Being a founder - How it sounds impossible, until it is done

Last lecture was about great people. It was Bala's last lecture and the meaning was to sum up how different entrepreneurs can be in regards of the environment they live in. But what they really share is that they is that they change history, they change people's view on things. Changing the world does not require you to be the smarter person. What it requires is that it changes the world. A good example is when Rosa Parks denied to move from the white people section in the bus on her way home. Another example is Bill Gates vision on the future when he founded Microsoft and changed the world. These two examples are so different and at the same time so similar.

Now having thought about Rosa Parks and Bill Gates on how they changed the world, does that mean that they were smarter than Einstein? Well no... of course not. It just tells us that they are among many who could deal with ton of things and do the incredible things. It leaves them as entrepreneurs but not necessary genius though some may look at them as such. That raises up the question about how can you become a great founder. I looked it up on youtube and found Reid Hoffman trying to express his thought on that which was interesting.  He says that if you want to become a entrepreneur you might wanna hope having some superpowers. Because there are things which may give you edge.

Skills that are super important according to the LinkedIn founder are:

Founding Team

Delegation

Location

Vision

Focus

Flexibility

Evaluation

Confidence

Risk

Data

Persistence

Time Horizon

Now I'm not gonna repeat all his thoughts but I found his thoughts on location important. He mentioned that even though the Silicon Valley may sound as the perfect place for startups, then think again. Location of the startup is super important. Todays recent startups could never have thrived there. Think of GroupOn and AirBNB for example. A person living in the Silicon Valley probably would never had these thoughts there and it would have been a terrible trial market. So your location or your network of locations may be one superpower for you to become an entrepreneur. It's super important actually, Rosa Parks location put her into the position of changing the world. Same with Bill Gates, the world's inefficiency got him to change the world. 

When your location and the external factors around you adds up with confidence in doing a change you may find your self in the position of changing the world. Our most recent example of a man with these set of skills is Manoj Bhargava. This man became a billioner because of a energy dring he made. Which I actually have never tasted. But what made him an entreprenour is that he decided that he wanted to change the world. Finding a way to change the world isn't so hard. But it requires you to think of Reid Hoffman's set of skills. Because we are surrounded with problems everyday. Which drives me to handing it to Bala for being that person who has done so great in changing my mindset in reacting to problems I may face in life. He has affected so many people with his interests and knowledge that I'm sure that they know now when the chance of changing the world is laying there in front of their eyes. It's just so common that when we experience something annoying and know that it probably bothering someone else we just sit and do nothing. Rosa Parks said hey no more bullshit and changed the world. Manoj Bhargava became a billioner and discovered that he could change the world with his fortune. The opportunities like that can still be found. When you find that opportunity to take action and change the world what do you do? 

When you need that inspiration about changing the world just go to google and type changed the world under image search. You'll see my point. 

Nelson Mandela pretty much summed it up for us also, "It always sounds impossible, until it is done". 

Culture

Culture has played a big role in Bala's guidance as the class mentor.  In a way he has taught us that the culture is the secret sauce of a startup. It has given me many reasons to think of culture. What is a companies culture? After reading many posts on the web such as the post of Corey McAcenney on wired.com on startup culture, Candida Brush on Forbes.com and books like Zero to One I have come to the conclusion that saying a company has some culture of X is not the perfect expression but a much common one. I prefer to refer to the learning from the book Zero to One that no company has no culture, a company or a team is a culture. The ritual we use to describe our culture is what we as a team communicate about what we want to be, what we want the company to be.

Bala has managed to get us to think about how to start a startup, we are all really interested in this subject and we absolutely love getting wisdom from people out there who are willing to share with us their experience and philosophy regarding things related to starting a startup. And what would describe the culture of Bala's class? I think all his planning and research has been a part of the ritual he wanted to be the class culture. The class has a culture of shared interest in learning how to start a startup, getting wisdom from the ones who have done a startup and so on.

Gunnar Hólmsteinn, the COO of QuizUp visited us to share with us his wisdom on culture. And what I noticed was that this guy is not the academic type who gives us some definition on the white screen about culture, allow me to to skip to the wikipedia description: "the behaviour of humans within an organization and the meaning that people attach to those behaviours".
He's the kind of guy we need, because we could all seek the academic expression of culture on the web by our self. He's man with culture-creation in his fingertips. Some people have that ability to make a party a good party and I'm sure that he's that type. 

So there he was to tell us about culture and he just told us .. the best way for me to explain to you guys what culture .... is by telling you about my job....

And why did he do it this way? Why did he express culture on his first actions as the COO of QuizUp? It's because when we outline overall goals of startups we are motivating our culture.
When we show respect for the people we work with we are creating a culture of respect.

Every story an ex-employee or current employee can say about atmosphere in the company is that persons version of the company's culture. Because culture is how we behave with our colleges. And having given that a thought I understand the importance of the company's culture rituals and what the company does to get these values and the habits it powers to be a expression of the companies culture. Because in the end we want all memories to be pleasant.

The only question left is: what is a good company? What is a good culture? I think no company can be good company unless it has a good culture and because of that it's safe to say that the culture is one of the company's most important flavors.

Why we can't not afford PR

We had the pleasure of meeting Paula Gould. It was clear that Bala shows big respect for her and he is very grateful for having had her to assist him in starting "Startup Iceland".

She's been in involved in PR-related subjects for almost 20 years. When I think back I remember her looking like she was around 30 year old so she must have started quite early :).

In her mind one of the most crucial thing's to "know your story". She told us that the first thing people think of when they see you or your company is "you are like X".... and because of that reason you really need to emphasise on the importance of knowing your story. What was the passion for starting the company? You need to know how you differentiate from your competitors, what your competitors are doing, know your market fit ... because when you meet someone and tell him about your company, you don't want to leave that person with the impression that your company is a copy of something else. You want leave that person with how you wanted your product to fit better the customers needs and how that product is going to impact certain people. I completely agree.

Now that we agreed on what I explained above she menioned next the question if we afforded a PR? Well if you want people to know your story then yes... if you want people to know that your product is not just a copycat of something else then yes... if you want people to know why they should need your product then yes.

But that left us with the question... but hey, PR-advice is not cheap, I probably don't afford it... But her answer to that was... well you don't afford not afford PR. Then if I can't not afford a PR then how? ........ You need to find a way, what ever it takes. You don't necessary need to a hire a PR specialist. You might just book your self for a PR practice with yourself, or trying to hire people who may be PR-savy. There's endless ways to do PR but it's so important to get through all that noise out there so people notist you.  You might even know about a certain person that might help you get others to know your product... and there's nothing wrong about sending that person a message once and then... as long as you are only stalking that person professionally she said :).

And if you keep your mind to doing at least the best you can in PR you will hopefully (eventually) afford a PR person to help you... And then I thought, can everybody do PR? The answer is clearly yes but a profession PR will help you sending more valuable longterm signals about you out there.


Bala then took over with some nice things to think of regarding "how to get started".
He talked about the challenge of getting noticed which Paula had been talking about as well.. He's simple advice was find a way to make people care! Build a landpage so that people know you exist. Get 5 to 15 people to like your side. Try getting more to like  your page. Ask them for their email so that you can contact them when you are closer to making your product ready. And of course... don't do things that will cause you trouble like hiring people when you don't afford it. And just do these things that need to be done even though they are not scalable such as having a talk with people about your product.  Every founder had to do then also.

But what about raising money?  Why not just raise money immediately? The answer is No, no no... do not raise money until you really need to and you hopefully know there's alot of investors who's gonna be waiting in lines to give you their money... because if you go soon you'll end up getting nothing, wasting all your energy on nothing or even worse giving that investor too much equity in your company because you were talking to that person to early.

How we must sacrifice for the world to develop

We had the pleasure of having Haukur Guðjónsson as a speaker, founder of Bungalo.com last wednesday.

I really enjoyed listening to this inspiring guy, more than any other lecture actually to this point, because he gave a really good impression of himself and brought to my attention that I have actually had partly wrong view on how to deal with challenging ideas that don't meet my todays reality or the enviroment. I think 99.9% people who get an idea which would need the world to change burry their ideas and do nothing. We need to change that, that's just plain wrong! All ideas have some negative sides, which may involve your current ability to make your idea come true such as your current financials, they may also have negative effects on some professions, species and more.... Did polluting the earth regarding making affordable cars stop us? Did complaints from hotel owners over changed demand and supply make people not use AirBNB? The answer is NO. New innovation usually changes the world, it may affect some negatively but I'm sure that it always has positive side effects as well. Current laws or macro factors need to change for new future to come true.

A good example of how a negative thing can later become a positive thing is how elephants did not become extinct mostly because of the game Billiard and other things as we'll. The game needed extremely massive balls which would not brake or explode. The only massive ingredient that did the magic was ivory from the tusks of elephants, which needed a lot of killing of elephants. The demand was huge for various of things but mostly Billiard. As the demand increased a man called Leo Bakeland invented a plastic called Bakelite which did the trick for all these things that needed ivory before, which he then used to make Billiard balls more affordable so not only the rich could enjoy the game. He did therefor save the game and the elephants. But it's safe to say that the game actually saved elephants because Billiard and many other things that needed ivory, were invented with extremely negative impact on the elephants and later came that guy who wanted to make the production of billiard balls differently which made it possible to stop using ivory in production of many things.

Now over to the guest speaker. Haukur has started many companies in his life and has made a bunch of mistakes which he was willing to share with us. His real success was bungalo.com, a company started at his worst financial moments in his life. He didn't have any money and no programming skills, he technically had no resources to make that idea come true. He was unable to convince people to come work for him for free so he needed to learn programming by himself which he did. He did what was necessary for his idea to come to life, he took years with no salary, sleeping on friends sofas, keeping all cost as low as possible in order to make sure he's dream would come alive.

He talked to us about the part when Bungalo needed users. His only way of getting user's was by calling all cabin owners he could think of or go meet them, so it took alot of effort. He later went to Canada to start Bungalo there and had to do the same thing, travel around the country and meet cabin owners and sell the the idea about renting their cabin on Bungalo. All to all... this guy did what was needed and I really hope bungalo.com will continue to grow. He therefor had a company which had important factor that was not very scalable unless doing peer to peer sales.

Now to the part which changed my world. When I was listening to Haukur speak about Bungalo I remembered that there had been some news about that people renting rooms or apartments on AirBNB needed to have license for offering guest services, they technically need to start a company with licenses to do what they are doing, and the same thing should apply to Bungalo renters I guess. And I related to many people I know who have rented their houses via AirBNB and Bungalo that don't give a crap about the rules. And the police is not doing anything about it and probably have no intention to do so. This issue will hopefully never kill sites like AirBNB or Bungalo.com but this kind of mindset of worries may however kill many good ideas at their birth.

I  have had several ideas in my life time where I have decided to do nothing about, because of rules make the idea hard becoming alife. Just 2 months ago I bought a domain called localTGS.com and had plans on starting a similar concept as AirBNB but only tour guide services (Local Tour Guide Services.com /LOCALTGS.com). But when me and my colleges started talking about it we soon realised that in order to work as a tour guide you need license as a tour guide and of course there our idea was dead.

However if I relate to AirBNB, Bungalo and UBER they all probably thought, "No, this idea does not work. In order to drive people you need to have a taxi license...", but the thing is and that if you get that insane idea there's definitely gonna be some problems like that. And why on earth does a Taxi driver need to have a special license? It's not like it's a complicated job! And why on earth would I need get some license from the government in order to rent out my spare room downstairs?  And having said that, one of the key similarities among successful ideas is that they changed the world, maybe at your cost or some else...

So now for the future. When you think that things should be done differently eventhough the rules are not on your side, just go for it. The world needs to change, most rules also. I wonder if Henry Ford ever thought that he should stop making cars because they probably would drive too fast and be danger to people?

Now what about "good design"? What is good design?  Like my posts have already described things don't need to perfect at the beginning, they just need to show your vision so that you get users which will inspire you to make your product better. But what is "good design"? According to Steve Jobs : "This is what customers pay us for - to sweat all these details so it's easy and pleasent for them to use our computers. We're supposed to be really good at this. That doesn't mean we don't listen to customers, but it's hard for them to tell you what they want when they've never seen anything remotely like it". Haukur talked about how customers always want to give you ideas on how to improve your product which is good but you need to be able to take the noise away. You need to be able to pick the valuable points because you don't want your product to become to complicated. You want it to be simple and beautiful.

Then what is good design? Bala had alot of points for us there:

• is simple,
• is timeless,
• solves the right problem,
• is suggestive,
• often slightly funny,
• it's hard,
• looks easy,
• uses Symmetry,
• resembles Nature,
• is Redesign
• can Copy
• is often Strange
• happens in Chunks
• is often Daring

And if keep these points in mind we will be able to differ the noise away and stick to the important stuff in developing our product. We need to be engaged in delivering what the user needs in a simple and beautiful way.

So all to all... Bala had a great quote which I will make my last sentance for this blog: Building products that people love is about building something unique ... "If you go on a date with a person you want to show something unique with your personality".

A startup is a company designed to grow fast. But how do we make sure we grow fast?

We had the pleasure of having some of the founders of Guide to Iceland to visit us last Wednesday where they talked to us about growth and how to get customers.

 They had an important message for us which was about first mover advantage. They said: 

"Don't let other market participants get you thinking that you are in a fight.  You should just focus on your product and make sure it's special so that you are not in competition with someone else.  We didn't copy what the competitors are doing good. We just do what we think adds value."

Now in order to grow they said you need a team. You need ridiculous amount of energy to achieve your goal and you need talented and devoted people. Having said that they also said you don't want to hire cheap. 

You also have to find the what motivates your team members, what makes them happy at completing their job?  You then need to know to let go of control, if you always wan't to be in control then you are looking for robots. You are looking for people who can improve the business, that can think outside of the box.

Xiaochen also talked about important things from the team member side. She said given that being a growing company you need people who are willing to sacrifice alot of work for the good of the company. If they are not looking for that kind of job then you and who ever do not have a future together. 

She also said that you need to be aware that you need different skills so you need to find different people. She also mentioned attitude which should never be tolerated, makes sense.

And for everything to add up from your resources she said you need to think big. You should not set up a single website and think that in 6 months alot of people will have discovered you through google. You need to get a marketplace social network which connects people to achieve. But I guess that depends on your business....

More about growth... Bala inspired us to read the book Traction trumps everything.

Paul Graham one of todays respected writers about startup's says: "A startup is a company designed to grow fast...the only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth."

Now if we think a little about the word traction, then we should agree that it sounds like a new word ;). What it really stands for and what the book will to tell us is for those who read it is: "Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don't have enough of are customers". The book emphasises that we should be aware that traction and product's development are equal important in weight. Like my previous blog's of Bala's lectures have indicated, getting followers is extremely important. Having wasted all your time and energy on your product not on customers is just wrong. You need to take the demo out there as soon as possible and see if people will love your visdom.

And why is this thought about taking the demo out there immediately so important? Because marketing takes time. You have multiple channels to get to your customers and getting their viral, mouth by mouth can be so helpful for you to achieve your growth and nicest of all you may not need much money to use these channels.

The book will help you identify the top channels you need to emphasise for your success. A valid point to keep in mind is that poor distribution is the number one failure of products, not the product it self and a common failure of entrepreneurs. The book even indicates that 50% of you time should be on your product and the rest on distribution (or getting out there and getting known, getting future customers). And if you manage to get one channel to work very good for you it may make huge success for you. The book will therefor help you evaluate and do tests on channels that may be promising for you business such as which channels give you the good customers and which channels only give you only bad customers who sign up and create no revenue.  

The 19 traction channels are:

1. Viral Marketing

2. Public Relations

3. Unconventional PR

4. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) 

5. Social and Display ads

6. Offline Ads

7. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

8. Content Marketing

9. Email Marketing

10. Engineering as Marketing

11. Target Market Blogs

12. Business Development (BD)

13. Sales

14. Affiliate Programs

15. Existing Platforms

16. Trade Shows

17. Offline Events

18. Speaking Engagements

19. Community Building

In short.... Searching channels is easy, finding which one is gonna be the key to your success may be tricky. Not emphasing on the importance on getting known may be fatal for your product. This book gives insight into the framework of successful companies, how they tractioned ;).

The different views on competition and monopoly along with some words about our visit to Plain Vanilla

Now we've made some progress in changing our mindset more to Bala's vision of the world. Which I like.

My main things to discuss in this blog are competition and monopoly.

It seams that our world is still following the words spoken by Adam Smith too long time ago, which were "In general, if any branch of trade, or any division of labour, be advantageous to the public, freer and more general the competition, it will always be the more so." 

Bale said: "competition is only good for companies not becoming a bully or slowing down innovating(stopping innvoation). Other ways are bad thing."

Now if we revisit that thought of his, we can maybe say that it applies for some part of the economy. However our economic history is kind of short so we should not feel safe to apply that thought completely on our world.

And for startups? Competition is a really bad thing. If a startup has a big company which will bully it harshly, it's innovation will not thrive.

What about the development of your product? Will competition make it better? Or will it make you and your competitor more identical? If you get in the ring boxing with your competitor you are probably gonna wan't show the audience what they are used to watching, boxing. So competition really makes companies often stop innovating and even worse they start making the product the same way.

What about the profit? Competition will destroy profit.

But is a monopoly a good thing then? No of course not! At least if it is being misused then it's a terrible thing. But will a monopoly make sure I can develop my product according to my plans? Yes, maybe. But that's not maybe a good thing.

Now we did spend two hours at least talking about competion and monopoly. And Bala seems to have spent alot of thought on this issue. And my understanding was: Never feel that you are in a competition at least when you are a startup. Because if you are a startup you should be focused on how you can make your products 10 times better than someone out there who may feel like your competitor. And you should be focused on how your consumers would want to pay 10 times more for your product.

So don't mind the other company's trying to get you into the ring for a fight. Put your mind on your product unless you are gonna be in the copying business.


Now about our trip to Plain Vanilla. 
It was nice to see their place which was really cool, probably a great place to work for. They had apparently managed to attract some people across the world to come work for them.

They had a open meeting about Android development which was a bit technical, probably like understanding mandarin for most of the people there.

I found it interested how programming languages have been developing. I did some programming few years back mostly in Java and VBA. I was consistently thinking then how complicated this Java language was and what do you know? Of course some entrepreneurs had the same feeling at that time and have made new languages such as RX Java and Groovy which are way simpler and better. I might as well revisit that career.

From ideas to action with no hurdle

The fourth lecture is finished. Time passes fast but I that Bala probably among the few people in the world that I feel helped me adjusting my mind for better chance of achieving something amazing in my life.

This lecture did give me good ideas about how to express my mind in the future on my role in making them come true. These ideas are actually very simple but being that simple really affected me.

I think me and many others do get ideas regulary and decide not to implement them because they don't have access to a million dollar factory or the know how to build their own website if the product is in that form(for example if you want to build a social media).

This lecture gave me different view on that. You should actually make it your life motto to write all your ideas down somewhere and use at least one day a year to give them a little bit of chance of becoming alive.

Now you are probably wondering how that can be possible?

Well making the idea come almost a life can be done with the instructions here: http://keynotopia.com/guides-ppt/.

The other way is watching this video here: http://www.ideou.com/products/from-ideas-to-action

I highly recommend clicking on the second link and watching the video on ideaou about how an idea a a toy came a life.

And the crucial point to remember is that you can with a expression of your mind make billions. If you get that amazing idea and can make a demo if it even though it lacks all the engineering work needed for it to work properly. Just so you can just show your thinking can be among the first step of making your ideas come to life.

And one thing extra. I just realized that you can actually buy a out of the box social network similar to facebook or pinterest (you just choose which you prefer) and start your own social network. You may find some need for a platform for people to connect. For example if you want to connect couples with singles in order to do some interesting things together you could make that kind of website for less than $30 a month and your idea may be so amazing and helpful that you'll make hugh progress. Try taking a look at onsocialengine.com or googling similar products, there are plenty out there1

I hope this reading influences some people and helps them expressing their ideas in the future.

All my best regards to the world!
Atli