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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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

Basecamp changed some rules about workplace politics discussions, forbidding specific subjects in their main channel in the company. Here’s a quote from Jason Fried’s blog post: 1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account. Today’s social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related […]
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Sunday. London. Rain. Bar on the street level. Sitting at a table next to the window, with hot tea in front of me. Looking outside to people walking. Next to me, Cambridge Theater, with a big billboard presenting Chicago – The Musical. Music in the bar: John Lennon – Imagine. I feel like I am […]

The best way to build wealth from scratch right now is building a company. So what are you waiting for? In 1982 the most common source of wealth was inheritance. Of the 100 richest people, 60 inherited from an ancestor. There were 10 du Pont heirs alone. By 2020 the number of heirs had been […]

This is a good Twitter thread to remind you what the first stage of your startup is about. The full thread is here, on Twitter, from @Suhail. I’ve also saved it completely below, so I can go back to it when I forget. 1/ The first 18 months of a startup: After starting my 2nd […]

Freelancers (and creators, as a subset) will become the main part of the global workforce by 2030. Or even earlier.

The Marketplace 100 report from a16z is what you need to read as a founder or investor.

I was 14 or 15 when, finally, a martial arts club opened in the city I lived in. All of a sudden, we could go and become Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan or Jean Claude Van Damme. Of course, it didn’t work like this, but something stayed with me since then: the belt system. A […]

I’ve found yesterday a great Twitter feed on the reasons a VC might pass on investing in your company. I publish the entire thread below, but go to Twitter to see the comments, as well. Why VC investors pass on startups: a thread. Alternative title: don’t take it personally. You’re solving a problem that doesn’t […]

I’ve seen this on TechCrunch today: Bryter raises $16M for a no-code platform for non-technical people to build enterprise automation apps 2 ideas: 1. I might’ve started too late in life to learn Python to add automations to things in my work life. Well, what the heck, it’s not like I’ll stop, but it’s good […]

Do you really need a product to show when you start a new business? The truth is you can actually start a business without a product. You need to know if there is a market for your idea, though. How do you do this? Asking friends and family is a dumb idea, in my opinion, […]

Well, if I tell you the first name of the entrepreneur, it might not ring a bell: Ferruccio. If I tell you it’s a car company, you might think: “Hmmm, italian name… Ferrari! Ah, no, that’s Enzo! Alfa Romeo! Maserati!”. Or you might say the right name: Lamborghini. Which entrepreneur made tractors before entering the […]

“I just started a gaming company and we make Solitaire games!” “Well, that’s stupid!” That was me in 2012, telling a friend about the new project I just started. He still is my friend (I know!) and he is a smart guy. And he genuinely thought it was a stupid idea. And I still remind […]

I have a good friend that wants to start up a blog. And he has so many interesting things to say, I would read his blog. Well, this brilliant guy started his blog about a year ago. In his head. He knows what kind of articles he’ll write, how long they will be, how great […]

Asking questions is probably one of the most underrated skills in the world. I mean, everybody can ask questions, right? A toddler asks questions. And, oh, my God, they do ask a lot. As you know, though, it’s not that simple. I grew up in communist Romania. School was a serious matter and you didn’t […]

Last week I sent an email to the email list (you should subscribe, by the way). I was talking about Basic advice and how important it is that, from time to time, someone reminds you how important it is to focus on the basics. My definition of basic advice is this: advice that’s really easy […]
Buy website
TL;DR: I want to buy some websites. See below for more info. Years ago, before I started MavenHut, I was building content websites. Mostly blogs about different things. One about cars, another one about motorcycles. I sold all of them to support MavenHut in the early stages. At the beginning of this year, though, I […]
What's your company hour on Sillicon valley clock
A company’s narrative moves like a clock: it starts at midnight, ticking off the hours. The tone and sentiment about how a business is doing move from positive (sunrise, midday) to negative (dusk, darkness). And often the story returns to midnight, rebirth and a new day. Aaron Zamost, What’s your hour on ‘Silicon Valley time’? […]

I was thinking of ways to generate revenues for content sites the other day. My focus is on interview based sites (for obvious reasons) and I remembered Indie Hackers doing a really good job about it. I thought I read a sort of income report on their site, but I couldn’t find them anymore, since […]

I was reading recently some article or book about getting off your ass and doing shit. And I remember thinking this: Reward each action you take. Or, better said, reward behaviour. It basically means that whenever you choose a target or a goal, you define the actions you need to take to get you there […]

Scott Adams once wrote: “One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard goes something like this: If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. It sounds trivial and obvious, but if you unpack the idea it has extraordinary power.” Good quote. From The Psychology of Money.

One question that I get often from newly startup founders is “How do I set my KPIs? How do I know how much money should I make? How do I know how many visitsI should have?” The answer, this early, is only one: be there every day. The KPIs should be initially related to your […]
subscription-boxes-business-model
As you know, I send a weekly newsletter with business articles to read, things I find interesting and similar stuff. One of the best-received emails is this one about subscription boxes. I’m putting it here exactly as it was sent because I think it can be interesting for a lot more people than the hundreds […]
Effective vs Efficient
A lot of people pride themselves on being efficient. And this is not bad. Unless you’re efficient about the wrong things. Which means you’re not being effective. Take this: you have a business selling a hat. And you devise the most efficient marketing plan for selling the hat. But truth is, the hat is bad. […]
Fast No, if it's not Yes
The best answer you can get to any business request/proposal is, obviously, “yes!”. But what’s the second best? For a long time, I thought that I wanted to hear at least a “maybe”. Or “let’s talk later”. Or “if you do this thing, I might be interested”. Oh, boy, how wrong I was. If it’s […]

I was reading a Reddit thread the other day. A guy was doing an AMA about his startup and had this to say about it: As a result of this, we are now a pretty rare breed of business as we started with no finance, no VC Funding etc etc, we did it the hard […]

“Because of the amount of money I’d spent, I felt incredibly invested in making sure the car was always perfect. It made me realize that most rich assholes are just too protective of their stuff.” I’ve found this quote on the okdork blog, in this article. While Noah Kagan talks about buying a $70,000 Jaguar […]

One time. It was that moment when I woke up and said: I can’t take it anymore. It was just 6 months into MavenHut, at the end of August 2012, but I felt that all I was doing was for nothing, I wasn’t moving forward at all. Cristi and Elvis, my co-founders, were creating a […]

Last week I’ve talked to the entrepreneurs from the 2017 cohort of RebelBio, in Cork, Ireland. I’m hopeful I’ll be helping them overcome at least some of the ongoing issues you face as a startup founder. So I had a presentation that touched some of these points: 1. You’re not alone You’ll often feel that […]

For the next 3-4 months I’ll mostly be in Cork, Ireland, where I’m mentoring the teams for RebelBio, a BioTech accelerator that SOSV has created here about 4 years ago. SOSV is, as some of you may know, the investor in MavenHut and our partner there since 2012. I will actually act as an “entrepreneur […]

Asia’s response to Uber’s global ambitions—unlike Europe’s—was primarily entrepreneurial. from The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World I think this is the difference between Europe and Asia (in this case) and USA: we, Europeans, put much more focus on help from legislation and institutions, […]

I’ve read several business books in 2016 and some of them were worth the time spent :)) Here are the two that I would read if I only had time for just two books. 1. The Hard Thing about Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are no Easy Answers It took me a little […]

“I will never be able to sell something. I am the artist, I create things, I don’t sell them to the buyers at a fair. Sales people should sell, not me!”. This is what my fiance was telling me the other day, when she came back from a fair where she sold some of the art she […]

I’ve always read a lot since I was about 5 and I learned how to read. The thing is, building MavenHut took a lot of time and I’ve stopped reading as much as I used to. So I decided recently to read more. Reading books gives me a lot of ideas. And the worst thing […]

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day […]

Due to MavenHut’s success, there are people that think I know stuff and they want to meet me to talk about their business. And, time permitting, since I travel a lot these days, I actually love to meet the entrepreneurs. And why shouldn’t I? I love talking to smart people (who doesn’t?), I am interested […]