Curious about stuff
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
I don’t know if you know, but we have a dog. His name is Sami and he’s a Westie. And he’s really cute. So cute that we always think he could’ve been a Disney character, with those big eyes and big nose.
Well, now we know how he would look like :)
Miruna made a video tutorial about how to turn YOUR dog into a Disney character, as well, in case you want to try.
Oh, and the AI prompts we used are available to copy/paste here.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.