Archive for the ‘Start up’ Category
- I am so fucking poor – Outernet
[...] if I stop moving, I’m fucked.
That pretty much applies to all startups.
- Man on wire: “It’s impossibe, that’s for sure. So let’s start working.”
Michael Bierut on Philippe Petit
[...] Petit was a teenager in Paris browsing magazines in a dentist’s office when he saw a rendering of the then-unbuilt World Trade Center. He was electrified. He was already an obsessed magician, juggler, and high wire artist. To an aspiring tightrope walker, the idea of two 110-story towers, side by side, suggested only one thing. Petit drew a line between the image of the two towers. All that remained now was the execution.Making the walk happen took years of planning. Petit sums up his own attitude with characteristic aplomb: “It’s impossible, that’s for sure. So let’s start working.” He moved to New York and began visiting the construction site, at one point obtaining access to the top of the towers by posing as a French journalist. He made drawings and took photographs. Returning home, he built a full sized model of the WTC roofs in the French countryside to practice the walk. Getting all the necessary equipment up to the tops of the towers was not a one-man job. He recruited a group of confederates, a colorful multinational troupe who offer conflicting present-day memories throughout the film, and who each played a different role in what they privately called the coup. The plan was not just bold but actually rather insane: their solution for the hardest part of the whole scheme, for instance, getting the wire from one tower to the other, a span of nearly 200 feet, was to use a bow and arrow. It worked. Amazingly, it all worked.
Love Philippe Petit! He would fit right in in a startup!
- HackTO
The first time I attended a hackathon it was in Silicon Valley and I totally fell in love with the idea of getting together with a group of people with limited resources (a laptop, skills and an internet connection), an API and the desire to create an application. Felt pretty similar to what any startup does in its startup days! So when Corey and I talked about a hackathon being held in Toronto, for local developers to work with local APIs, well you know what happened next: HackTO was born.I am very excited to announce HackTO. The idea behind HackTO is to have a series of APIs made available by local startups. And connect these APIs with local developers to build – in a day – amazing applications.
We are still working out all the details – much planning ahead – but here are the basics:
- DATE: Saturday May 15. This is an all day hackhaton. We will be providing breakfast and lunch.
- LOCATION: TBD. We are still working out the location details. It will be downtown.
- AVAILABLE APIs: Freshbooks, Idée, PostRank, CanPages + more. We will be announcing additions to these APIs in the coming days.
- SIGNUP: Sign up is currently open, there is a $10 fee for registration.
- JUDGING AND PRIZES: We are working on awesome prizes for the best applications developed during the hackhaton. Stay tuned for details.
If you’re with a technology company or startup you think ought to be involved, get in touch lboujnane (at) ideeinc.com or just say hi or ask questions.
- Chris Dixon on the next big thing
As a startup founder you need to understand that:
Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading telco of the time, Western Union, passed on acquiring the phone because they didn’t see how it could possibly be useful to businesses and railroads – their primary customers. What they failed to anticipate was how rapidly telephone technology and infrastructure would improve [...]
and [..] look at products as processes.
- The Ron Conway Way
Ben Horowitz on Ron Conway:
“If Ron’s awake, he’s working. He can be at a party, in his pajamas, or at the Super Bowl. Ron is always on the job and the network is always on.”
- Venture beyond the possible
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
- #startups
[...] the cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill.
- 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.
- Howdy startup!
“how easy it is to look at a marketplace and see nothing more than a list of must-have features. If you’ve got user profiles, you need a messaging system. If you’ve got a site, you need an FAQ, support section, and a blog. If you’ve got activity, you need activity streams, RSS, and all that jazz. If you’re selling stuff online, you need a reviews section, after all, all of the big players have them, right? You’re not a big player. You’re just getting started.”
- HackLab TO, Startups, Pricing, Bosses
Welcome to HackLab TO in the National Post!
The only kind of hacking that HackLab.TO and many of the more than 170 similar spaces active around the world are engaged in is the repurposing kind. Described as the “fourth R” — following reduce, reuse, recycle — repurposing involves “taking existing technology and using it in sort of new or perverted ways,” explains 25-year-old Honeywell. “The focus is on do-it-yourself technology.” Virtual spaces, as popular as they are, simply do not cut it when it comes to reincarnating laser engravers and creating controllable LED signs.
Stewart Butterfield Flickr co-founder “We had it all wrong in the beginning”
“No battle plan survices contact with the enemy“. And that includes your software pricing. Run over and get “Don’t just roll the dice: a usefully short guide to software pricing.”
21 Things that Great Bosses Believe and Do: My favourites:
- (8) Reward success and (intelligent) failure, but punish inaction.
- (11) Eliminate hiring and reward practices that reinforce cultures where “the best you can be is a perfect imitation of those who came before you.”
- (12) Hire people who make your squirm.
- (18) Kill a lot of ideas, including a lot of good ideas.
- (21) Innovation requires selling your ideas. The greatest innovators, from Edison to Jobs, are gifted at generating excitement and sales. If you can’t or won’t sell, team-up with someone who can.
Work: CEO of 
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