Misc

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.

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

Hello, everyone!

I hope you had the time to read the first book I recommended, The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. A month should be more than enough :)

That being said, here’s my second book recommendation. I should mention, though, that this read should be the first one for every entrepreneur who decides to build a company around a product or service. Especially if it’s tech related in any way. The book is called The Lean Startup, written by Eric Reis. But don’t take my word for it, there are 29 other entrepreneurs that recommend this title on The CEO Library.

The Lean Startup talks about building a business around a product or a service, how to take that product/service to market fast, how to measure all the modifications and improvements you add to the product. Obviously, there is much more to the book than what I mentioned, but you need to read it in order to really understand why it’s recommended by a shitload of CEOs.

Among the entrepreneurs recommending the book is one of Facebook’s co-founders and initial CTO, Dustin Moskowitz – also co-founder at Asana – as well as the Chairman and co-founder of Intuit, Scott Cook. This is what they had to say:

Dustin Moskowitz: “At Asana, we’ve been lucky to benefit from Eric’s advice firsthand; this book will enable him to help many more entrepreneurs answer the tough questions about their business.”

Scott Cook: “Business is too important to be left to luck. Eric reveals the rigorous process that trumps luck in the invention of new products and new businesses. We’ve made this a centerpiece of how teams work in my company . . . it works! This book is the guided tour of the key innovative practices used inside Google, Toyota, and Facebook, that work in any business.”

Finally, if you want to know what the team at The CEO Library has to say about it, we actually read the book as part of our BookClub and you can listen to us here: Lessons Learned from The Lean Startup & How we Put them into Practice (Book Club Talk)

Look, me and my team used what we learned from the book while building Mavenhut. I read the book 4-5 times in the last 6 years. It’s the one book you should read before starting anything. And read it again in one year. You’ll see that the more your company grows, the more things become clearer as you read the book.

So even if you already read the book, read it again. With every re-read, you will have a deeper understanding of the lean startup concept. This is why, this month I won’t recommend another book, just in case.

Bobby

P.S.: OK, OK, you’re twisting my hand. Here’s an alternative book, if you already read The Lean Startup or if you read fast. Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup by Rob Walling. It’s a good read about creating a side project, a product business on a smaller level, a, if I dare say, lifestyle business. It’s quite good and you should read this, as well, if you have the time.

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

Once you kinda know what you’re getting yourself into when you start your own business, you understand you can’t really do things on your own. You will need a team, even if it’s contractors and not employees. If you’re building a tech company and you’re not a developer yourself, you will also need technical people to help you.

The best book in terms of how tech people think and how to convince them to work with you is Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent by… Joel Spolsky, obviously.

Joel Spolsky is kind of a legend on the internet, after he was one the initial bloggers – even before blogs were, well, blogs. He had the Joel on Software website that was the Bible of developers wanting to make money online. He then started a project called Stack Overflow and another one called Trello. You might’ve heard of the last 2 ones since they are huge projects and quite known online. Trello was sold in 2017 to Atlassian for $425,000,000. Not bad at all, right? :)

Anyway, back to hiring your team. The first employees of your company are the most important ones because your survival depends on them. While later mistakes in hiring people can be managed, early mistakes have a tendency to kill the company, only because you don’t have the resources and time to hire someone else.

This is where Smart and Gets Things Done comes into the spotlight. It gives you a general idea of how an interview should go when you hire a tech person, it makes you understand why you need the best team you can get and what to do about it.

You will also find out what you need to do to get people to apply for the positions you have open at your company.

Of course, this is not gospel. You shouldn’t just follow what Joel Spolsky says, just because. Understanding the logic behind all these decisions will help you anyway, even if you choose your own path.

So here it is: Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent. Read it and have fun with it.

Bobby

P.S.: as usual, if you have read the book or you’re a fast reader, here’s another book until next month: Remote, Office Not Required, by the guys that founded Basecamp, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. It was the first book we’ve read at The CEO Library book club and it gives you an idea on the challenges and advantages of working with a distributed team (as we are at The CEO Library).

P.P.S.: One more thing: if you read any of the books, let me know through the Contact Form on the site or at getintouch@theceolibrary.com. Or reply to this email. I want to hear from you, to better understand what you want to read and if the books are interesting for you.

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

One thing that was constant in my life as an early stage entrepreneur was pitching. If you put together private and public pitching, I think I pitched more than 100-150 times in the first 12 months of MavenHut’s life (MavenHut being the startup I co-founded in 2012 and I raised money for). Pitching is, therefore, one of the best tools in the toolbelt of the startup founder and, more importantly, the early stage startup CEO.

A book I read around the time I started pitching was “Pitch Anything”. While the book is weird sometimes, getting into the manipulation grey area, it contains some really good gems when it comes to improving yourself.

The thing I remember the book for, mostly, was how to grab attention and keep it for the duration of your pitch. While I still have issues in doing either of them, I became a lot better :) If you want to see a really nervous startup CEO pitching his company at a business accelerator Demo Day, watch my Startup Bootcamp Demo Day presentation here and judge for yourself if I was any good.

I feel I should try more to convince you that you should read “Pitch Anything” but, seriously, if you want to raise money and you don’t believe you need to improve your pitching skills, nothing I will say will change it.

Thanks,
Bobby

P.S.: As usual, if you read the book, here’s another option: Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good is a good history book on the evolution of web businesses during the early 2000s (up until around 2007-2008). You can read about the startup scene in Silicon Valley and not only, you can read about projects up to Facebook, you can read about PayPal Mafia and their investments. It is a more optimistic book than what we see now in those companies that survived.

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

I’ve read Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine by Antonio Garcia Martinez at the end of 2016, about the time it was published. I don’t remember where I’ve heard of it, but it seemed like a good summary of what life is as the founder of a VC backed business.

I wasn’t sorry I read the book. Aside from what I already said, the author tells the story of his Y Combinator time (when he launched his business), the story of his failure, the talks of selling and his relationship with his founders during that time – he wanted something else so the deal was almost killed.

I also found interesting his story of the time when he joined Facebook. He was there in 2014, when Facebook was revamping their ads platform and he talks about the chaos that was there at that time. It struck really close to home since we had some really big issues with Facebook ads during the same time and all the people that we talked to at Facebook gave us different suggestions that never worked. And that’s when I understood why: they didn’t really know what was happening.

Finally, I think this is the kind of book you write when you never want to start a VC backed business again. He probably pissed a lot of people with how openly he talked about the issues, including investor Chris Sacca, who was an investor in his business.

The book is quite easy to read, light, so it shouldn’t take long. But it doesn’t mean it’s not good for you, to understand what you might be getting into.

The “bonus” book, the one you should read if you have more time or you already read Chaos Monkeys, is Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow. The book shows some methods and tells the stories of people that managed to use those methods to accelerate their success. I think it’s a good thing to understand as an entrepreneur short on time and money. And almost any other resource, for that matter.

Bobby

P.S.: One more thing: if you read any of the books, let me know through the contact page on the site or at getintouch@theceolibrary.com. Or reply to this email. I want to hear from you, to better understand what you want to read and if the books are interesting for you.

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

So you kinda know what to expect from your entrepreneurial adventure. You also have a product, a team and you know how to pitch. You maybe got a small angel investment, as well.

Still, how do you get users? How do you tell people where to find you and why to use your product?

Well, this is what Ca$hvertising is for. Or its complete name, CA$HVERTISING: How to Use More than 100 Secrets of Ad-Agency Psychology to Make Big Money Selling Anything to Anyone by Drew Eric Whitman. Please, ignore the clickbaity title, which is actually not bad, once you think about it, and read the book anyway.

Reasons to read the book:

• It gives you guiding principles around creating and improving your ads
• It pushes you to see ads as a tool to be used, not as a creativity contest
• Gives you suggestions on influencing the potential users.

Look, I’m not telling you to lie about your product or anything like that. But you can say one thing in different ways, one way being the one that gets you the users.

Story time: when we started MavenHut, the best way to get users to your app, fast and effective, was to use Facebook Ads. Of course, that meant spending money, money we didn’t have. Well, we had about $5/day, but it certainly wasn’t enough to make an impact on our business. Or so I thought. I mean, it cost me around $1-$2/user, it really wasn’t enough.

Then someone recommended “Ca$hvertising” to me. And once I understood what I can do, I got to the point where I would bring 3 users in the app for every 2 cents I spent (yes, 2 users/$0.03). Yes, they were users from “cheaper” countries when it came to ads, like Argentina, Mexico or Colombia, but they were real users, that could give us feedback on our apps. This is how we got the first 15,000 users in Solitaire Arena. Then Facebook’s “virality” brought more. Eventually, we got users from the more “expensive” countries, as well, by reusing the ads that worked in the ones we targeted initially. By the time we sold Solitaire Arena we had more than 30 million installs across platforms. And it all began with Ca$hvertising and $5/day.

Of course, not everybody wants to buy ads. But the same principles that make good ads also make good copywriting and good content. So read the book anyway :)

If you want to see some of the processes we used to bring the first users (when we only bought ads for US users), here’s an article I wrote on my blog several years ago: MavenHut’s First Step, A Click and A Form: A Case Study on Starting Your Startup with Less than $200

Bobby

P.S.: Ah, you’re right, I almost forgot the book recommendation in case you already got through Ca$hvertising. Or if you read fast. How about Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t by Jim Collins. While it’s a bit too early to apply most of the principles in the book, I think it’s a good read to give you a blueprint for how you should run your company and how the company should be built.

P.P.S: One more thing: if you read any of the books, let me know through the contact page on the site or at getintouch@theceolibrary.com. Or reply to this email. I want to hear from you, to better understand what you want to read and if the books are interesting for you.

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

10 years ago, I was really into SEO. I’ve made the first real money online using SEO in 2006-2007. And one of the people that rose through the ranks during that time was a guy named Rand, from a company called SEOmoz.

10 years later, the company he started then is now generating $45 million in yearly revenues, but he is no longer involved operationally. He was the CEO, then he left the position for someone else, then, in 2017, he left the company for good.

While he started a new company in 2018, he spent some time after he left Moz to write a book. The book, called Lost and Founder, is the story of Moz. It’s a raw story of what he felt during the life of the company, what he felt when he was changed as CEO, what he felt when he left the company he created.

One of the things I found really interesting was the fact that, even if the company he created is worth around $100 million, he’s not a millionaire. And I’m not talking about paper money (which he has, obviously), but about cash or assets that could become cash in a small amount of time. He also tells the story of a moment when he didn’t sell the company for about $25 million, an amount of money that would’ve made him a millionaire, with about $10-15 million in the bank.

I think the story I just told you shows how different the startup path really is from what we think it is. How, sometimes, not building the biggest company we can and not taking investor money in large amounts is, actually, a better choice for the entrepreneur.

Of course, the book also talks about how to hire people in your company, how to create revenues and growth and how to spend the money you make and the money you raise.

I see this book as a kind of continuation for the first book I ever wrote about in this reading plan: The Hard Thing about Hard Things. Ben Horowitz wrote about the “romantic” part of internet businesses, the 2001 dotcom boom and crash and the recovery from that. He also wrote about a company going the IPO route. Lost and Founder is a similar one for the “startup generation”. With a crisis of its own (2008) and with less success, in financial terms. But I think this is the most common startup entrepreneur experience, not the Facebook one.

The book isn’t difficult to read, so you have no excuse not to read it. Here’s the book’s link on The CEO Library: Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

Bobby

P.S.: If you already read Lost and Founder, I want to recommend another book and the one that was initially part of this reading plan: Business Stripped Bare by Richard Branson. I think most of you know about the “Virginity” series, but Business Stripped Bare is the better book, in my opinion. It explains step by step the decisions Richard Branson took during the launch and the life of a low-cost airline in Australia.

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

When you read about starting your own company nobody tells you anything about the board. OK, maybe someone told you, but nobody told me. So imagine my surprise when, while raising money, I needed to understand who should be on our board. Or, even more important, what the hell is the board’s purpose. And is it really, really necessary?

One of the things you really need to understand as a founder as, especially, as a CEO of a company is that the board is there to hold you accountable. By “you” I mean the CEO and the team.

Of course, that’s not the only purpose of the board. A good board provides advice, insight, ideas, and connections. It means that you need to pay attention to who is part of the board, how many people are on the board and similar things.

The book I’m recommending today, “Startup Boards” by Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani, is the best book I read on the subject. This is a primer in everything a board should be, how it should help you, as a company (and its CEO) and how it should function.

Of course, when you think of boards, you usually think of board meetings. That’s where the drama happens, where CEOs are fired (Uber, anyone?), where changes in strategy happen, where new CEOs are hired. Well, most of the board meetings are nothing like that. The book also explains what a board meeting should be like and how it should happen so that it’s not something that horrifies you every 3 months, but actually something that helps push your company forward.

You might have also heard of “advisory boards”. While not exactly necessary for a company to function, it can be a good added value if you know how to do it. Brad Feld mentions these as well and it helps.

The book is not as difficult to read as it might sound. Maybe because I was right in the middle of raising money for MavenHut, it made a lot of sense for me, so I went through it in 1-2 days. If you find that you are not interested, maybe it’s not the time for you and your company. Just know that “Startup Boards” exists so that you can come back to it when it happens.

Thanks for reading the email,
Bobby

P.S.: as usual, here’s another option, in case you already read this book or it’s something that’s not interesting for you: Shoe Dog, a Memoir by the Creator of Nike, by Phil Knight. The reason I recommend this is so that you understand how relevant and important cash flow is for a company. Nike had cashflow issues long in the company’s life. Even when they were one of the biggest sport shoes companies in the world, they were still close to closing up because of an unpaid invoice.

I’ve added a Plex server on a Raspberry Pi 4.

Here are the links to all the resources I used (in case I need them later and for anybody else that is interested):

How to Install Plex on Raspberry Pi 4
Plex not seeing the files on the external SSD
How to Install Subzero plugin (for subtitles). Where is the plugin folder located.

In case you want to know what’s new in iOS 15. I didn’t follow too much this year’s release, so this short article is quite good: it gets me up to date without the need to read a lot :)

This year’s update is also a bit different because you don’t have to update to iOS 15. If you’re fine with iOS 14, Apple won’t force you to make the jump to iOS 15. You’ll still receive security patches. Some people will simply dismiss iOS 15 altogether.

It seems like a small change, but it actually says a lot about the current state of iOS. Apple considers iOS as a mature platform. Just like you don’t have to update your Mac to the latest version of macOS if you don’t want to, you can now update at your own pace.

From here: iOS 15 adds all the little features that were missing | TechCrunch.

Here’s a look at the changes on iPadOS as well.