Archive for the ‘entrepreneurship’ Category
- #startups
[...] the cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill.
- hohoto
When I have a bit of time later this week, I will blog about our little hohoto project – our $40,000 fundraiser for the Toronto Food Bank. In the meantime I wanted to capture this because it certainly was a great way to start the morning!
- NYT interviews Jeff Bezos
NYT: The Kindle, an electronic reader brought out by Amazon two years ago, has become your company’s best-selling product and a great success story. But several rival e-readers are coming out in time for Christmas. What do you think of the Nook, for instance, from Barnes & Noble?
Jeff Bezos: We have a long tradition of not talking about other companies, which I’ll stick to.Oh so do I!
And
NYT: What do you say to Kindle users who like to read in the bathtub?
Jeff Bezos: I’ll tell you what I do. I take a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and I put my Kindle in my one-gallon Ziploc bag, and it works beautifully. It’s much better than a physical book, because obviously if you put your physical book in a Ziploc bag you can’t turn the pages. But with Kindle, you can just push the buttons.NYT: What if you dropped your Kindle in the bathtub?
Jeff Bezos: If it’s sealed in a one-gallon Ziploc bag? Why don’t you try that experiment and let me know.I am rolling on the floor laughing.
- Go head and piss people off!
I know I do. All the time. Apparently I am very skilled at that. But that’s only because I am doing the right things – and I care! You see: “doing the right things will almost inevitably piss people off”. Just loved Tim Ferris’ Benefits of Pissing People Off blog post.
[...] if you are really effective at what you do, 95% of the things said about you will be negative. Keep your head on straight, don’t get emotional, take the heat, and just make sure your clients are smiling.
- Gameness, vaccines, turtles, life and startups
On Offensive Play by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker [...] those who select for gameness have a responsibility not to abuse that trust: if you have men in your charge who would jump off a cliff for you, you cannot march them to the edge of the cliff.
Does the vaccine matter? The Atlantic
The women agenda: NYT reader submitted photographs from around the world illustrating the importance of educating girls. Some great shots!
From Science Friday: Michael Musnick is a citizen scientist who studies wood turtles in the Great Swamp — a stretch of wetland about 60 miles north of New York City. He found turtles dying in the railroad tracks and proposed a solution to New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority: tiny turtle bridges.
There are close to 1.7 billion Internet users in the world. The network by the numbers.
Norwegian photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen spent six weeks living in the slums of Nairobi, then Caracas, Mumdai and Jakarta. His Foreign Policy photo essay is enlightening!
Best young entrepreneurs of 2009 from BusinessWeek and yes the list includes women!
Interview with Ken Segall, the man who named the iMac and wrote Think Different.
- CEO Uniform
Monday evening humour via Business Week: “These days, CEOs no more have to wear a suit and tie than senators have to behave themselves in Congress.” If you are wondering I don’t wear a suit.
- Weekend reading
Dan Pink on the science of motivation – a Ted Talk
Born to Run: if you are a runner, run get this book and wiggle your toes at the shoe giants!
Startup advice: Evaluating risk and opportunity as a human by Paul Buchheit.
Homage to Alan Turing.
- Examing ideas of success and failure
Alain de Botton examines our ideas of success and failure — and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments. An interesting Ted talk:
- Boring
Thanks to all the friends who emailed me this New York Times article. I am not sure what they are trying to tell me but
but according to the latest research “[...] warm, flexible, team-oriented and empathetic people are less likely to thrive as C.E.O.’s. Organized, dogged, anal-retentive and slightly boring people are more likely to thrive.” Slightly boring? Really?(c) Photo by Manuel Bordallo





Work: CEO of