Curious about stuff
640 startups invested in. Google, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, AirBNB and Dropbox among the investments.
This is Ron Conway, one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley.
The interview below is part of the Y Combinator 2012 Startup School. You can see all the interviews on their YouTube channel, including some of the 2013 ones.
A good friend sent me this video of Malcolm Gladwell talking at Google and presenting his new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.
The talk starts with a different way of understanding the biblical fight between David and Goliath:
– the sling that David had was capable of great accuracy and of a similar impact as a .45 caliber bullet
– Goliath was probably almost blind and slow moving.
This means that, basically, the guy with the best technology and speed won. As it should :)
Watch the one hour presentation below. Another interesting thing is that Malcolm Gladwell was the first person to participate in the now famous Google talks :)
P.S.: a similar idea to what this guy is saying I’ve seen described in Brad Gilbert’s “Winning Ugly” book about tennis. It is a good read even if you are not a tennis enthusiast.
And, not related to this, I forgot to hit Publish on this post yesterday, so I am publishing it today (even if with an earlier date, to fit into Saturday Video).
Last Thursday, the guys at TechHub had an interesting guest from MIT (Bill Aulet) to talk about entrepreneurship. Along with two Romanian entrepreneurs (Marius Ursache and Andrei Marinescu), they talked about the issues you could have if you do not start in a “beach head” market, how to bootstrap, where would you get cofounders (great idea: going to a Hackaton – Google is organizing one soon in Bucharest).
Here are some ideas from the talk:
In Bill’s perspective:
- entrepreneurship needs to be regarded as a profession
- the supply of quality entrepreneurship education today is very limited
- entrepreneurial education is contextual, so it’s difficult to teach
- entrepreneurship is experiential, it’s mentor-intensive
- the objective of education is to teach people how to fish, not how to catch a fish
- it’s easy to fail at doing education in entrepreneurship (Donald Trump has an entrepreneurship institute – storytelling and shark-tanking – now he’s being sued for that)
- you have to have the right spirit, to think differently, to be motivated
- you need to foster an environment of creative irreverence, like they do at MIT (hacking)
- hacking is about taking on Goliath, about swimming against the current
- we need not to make entrepreneurship sound easy
- we need the execution skills of a navy seal and incredible self discipline
- you can’t just have practitioners in an entrepreneurship education program; you also need researchers and hard date people
- if we want to make this a profession, we need the data to back it up.
Unfortunately I cannot embed it on my blog, so you can go here and look over it. It’s worth listening for 50 minutes (though they had some issues with the mic at some point and it was a little annoying, but the info is so interesting, it’s worth getting over it).
Of course, there is a short review of the talk here, on the TechHub blog (this is where the quote is coming from)
Since this is the last weekend to enter Startup Spotlight competition at How To Web, here are some great pitches I’ve found around the web:
Keen.io, a great short pitch (approx. 3 minutes)
ZocDoc, a nice way to start with a personal story.
And, finally, MavenHut’s Demo Day pitch, with yours truly:
Finally, here are some links to other pitches:
Quora: What are best start-up pitch/product intro videos available on vimeo or otherwise?
Quora: What are some great videos of startup pitches under 3 minutes?
Business Insider: The Best Startup Video Pitches of All Time
I am changing the Sunday Video to Saturday Video. The reasoning behind it is that it gives me more of the weekend to play more games, so I can write about them on Sunday.
One of the videos in this post is about beauty, about the impact beauty has on young girls, all told by a women that was a model at some point in her life. I found the story entertaining and the ideas behind it genuine.
Another TEDx story I’ve seen is the one of a pickpocket. It’s fun to watch and be careful, this can happen to you (wait for the final minutes to be blown away). I’ve gone back to watch specific sections of the video several times (maybe more than I’ve done this with any other video).
Finally, the last video I’ve seen is about the food we eat. Jamie Olivier has a passionate presentation about food (what else) and obesity. While I am not really interested in the subject, he is entertaining to watch and, by the end of the presentation, you feel you should be interested. It actually had an impact on me, since I decided that I need to lose the weight I gained after 6 months of traveling, eating bad food and eating at weird hours.
I hope you enjoy the newly Saturday Video (ex-Sunday Video) :D