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Productivity Tip: Sleep

June 12, 2024 By Bobby Voicu

I’ve been reminded, again, in the last few days, of the best productivity tip ever:

Sleep.

Sleep early enough and sleep at least 8 hours every night.

If you’re in your early 20s, ignore me, this will probably not apply to you.

But if you’re in your 30s or later, sleep the entire night and go to sleep early đŸ€©

Otherwise, at least in my case, I need so much more effort to be as productive as I want to. If I even get there.

And the last two weeks were brutal for me. I traveled (by plane or by car) every day for 10 days. Then I got a little sick and couldn’t sleep because of it. My Oura ring was telling me I might need to sleep. Which I did and I started to feel better. But I still feel tired.

So, back to sleep for me. At some point during these days…😅

Later edit: what do you know, I wrote about this once before. And again 5 years later. Just forgot to listen to my own advice.

Don’t Be Ignored

May 22, 2024 By Bobby Voicu

Create something. A game, a business, something.

Put it out there.

Then hope to be judged. And criticized. And rejected.

Otherwise, be safe and comfortable. Be ignored.

You decide.

Steh Godin said it first.

Luck in Business

May 20, 2024 By Bobby Voicu

I was talking to a friend today and he said he disagrees on luck being necessary to be successful in business.

I disagree with his disagreement :D

Joking aside, I think everybody successful in business was lucky. Context, the right people, there’s a lot of things that you were lucky to get.

Of course, you can be the luckiest person ever, if you don’t take advantage of the opportunities, luck doesn’t matter. But to say it’s not there…

So, if luck matters, why even try starting a business? Because you can put yourself in the best position for the moment luck will hit. You can build a great team, you can optimize costs…

Sometimes, the luck comes too late, of course, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t prepare for that moment.

What If They’re NOT Right?

May 14, 2024 By Bobby Voicu

1492: a monk wrote that the printing press will never last.

1902: NYT said cars will never be cheap enough to be popular.

1943: IBM’s president thinks there might be a market for 5 computers globally

2000: Daily Mail says the internet is just a fad

2007: Engadget tells us why the iPhone will fail

2024: [Almost] Everyone tells you Vision Pro/Meta Quest/spatial computing is not a thing.

And they may be right.

But what if they’re not? đŸ€©

Zoom Towns is a great name

June 8, 2021 By Bobby Voicu

I don’t like living in big cities anymore. I like visiting and spending some time there, but I love living in a 100k+ population city. And while I moved here before the pandemic, I was so happy I made the move when it started.

And I’m not the only one. There’s now a name for the cities/towns that allow people to work remotely while balancing a good life close to nature: Zoom towns.

Rumore bets there’s a good chance many Zoom towners will remain in their new homes, too, particularly as towns evolve alongside their latest residents.

“Once they reach this tipping point where they’re a pretty cool town with a nice coffee shop and cool bars and good restaurants – when they get over the hump and become a place – people want to stay,” she says. “So, what’s interesting about this flood of amenity migration is that it probably tipped a lot of these communities over that hump.”

Sherlin, the remote worker who traded Los Angeles for Northwest Arkansas, says she feels like she landed in the right place at the right time. “So far, I absolutely love it,” she says. “I don’t see myself leaving, but I’m going to complete the year and figure it out from there.” 

No one knows whether companies will keep remote-work policies forever, so it’s hard to predict the future of these nature-adjacent Zoom towns or the workers who’ve flocked to them. At the moment, however, for outdoors-loving workers who are able to pick up and leave, many Zoom towns have rolled out their welcome mats. Step on in.

From here: The ‘Zoom towns’ luring remote workers to rural enclaves – BBC Worklife.

StackOverflow acquired for $1.8 Billion

June 3, 2021 By Bobby Voicu

Seeing the flurry of IPOs and acquisitions in the tech space I didn’t somehow expected StackOverflow to be sold to Naspers/Prosus. I actually think it’s the best outcome, since the buyers will probably want to increase the value of the asset and Naspers has a history of doing this successfully and not selling assets after fluffing them up a little bit.

Today we’re pleased to announce that Stack Overflow is joining Prosus. Prosus is an investment and holding company, which means that the most important part of this announcement is that Stack Overflow will continue to operate independently, with the exact same team in place that has been operating it, according to the exact same plan and the exact same business practices. Don’t expect to see major changes or awkward “synergies”. The business of Stack Overflow will continue to focus on Reach and Relevance, and Stack Overflow for Teams. The entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now.

This is, in some ways, the best possible outcome. Stack Overflow stays independent. The company has plenty of cash on hand to expand and deliver more features and fix the old broken ones. Right now, the biggest gating factor to how fast we can do this is just how fast we can hire excellent people.

From Joel on Software

Also, the press release from Prosus:

With expertise in scaling communities in high-growth markets globally, Prosus can help accelerate Stack Overflow’s growth ambitions, with a particular focus on reaching a wider international community, while also further scaling the company’s Teams product to position Stack Overflow at the center of product and technology development within major enterprises globally.

Prosus has built a significant presence on the enterprise side with a focus on the future of workplace learning. Prosus will reach 90% of the Fortune 100 across its corporate learning companies including Stack Overflow, Skillsoft, Udemy and Codecademy.

A WEIRD interview: Marc Andreessen

June 2, 2021 By Bobby Voicu

I genuinely don’t know if this interview with Marc Andreessen is a parody or the real thing (apparently it is the real thing), but you should read it nevertheless.

Henrich describes in his book how some people (us) are culturally WEIRD — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic — but most people in the world aren’t. Yet.

[…]

I find this thesis enormously compelling and largely optimistic. I predict that we — the West — are going to WEIRDify the entire world, within the next 50 years, the next two generations. We will do this not by converting non-WEIRD people to WEIRD, but by getting their kids. Their kids, and their kids’ kids, are going to grow up on the Internet at least as much as they grow up in the real world, and the pull of WEIRD culture will overwhelm all existing non-WEIRD cultures. I realize this is a very strong claim, but this process is already underway; at this point I think it’s inevitable. The cost of this will be a collapse of global cultural diversity exactly as you and Rozin predict.

From here: The Dubrovnik Interviews: Marc Andreessen – Interviewed by a Retard – Fisted by Foucault.

via Marginal Revolution

A great sales deck and 5 sales fundamentals

May 24, 2021 By Bobby Voicu

When friends ask me about raising money, this is one of the first articles I ask them to read. It’s a sales deck, but a lot of that transfers into raising money, so it’s worth going through it and understand the fundamentals.

A few months ago, my friend Tim took a new sales job at a Series C tech company that had raised over $60 million from A-list investors. He’s one of the best salespeople I know, but soon after starting, he emailed me to say he was struggling.

“I’ve landed a few small accounts,” Tim said. “But my pitch falls flat at big enterprises.”

As I’ve written before, I love helping teams craft the high-level strategic story that powers sales, marketing, fundraising — everything. So Tim and I met for lunch at the Amber India restaurant off San Francisco’s Market Street to review his deck.

After loading up on the all-you-can-eat buffet, I asked Tim, “At what point do prospects tune out?”

“Usually a few slides in,” he said.

Intent on maximizing dining ROI, Tim went back to the buffet for seconds. When he returned, I pulled out my laptop and launched into a Powerpoint presentation.

“What’s this?” Tim asked.

“This,” I said, “is the greatest sales deck I have ever seen.”

From here: The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen | by Andy Raskin.

The wave of European VCs

May 17, 2021 By Bobby Voicu

Dragos Novac, at Sunday CET, wrote an interesting piece on the new wave of European VCs.

I’m raising money right now for a new project and I can see the difference in people I’m talking to comparing to 2012-2013, when I raised money for MavenHut. The people I talk to now in Europe are a lot more similar to the people I was used to meet in the US. Not bad at all!

Who are those new people trying out new things? I am seeing three types:

i) former entrepreneurs – more and more founders decided to start investing, either on the side or as their main job.

ii) young people in their late 20s-early 30s, who decided to take their destiny in their hands and run their own show rather than working for traditional investment shops run by old school people.

iii) veterans who also decided to raise their own fund and become startup VCs rather than retiring as employees for traditional shops.

All those guys have energy, are knowledgeable and risk takers. They understand the value creation process and are trying their best to be a positive part of it. Some of them are idealistic, which is a good ingredient in a business where the KPI is a number which is usually correlated with the ego size.

And those guys, combined with a lot of outside competition, are the future of this VC-backed ecosystem, which is still an insignificant bubble in the grand economic scheme of things from Europe.

Read the entire newsletter/post from Dragos here and subscribe to Sunday CET. It’s the best newsletter I’ve found on VC and startup investment in Europe.

Carrd: The Making Of

May 10, 2021 By Bobby Voicu

In the last email from IndieHackers I found the story of Carrd, the one-page site builder. The company just hit $1M ARR and the founder talked about his early experience building the product here.

Apparently doing the same two things over and over seriously impacted my ability to come up with “outside the box” ideas, and what few I did come up with were either too boring or just too damn cliché (yes I considered doing a to-do list app 😅).

So, perhaps the solution was to not think too far outside the box, and instead stick to the same general category as all my previous work — that is, web design, and specifically the “do-it-yourself” variety found in site templates.

And that’s when it hit me: how about a site builder?

Not only would this be a fun challenge (and one that would encompass both the frontend and backend), it also felt like the next logical step after years of making increasingly sophisticated site templates that were kind of edging towards proto-site builder territory anyway.

It’s an interesting experience, especially since he mentions in an AMA on the site (IH) that he raised VC money when he was already profitable and it wasn’t for the money only, but mainly for the network and advice.

Guess you could say I was in denial about Carrd’s growth and what it was becoming. I still thought of it as a side project even as recently as a couple of years ago, but a combination of events in 2020 (COVID-19 and protests in the US being the most significant) crazy accelerated growth and made it very, very clear that was no longer the case and I needed to treat Carrd — and, more importantly, the users who relied on it every day — with the importance it deserved.

Which was all well and good, but WTF do I do next? Do I spin up “Carrd Inc”? Do I begin hiring? If so, who do I hire? What sort of business/legal shit do I need to know about given how much user content is being generated literally every second? Questions I was reasonably confident I could figure out in time, but as growth continued to accelerate — we went from adding hundreds of sites a day to literally thousands within the course of just a few months — I realized there was a good chance by the time I did figure it all out, it’d be too little too late.

And that’s where the idea of the raise came in. As something of a solo bootstrapper I’ve always been pretty insistent on doing everything myself so the thought of getting others involved (let alone taking their money) wasn’t exactly appealing especially since we were profitable and didn’t actually need the money. However, I knew from talking to others there was a lot more to VC than just being cut a check, and that the network, expertise, and connections I’d gain would go a long way to address the issues I was facing at that moment as well as better equip us for taking Carrd into the future.

… which I guess is what it comes down to: doing what’s best for the product — even if it does bruise your ego a bit :)

The AMA is here and it’s worth reading all of it.

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