Aniq started this...

10 Tips for Starting Entrepreneurs

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: startup entrepreneur)

Posted December 29, 2008

// 0 Comments

Eugene Kleiner's Laws

One of the most influential members of Silicon Valley's genesis was Eugene Kliener. He was a co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and an angel investor in Intel, and most notably, a founding partner in KPCB - one of Sand Hill Road's most prolific and successful investment firms. His investing methodology and vetting process has been informally codified as "Kleiner's Laws", I've shared them below, but I'd call this required reading/internalization for any entrepreneur (and investor for that matter).

Kleiner's Laws

Make sure the dog wants to eat the dog food. No matter how ground-breaking a new technology, how large a potential market, make certain customers actually want it.
Build one business at a time. Most business plans are overly ambitious. Concentrate on being successful in one endeavor first.
Risk up front, out early.
The time to take the tarts is when they're being passed. [As an addendum to this, a mentor of mine, Brian Flynn at Schlossberg:Flynn (http://www.schlossbergflynn.com/profiles.php) once mentioned "When the waiter comes by with hors d'oeuvres, take two" - meaning, that if more funding than you think you may need is presented to you, you may regret not taking it down the line (especially in an economic crisis such as now.)]
The problem with most companies is they don't know what business they're in.
Even turkeys can fly in a high wind. In times of strong economies, even bad companies can look good.
It's easier to get a piece of an existing market than to create a new one.
It's difficult to see the picture when you're inside the frame.
After learning some of the tricks of the trade, some people think they know the trade. This reflected some of Eugene's own humility; he recognized that many venture capitalists thought they were experts when they had just a bit of knowledge.
Venture capitalists will stop at nothing to copy success. [Speaking of success copycats though - my favorites by far are the Samwer brothers (http://www.europeanfounders.com/). They made money by creating clones of companies like Facebook and eBay in European markets. They even copied the name of their fund from Peter Thiel's fund ;)]
Invest in people, not just products. Eugene always respected founding entrepreneurs. He wanted to build companies with them not just with their ideas.

Loading mentions Retweet

Posted December 13, 2008

// 0 Comments

Chris Langan: The World's Highest IQ

This is a pretty incredible story - definitely worth watching.

"The stupid person thinks that he is smarter than or as smart as a smart person - and therein lies his stupidity."

Loading mentions Retweet

Posted December 9, 2008

// 1 Comment

Ask.com = epic fail.

I was checking out Ask.com's recently released top queries list. TechCrunch had a post about it the other day and they only showed the top 10 search results, which were hilariously stupid (#3 was Google and #9 and #10 were 'online degrees' and 'credit score' respectively) [Source: http://about.ask.com/en/docs/2008/topqueries.shtml].

But then I looked at the rest of the page...

The #1 question search was "How do I get pregnant?", followed by queries on weight loss, writing resumes, minimum wage, selling cars, name changes (??), meaning of life... It basically sounds like depressed job seekers that are trying to sell off assets so they can keep their sub-prime crib.

Also, if you don't know what myspace, google, youtube, facebook and craigslist are by now, I'm not too surprised that you're settling for Ask.com. However, Ask.com is still a top online property, visited by 28MM people according to Compete.com [http://siteanalytics.compete.com/ask.com/?metric=uv] and also is ranked 51 on Alexa and top 25 on Compete. Alexa even shows that Ask.com is growing in terms of rank and page views!

However, when you put this all into context with Quantcast's demographics, it makes a little more sense: 57% female, 58% no children, ~50% less than $60K total household income, and 49% without a college education.

Regardless, Ask.com - these top searches are ridiculous! And even though 1% of total search is reportedly worth a cool $1 billion, I see Ask.com heading south in the coming years.

Click here to download:

Ask.com_epic_fail..zip (599 KB)

Loading mentions Retweet

Posted December 3, 2008

// 0 Comments

How Chinese Farmers Are Making Eagles Fear the Chickens

Caption: Chinese farmers are trapping eagles and other birds of prey and throwing them trussed up into chicken pens to make them so scared of poultry that they never return [Source: Telegraph.co.uk]

Frightening!

Loading mentions Retweet

Posted December 1, 2008

// 0 Comments

Cornell Ranked Higher Than Stanford on Latest US News World's Best Colleges Rankings

http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/worlds-best-colleges/2008/11/20/worlds-best-colleges-and-universities-top-200.html

I usually don't give too much credence to anything that USN&WR puts out, but I couldn't let this notice slip. OK - so the wannabe elitist in me has to come out for this ;), but looks like that $21.6 billion Stanford endowment needs to be put to work in the rest of the world. Regardless, hoping to see greater things come out of alums of all of these schools (should be interesting to see what Cornell '09 puts out now that 20% of the class isn't going into planning to go to financial services anymore -- oops).

Here's the list to round out the top 20:

1. Harvard

2. Yale

3. Cambridge

4. Oxford

5. Cal Tech

6. Imperial College London

7. University College London

8. University of Chicago

9. MIT

10. Columbia

11. UPenn