Misc

I was traveling to Greece a few years ago and this happened on the flight:

Flight Attendant: what do you want to drink?

Me: Fanta, please.

FA: I don’t have, but I can make it for you!

Me: 🤔

FA: I have Sprite, I have orange juice. Then I combine them: FANTA!

Me: 😅🤦‍♂️

FA: I’m serious, I made one for someone last flight…

Greek people, especially in hospitality, never say no. Even when they should say it. While this can be frustrating if you’re not used to it, it also means they go out of their way (most of the times) to make whatever they agreed upon happen.

And, yes, sometimes they flake on you. But you get used to it, as well. It’s the cost of doing business.

I think I use Apple’s Notes app more than any other app on my devices. And I didn’t know most of these things:

Write This Down: 17 Things You Didn’t Realize Apple’s Notes App Could Do

Not me, don’t worry about it!

But there is someone blogging from the South Pole base where they stayed over the long winter.

Here’s the first post in a series about actually leaving the South Pole.

During the winter, many departments, IT included, are subject to a more casual daily task schedule. Our goal over the winter is to stay on top of day-to-day upkeep, to execute on long-running projects, to respond to incidents, and to tackle any larger maintenance items that can’t be done when the station is “full” over the summer.

There’s more to read there, so stop by and say hi!

Kuno Lechner; cropped by H Debussy-Jones (talk) 08:31, 14 November 2009 (UTC), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I recently went to a Candlelight concert. If you don’t know what it is: a string quartet playing tributes of popular music.

I’ve been to a Coldplay/Imagine Dragons mash-up concert and it was one of, if not the best, concert I’ve ever been to.

Here’s an idea of what you can see:

I recently found out about this French sweet pastry and I want to try it:

Kouign-Amann

I just don’t know if I can find it anywhere close to me in Portugal.

I’ve been a little bit more tired than usual these days, so I wanted to watch something on Netflix. I remembered hearing a lot of good things about Blue Eye Samurai, a made-for-Netflix anime.

It is really good. The art and animation are really good, the voice acting is amazing. Weird to hear English in an anime, especially since there’s no Japanese audio (at least I didn’t see it), but really good.

Here’s the Wikipedia entry.

I’ve discovered Mixed Reality with the new Meta Quest 3 I bought in December last year and I’ve been excited about it since.

I’m even more excited about the soon to be launched Apple Vision Pro.

But if you’re interested, here’s a list of all devices we might get this year.

I always loved reading gaming magazines. I started after the communism fell in Romania, in 1990, and never truly stopped.

Here’s a list of every English-language video game magazine still in print: GameHistory.org

Several years ago I made this startup reading plan for The CEO Library’s newsletter.

The setup was that every month you need to read a book (or two, if you have the time) and by the end of the year you would have a general idea of what starting a startup means.

Here are the books, along with the links to the reviews I wrote for all of them. I recommend one main book and a secondary one, in case you read it already or you’re a faster reader.

1. The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz (secondary: Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham)
2. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries (secondary: Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup by Rob Walling)
3. Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent (sec: Remote, Office Not Required, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson)
4. Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff (sec: Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good, by Sarah Lacy)
5. Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine by Antonio Garcia Martinez (sec: Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow)
6. CA$HVERTISING: How to Use More than 100 Secrets of Ad-Agency Psychology to Make Big Money Selling Anything to Anyone by Drew Eric Whitman (sec: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t, by Jim Collins)
7. Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World, by Rand Fishkin (sec: Business Stripped Bare, by Richard Branson)
8. Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors by Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani (sec: Shoe Dog, a Memoir by the Creator of Nike, by Phil Knight)

This is an email I posted on the newsletter for The CEO Library, as part of a Startup Founder Reading plan. Here’s the entire 16 books list

Hi!

My name is Bobby Voicu, I’m the CEO and co-founder of The CEO Library. Before that, I was the CEO and co-founder of a gaming company called MavenHut, I did some investing, raised about $3,000,000 for startups I was involved with. And I read a lot.

I made a reading plan for any early entrepreneur and I’m gonna send you an email every month with something else to read.

The Hard Thing about Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz, is, without a doubt, the book that reflected the most the feelings I had and I still have while starting and running a business (or startup, if you prefer this term).

I think this should be the first book in the reading plan for an early entrepreneur because it’s the book that will let you know how hard it is.

Let’s do this small exercise. Think about how hard on you do you think starting a business is? Take a small break from reading the email and think about it right now. 

Done thinking? Well, now multiply what you thought by 10 and it’s probably close to the happier times of your startup up adventure.

Let me tell you some of my own experience. When we raised the first €500,000 round of investment for MavenHut, my girlfriend asked me: “why aren’t you happy? You should be happy!”. But I couldn’t be happy. Because for me it was already over. It has been “signed” in my mind for the last several weeks, because I’ve put everything to work and, if anything happened, it wasn’t up to me anymore. I was already thinking of what to do next, who to hire, when to hire them and so on. A little bit of context you can read here: The Story of MavenHut’s first year.

So, what did I do after the signing? I sent an email to my co-founders: “Documents signed by all parties.” Then I went to sleep. It was 1 am in the morning and I just stopped working for the day. No parties, no champagne, nothing like that.

Going back to the book. There’s a bit, at some point, about The Struggle entrepreneurs and business owners go through and it really resonated with all the entrepreneurs I’ve talked to. Here’s a small excerpt:

“The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place.
The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer.
The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right.
The Struggle is when food loses its taste.
The Struggle is when you don’t believe you should be CEO of your company. The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head and you know that you cannot be replaced. The Struggle is when everybody thinks you are an idiot, but nobody will fire you. The Struggle is where self-doubt becomes self-hatred.
The Struggle is when you are having a conversation with someone and you can’t hear a word that they are saying because all you can hear is The Struggle.
The Struggle is when you want the pain to stop. The Struggle is unhappiness.
The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse.
The Struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone. The Struggle has no mercy.
The Struggle is the land of broken promises and crushed dreams. The Struggle is a cold sweat. The Struggle is where your guts boil so much that you feel like you are going to spit blood.”

I’ve gone through all of these feelings. And it’s still painful when I think about it. But the truth is I wouldn’t do anything else. 

I urge you to go and read the book. You can also see who Ben Horowitz, the author of the book is and what other entrepreneurs have to say about the book here.

Next month, I’ll recommend yet another book for you to read. Just finish this one until then 😃

P.S.: if you already read this book and want something to read anyway, read Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham. It’s a collection of essays from the founder of Y Combinator, the most successful accelerator in the world (Dropbox, Airbnb are amongst the companies that went through it). You can also read Paul Graham’s essays on his website. This book is not part of the 12 months reading plan, just some off-plan reading.