entrepreneurship
Top 5 resources to learn about business, strategy, entrepreneurship and management
I love learning. I love reading about new techniques, models, or different ways of thinking which challenge the various preconceptions I have.
One ritual I current have is printing out an article and reading it on the commute home on London's tube. While the rest of the smoldering hot traincar are listening to iPods or sleeping, I am reading, highlighting, making sidebar notes and thinking about how the article applies to anything else in my life.
There are many places on the web where you can find free and powerful knowledge on the web. The following are some of my favourite resources for knowledge and thought leadership.
- McKinsey Quarterly - They may be consultants who generally write about issues for large corporations, but these guys definitely know how to write good thought leadership on Marketing, Innovation, Economic Studies, and Technology. Most articles are free, but some articles require a McKinsey subscription (which is still well worth it).
FINALLY: Amazon Web Services get Service Level Agreements
Previously, I blogged about the Pros & Cons of the Pay Amazon Web services.
Basically, the biggest con was a lack of service level agreement (SLA). "How can a third party seriously build a profitable application or service on top of something that has no uptime guarantee or refund consequence for severe outages?"
I am now happy to have learned, that Amazon (as of October 1st, 2007) does provide service level agreements for their S3 storage service, which was designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
A big pat on the back for Jeff Bezos. Web companies can now leverage Amazon's offerings with piece of mind.
Heck, it feels good to sleep at night.
Mark J. Macenka on "The Great Value of Avoided Mistakes" (Startup School)
On Saturday (March 24th, 2007) I attended YCombinator’s Startup School event at Stanford University. YCombinator, an innovative (and controversial) Venture Capital firm, works with carefully selected entrepreneurial startups over a summer session in Boston, and injects a small amount of money into these startups in exchange for 5% ownership of the company.
Mark J. Macenka, gave a great speech on The Great Value of Avoided Mistakes in startups. If you are interested in starting a company, or have already -- this list can be really beneficial to you.
Here is his advice:
- Don’t get too focused on control.. Many entrepreneurs get obsessed with keeping 51% of a company. Don’t get bogged down on dilution. Just get the money and get changing the world.
YCombinator Startup School: Paul Graham's why to not *not* start a startup.
Today I attended YCombinator’s Startup School event at Stanford University. YCombinator, an innovative (and controversial) Venture Capital firm, works with carefully selected entrepreneurial startups over a summer session in Boston, and injects a small amount of money into these startups in exchange for 5% ownership of the company.
Speaker: Paul Graham, Partner, Y Combinator; Founder, Viaweb
Title: Why to not not start a startup?
Paul gave an excellent presentation regarding the excuses that people tell themselves (whether valid or invalid) to not try a startup (or join one).
At YCombinator, Paul claims to have a 50% succeed rate with an expected 25% long term success rate. He also states that 100% of YCombinator graduates would not trade their experience for a desk job in a cubicle.
So why don’t people quit their jobs and get going with a startup?
- I’m too young
