the screenshot below):

The result: in 4 hours we had the translation completed and everything was good again. While it may not seem like much, most of the people replying gave us at least 2 days deadline (and that was pretty fast). Which is how it should be done. But we didn’t have two days.

The network you have is a lot bigger than the one you actually think it is. So nurture it, even it is a virtual one (on Facebook, twitter, blog). It might help you a lot someday, even when you not expect it.

I am not the biggest fan of TV, but I enjoy some TV series a lot. Some of those I watch are TV shows that are worth the time for a business person, especially for the negotiating skills you can learn from them.

I would recommend, in no particular order: Pawn Stars, Counting Cars, Shark Tank.

Shark Tank is a show presenting startup founders that need investment (or, in some cases, just visibility) in front of a jury of investors including Mark Cuban of Broadcast.com and Dallas Mavericks (see more details here). The most interesting part about this show is the explanation of decisions by the jurors. Really worth the time.

Pawn Stars is an interesting show for men interested in the weirdness of the human beings. As well as people interested in history :) YOu can see here people bringing Elephant Poo in a can or really historic artifacts like books signed by old US presidents and similar things. I enjoy the show for the way they negotiate: the first time I saw the show and someone asked for $10,000 for something and the guys fired back with $2,500 I was in awe. I would’ve never thought of negotiating 75% of the price!

FInally, Counting Cars is a TV series around flipping old cars, after restoring them. Again, you see the owner of the car shop buying old, destitute cars and repairing them for a profit. Again, from the school of Pawn Stars, they really negotiate by dropping the price down to 60 percent on the initial offer> and sometimes they actually get away with it.

As a bonus, an interesting show I only saw some episodes on Travel Channel is Hotel Impossible: a series about bringing bad service hotels back in business.

About 6 months ago I’ve discovered Score! (I think Cristi, my co-founder at MavenHut, told me about it). It’s a game for both iPhone and iPad, but I only played it on the iPad.

Score! is a kind of Pocket Planes for football. Basically, you take goals scored in the last 30 years or so and try to recreate them on the iPad screen. Based on the level (Amateur, Professional), you set up directions, shot power and let the game unwind and gain stars and points based on accuracy.

Initially it felt like a stupid game, I must admit, but with every goal I would go forward I would get more and more into it. So much, actually, that I wanted to buy a goal package (you have some initial ones, and some additional that keep updating, with goals from World Cups, Premiership and similar).

The thing is I haven’t deleted from my iPad it since I downloaded the game the first time, though I do not play it that often. And, thinking of it, I really, really enjoy it, from time to time (especially on longer flights, when I am tired and unable to focus on reading and the inflight entertainment is boring).

So, if you have the time and care to have a non-realtime football game, you should give it a try.

Last spring I went on my first visit to the US. And my first stop was, completely unexpected for me, Austin. And SXSW.

There are lots of things to say about Texas and Austin and about the days of madness around SXSW. But one of the things I will remember was the keynote from Elon Musk (actually an on stage interview).

The feeling of being in the presence of what future generation will consider visionary and greatness was palpable. I think Elon Musk will be the Nikola Tesla of our generation (hopefully with more financial success).

As a funny thing, they say that Robert Downey jr.’s Tony Stark (IronMan) was modeled after Elon Musk. Also, you can follow a Twitter parody account which, from time to time, actually says funny one liners: BoredElonMusk

Take an hour and see the video below, it’s worth it. This is the man that started PayPal, sold it and invested two really disruptive businesses: Tesla and Space X. He’s the CEO of both and he wants to die on Mars, after living there the last years of his life.

Ask a startup founder about the revenue for the month. Or the number of users his/her business has. Or the amount of servers and the load on them on an average day. The answer should be immediate (there can be some hesitation, but only to take into account or not today’s numbers). Obviously, ask each founder the questions specific for him: I would hate to be asked about the servers, instead of Elvis. Obviously, I now a general number, and I know how much we spend on it, but that’s it. My job is not to know how many they are, but how they impact the cash flow.

Surprisingly, though, I have met so many startup founders, especially in early stages, that don’t have a clue about their numbers. And I have no idea how that happens. How can you think about your business every minute of every day and not know those numbers?

When I ask about this, they say there are so many numbers, how can they remember all of those? And I give them the example of Cristi, the other co-founder at MavenHut, who follows several hundred indicators permanently and he probably knows by heart about 50 of them (the most important ones). Or it takes him 2 minutes at the most to give details on the others (after looking through Excels and stats). It may sound huge, but gaming is a metrics driven business and that is his job. If he doesn’t know those, he can’t do what he’s supposed to do: create great games that are played by lots of users.

You may say that you don’t have the time to look at the numbers, because you are busy building a business. How do you know how to build it, what it needs, if you are not looking at the numbers?? It’s mind blowing for me how many times I hear this, though.

And, as a side information, every investor I’ve met asked me about numbers. User numbers, growth, revenues, if any, estimates, industry numbers. You NEED to know numbers!

Photo from ShutterStock

I am not a native English speaker. I’ve spoken the language (to the best of my abilities) since I was a kid. Thanks to my mother, I started to learn the language pretty early in life (6 years old), while games with lots of English text gave me the necessary push to actually go to the classes she paid for.

Unfortunately, I don’t speak English as good as I’d like to. Of course, I can make myself understood, I speak pretty fluently, but I often feel the wording I use is not the best or the terms I use have a different meaning in a specific context. Case in point: “I speak pretty fluent” or “I speak pretty fluently”? :D

Anyway, I don’t have an issue with people that don’t speak the language. I get it, it’s not easy for all of us (a German guy will have a hard time saying “v” as [vi] instead of [fi], I know), but you need to speak it. And, until today, I had no argument for pushing this other than the fact that everybody in our world (startups in tech) speak English: investors, co-workers, partners.

Today, though, I read this interview with Paul Graham from Y Combinator, and this is what he says when he is being asked about signs of a potential bad team while selecting them for YC:

One quality that’s a really bad indication is a CEO with a strong foreign accent. I’m not sure why. It could be that there are a bunch of subtle things entrepreneurs have to communicate and can’t if you have a strong accent. Or, it could be that anyone with half a brain would realize you’re going to be more successful if you speak idiomatic English, so they must just be clueless if they haven’t gotten rid of their strong accent. I just know it’s a strong pattern we’ve seen.

I know, life’s not fair. Not everybody was born in an English speaking country. Does it really matter?

P.S.: this is my Demo Day presentation. The tremble you hear in my voice is stage fright. After all these years…

Later updates: People reacted to Paul Graham comments and he answered here. More reactions from Mark Suster and Om Malik.