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From here:

If your screen is black or frozen
If your screen is black or frozen, you might need to force restart your device. A force restart won’t erase the content on your device. You can force restart your device even if the screen is black or the buttons aren’t responding. Follow these steps:
– On an iPad Pro 11-inch or iPad Pro 12.9-inch: Press and quickly release the Volume Up button. Press and quickly release the Volume Down button. Then press and hold the Power button until the device restarts.
– On an iPhone 8 or later: Press and quickly release the Volume Up button. Press and quickly release the Volume Down button. Then press and hold the Side button until you see the Apple logo.
– On an iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus: Press and hold both the Side and Volume Down buttons for at least 10 seconds, until you see the Apple logo.
– On an iPhone 6s and earlier, iPad, or iPod touch: Press and hold both the Home and the Top (or Side) buttons for at least 10 seconds, until you see the Apple logo.

This is on top of my Mac’s microphone not working in Skype (on MacOS, of course).

Photo credit

If you’re ever in the position to raise money, the first thing you’ll probably do will be to look for examples of pitch decks to use with your potential investors. In 2012, when I was raising money in earnest for MavenHut, finding this kind of examples was difficult. I needed to access my own network (which was not that big) because there were almost no decks available online.

Actually, I think the one that helped me the most was Reid Hoffman’s Linkedin deck, which he published on his own website, along with explanation and context for each deck. It was gold for me, because it helped me understand a little bit more about investor perception and targets. You can still find the article here and I hope it will still be there a long time, because I learned more from it than most of other resources combined.

I wouldn’t have mentioned pitch decks and presentations if I didn’t find today, in Ben Evans’s newsletter (one of the best tech related newsletters online) a mention to an article with 30 pitch decks from some of the most successful startups in the world or, how they put it, legen…wait for it… dary startups. You have the likes of Airbnb, Square, Buffer, Mint, Mixpanel, Moz (of Lost and Founder fame). You can even find Buzzfeed or YouTube. A really good collection that you shouldn’t miss if you’re raising money or think of raising money.

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention MavenHut’s public presentation at the end of Startup Bootcamp in June 2012. While the deck is not available online, you can see me barely breathing with stress on stage. It might actually be funny, but I think it’s also educational.

Since we’re on The CEO Library and we’re all about books, here are the books that helped me when pitching and when learning how to pitch, maybe they will help you as well:

• Pitch Anything – by Oren Klaff
• Made to Stick – by Chip & Dan Heath

Well, this is unxpected:

https://twitter.com/offthepill/status/1089287578992357376

Besides reading as much as I can, I listen to lots of podcasts on a weekly basis. I listen mostly to technology and “tech lifestyle” if you want, but I also listen business podcasts, on an episode by episode basis. I listen to them when I walk my dog, when I go around the town doing chores, whenever I have some “dead” time on my hands.

Today I found a really comprehensive list of 80 podcasts for the online business owners, from Businessese. They’re categorized, with categories like Marketing and Sales, Blogging, Finance and Legal, Mindset, Branding, Writing and Content Creation, Organization and Productivity, Creatives and Creativity, General Business. What’s more interesting, for me, at least, is that they avoided the most well known podcast, like Tim Ferriss’s one, and they tried to find less known, but really targeted ones.

In our own searches for new blogging and business podcasts to devour, we’ve found that most “best podcast” lists tend to feature the same major players we’ve heard before. That’s no good for the podcast obsessed! So we rolled our sleeves up and scoured the internet to curate a huge list of podcasts that has something for everyone, at every stage of business. Enjoy!

I got the list from an interesting newsletter I subscribed a long time ago to, Useletter by Amy Lynn Andrews. Look over it and, while you to this, don’t forget Cristina sends a really good newsletter every Monday, as well, here, at The CEO Library. She often recommends good podcasts she listen to, so you have that, as well, as a good reason to subscribe.

Finally, here are some podcasts I listen to, mostly Tech: Accidental Tech Podcast, Connected, Cortex, Analog(ue), The BirchTree Podcast, Real Money, Real Business. If you’re Romanian, I also listen to Andrei Rosca’s Zero Plus, Podcastu’ lui Katai and Radu Dumitru’s Radu and Matilda.

Oh, and one tip: if you want to listen to more podcasts or you don’t have enough time, use Overcast as your podcast client of choice, if you’re on iOS. It has a smart thing called Smart Speed that actually cuts pauses and it can cut 10-15% of the time you need. Also, I listen on 1.1x or 1.2x speed, which doesn’t distort the voices too bad and I get some more time from this as well.

Happy listening! :)

Around 13-14 years ago while discovering the benefits of p2p communication, I found out a show about cars that wasn’t really about cars. It was called Top Gear, it was in its 4th-5th year or so, and I fell in love with it.

After all, who wouldn’t? It was about fast cars and crazy antics and I was a guy in my early twenties, dreaming about Aston Martins.

Actually, because of watching Top Gear, in 2007 I started, along with my cousin, a blog about cars called AutoUnleashed. It didn’t bring us the money we hoped for, but it gave us a jump start into test driving cars, which we loved. And, its followup, called rpmgo, made enough money when I sold it so I could support the first few months of MavenHut.

Anyway, today I saw – on Amazon, because we don’t need p2p anymore to watch our favorite shows – the last “live audience” episode of The Grand Tour, the followup of Top Gear for the 3 presenters (Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond) . And it impacted me more than I thought it would. And, while I didn’t cry, I wasn’t surprised to see Jeremy Clarkson tearing up.

Well, they will still continue to do crazy antics in special, longer shows, but for the moment, thanks for the memories!

Of course, Top Gear still continues – maybe – on BBC, with a different team, and the show is not bad at all. But, for the moment, I’m actually surprised how much I feel I’ll miss the crazy “original” trio.

Photo source

In February 2018 I landed in Lisbon. It was my first time in continental Portugal and I wanted to see what everyone was so enthusiastic about. My experience wasn’t the best – though it improved a lot by the end of the year, but I want to talk about something else: Pastel de Nata.

I don’t know how or where I heard the first time about pastel de nata (which means cream pastry, basically, in Portuguese). I tried it pretty soon after landing, because it’s everywhere, and I really enjoyed it.

Right after eating a pastel de nata the first time, I remember talking to Cristi, my co-founder at MavenHut, and telling him “You know, they have this great thing called pastel de nata here”. To which he replied: “Yes, it’s awesome. Just be careful, you’ll be really sick if you eat more than 5 at a time!”. 5? FIVE? I could barely eat 2 at a time, since they were so sweet. But five???

Anyway, after this moment I learned that pastel de nata was a “secret” just for me, that a lot of my friends ate it before and, even more surprising, they didn’t need to come to Portugal for that. I found it afterwards in London at Nando’s, in Bucharest somewhere as well. And today I found out why:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the nata’s rise is fueled in part by promotion from the government, which sponsors events like the 2018 Nata Festival in London and funds local businesses.

Here is the entire article, called “The Unlikely Rise of the Pastel de Nata, and Why It’s Suddenly Everywhere“. And, if you, all of a sudden, feel like you want a pastel de nata, don’t tell me. Please, don’t. I have a really good Portuguese “pastelaria” really close. And their pastel de nata is really, really good.

Oh, and if you go to Lisbon, the best pastel de nata I’ve had was at Manteigaria, at TimeOut Market. They also have another place where you can find them, which might be less busy, on the corner of Largo de Camões, in Chiado. A lot of people say that the original pastel de nata, at Pastéis de Belém, is better, but it wasn’t my experience. To each’s own, though :)

Photo source: The illustration on top is Miruna’s.

I’m really interested to see where this is going. I use the iPad Pro a lot on a daily basis (not as a laptop replacement, unfortunately) and I’d love to have a good database on console quality games on iOS as well.

Several people involved in the project’s development say Apple is spending several million dollars each on most of the more than 100 games that have been selected to launch on Arcade, with its total budget likely to exceed $500m. The games service is expected to launch later this year.

A lot of people said that if Apple wants to be a real gaming platform, they need to pay for the games the way that consoles pay for exclusives these days.

Also, it’s obvious there’s a really big opportunity for revenues in “console type” gaming even for a company with revenues as big as Apple’s.

Apple has not said how much it will charge subscribers for Arcade or TV+, but analysts at HSBC have estimated that Apple Arcade revenues will grow from $370m in 2020 to $2.7bn by 2022 and $4.5bn by 2024, by which time HSBC predicts it will have 29m users paying $12.99 each month.

The full article, titled “Apple spends hundreds of millions on Arcade video game service“, is available on FT.com. If you don’t have a subscription to read it, just search for the title on Google and go from there.

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time – none. Zero.”
– Charlie Munger, Self-made billionaire & Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner

I found this article today and I agreed with a lot of the things I read. Since this is a website dedicated to reading and learning, I thought that the conclusion they reach is quite close to The CEO Library’s reason for being: knowledge is becoming increasingly valuable. In the end, this isn’t the reason you should read the article, but the fact that they make a really compelling argument for reading and getting more knowledge (and getting more knowledgeable).

The writer also gives you a list of essential skills to master in the knowledge economy we’re approaching, so it’s something you can apply once you finish reading the article.

The answer is simple: Learning is the single best investment of our time that we can make. Or as Benjamin Franklin said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”

I’ve found this article through the daily emails I get from Deepstash, the company some friends started a while ago. You should also check them out.

I was looking through the stats of The CEO Library recently and noticed that the page with books recommended by Naval Ravikant is one of the most popular on the site. So I got curious to see if I read any of the books there. And I did:

• Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. I talked about it here for a little bit.
• Genome, by Matt Ridley. I read this book when I was mentoring the RebelBio teams, to get some idea of what they were doing. While the first half of the book is a little bit slow, the second half of the book is amazing. Highly recommended.
• Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, by Richard Feynman. I’ve read all the books Feynman wrote about his life. They’re amazing :)
• I also read Power of Habit, Pre-Suasion, by Robert Cialdini and The Rational Optimist, but I don’t remember many things about them.

I have to say some of the books Naval recommends look out of place, but I might actually read some of them (I mean, what’s Tao Te Ching?).

I didn’t write on the blog in some time, so I thought suggesting some books for the summer holiday might not be a bad way to write again :)

Several days ago, while being somehow forced to stay at home, I wanted to play a nice story-based game that wouldn’t take a lot of time. And I remembered I really enjoyed PlayStation’s Uncharted: The Lost Legacy when it launched in 2017.

I played it again and I found it as enjoyable. For people that know a little bit about Uncharted, this time you don’t play Nathan Drake, but Chloe Frazer, his partner in crime from the second Uncharted game, Among Thieves. She teams up with Nadine Ross, one of the villains in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.

An unlikely pair, but I promise you, it works. They are funny in a different way from Nate and Sully, but funny and interesting nevertheless. In some way, their banter is actually more entertaining. Maybe because we don’t know as much about them as we used to know about Nate and Sully, who knows.

In the end, I’ve had a fun 6-7 hours replaying the story. I saw that the price is now around $20 (or €20) and I think it’s worth it. If you didn’t play the game and you have some time free during August, I’d say give it a go.

Image source: PlayStation