Pathik Shah

An excellent post about ambition, and the drive (or rather, the rush) to make it big when young.

You Are Not Running Out of Time

You know the feeling – the feeling of being left behind in the race for achievement. Of falling back in ‘the game’. For some people, the game is keeping up with the Joneses: marrying a good catch, living in a nice house, driving the right car, having a good job, kids that do well at school. For others, it is enjoying life’s pleasures – the best vacations, the most enjoyable parties, with the most exciting partiers. Then there are people who are forever pursuing harmony and peace in their lives, resolving the discordant threads one by one, and for some the game is living up to their personally defined objective definition of personal development.

For most, it is a combination with a common thread: Am I moving up in the world at an acceptable pace, or am I running out of time? Am I maximizing my potential?

What that quickly meant to me was that wasting time and opportunities were criminal, with my own potential achievements as victims that needed to be rescued from the assault of lost hours and non-productivity. It meant becoming a workaholic. Bill Gates probably felt that way once – looking back at his teenage years and his own obsessive time spent with computers, he said, “it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success.”

Keep Reading: You Are Not Running Out of Time

A Million Dollars Isn’t Cool. You Know What’s Cool? A Billion Dollars!

So You Want To Do a Startup, Eh?

An excellent post by Zed Shaw.

You have finished this book and have decided to continue with programming. Maybe it will be a career for you, or maybe it will be a hobby. You will need some advice to make sure you continue on the right path, and get the most enjoyment out of your newly chosen hobby.

I have been programming for a very long time. So long that it is incredibly boring to me. At the time that I wrote this book I knew about 20 programming languages and could learn new ones in about a day to a week depending on how weird they were. Eventually though this just became boring and couldn’t hold my interest anymore. This doesn’t mean I think programming is boring, or that you will think it’s boring, only that I find it uninteresting at this point in my journey.

What I discovered after this journey of learning is that the languages did not matter, it’s what you do with them. Actually, I always knew that, but I’d get distracted by the languages and forget it periodically. Now I never forget it, and neither should you.

Which programming language you learn and use does not matter. Do not get sucked into the religion surrounding programming languages as that will only blind you to their true purpose of being your tool for doing interesting things.

Programming as an intellectual activity is the only art form that allows you to create interactive art. You can create projects that other people can play with, and you can talk to them indirectly. No other art form is quite this interactive. Movies flow to the audience in one direction. Paintings do not move. Code goes both ways.

Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but if you want to make about the same money and be happier, you could actually just go run a fast food joint. You are much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession.

People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines.

Of course, all of this advice is pointless. If you liked learning to write software with this book, you should try to use it to improve your life any way you can. Go out and explore this weird wonderful new intellectual pursuit that barely anyone in the last 50 years has been able to explore. Might as well enjoy it while you can.

Finally, I will say that learning to create software changes you and makes you different. Not better or worse, just different. You may find that people treat you harshly because you can create software, maybe using words like “nerd”. Maybe you will find that because you can dissect their logic that they hate arguing with you. You may even find that simply knowing how a computer works makes you annoying and weird to them.

To this I have one just piece of advice: they can go to hell. The world needs more weird people who know how things work and who love to figure it all out. When they treat you like this, just remember that this is your journey, not theirs. Being different is not a crime, and people who tell you it is are just jealous that you have picked up a skill they never in their wildest dreams could acquire.

You can code. They cannot. That is pretty damn cool.

[Source]

What Makes a Successful Startup? | Dissecting Successful Internet Startups to find the Secret Sauce

No one knows, but here’s a rough answer, thanks to the guys at Startup Genome.

1. Founders that learn are more successful: Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth.

2. Startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startups that pivot more than 2 times or not at all.

3. Many investors invest 2-3x more capital than necessary in startups that haven’t reached problem solution fit yet. They also over-invest in solo founders and founding teams without technical cofounders despite indicators that show that these teams have a much lower probability of success.

4. Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company’s operational performance. But the right mentors significantly influence a company’s performance and ability to raise money. (However, this does not mean that investors don’t have a significant effect on valuations and M&A)

5. Solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x less likely to pivot.

6. Business-heavy founding teams are 6.2x more likely to successfully scale with sales driven startups than with product centric startups.

7. Technical-heavy founding teams are 3.3x more likely to successfully scale with product-centric startups with no network effects than with product-centric startups that have network effects.

8. Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money, have 2.9x more user growth and are 19% less likely to scale prematurely than technical or business-heavy founding teams.

9. Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money.

10. Founders overestimate the value of IP before product market fit by 255%.

11. Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than most founders expect. This underestimation creates the pressure to scale prematurely.

12. Startups that haven’t raised money over-estimate their market size by 100x and often misinterpret their market as new.

13. Premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to perform worse. They tend to lose the battle early on by getting ahead of themselves.

14. B2C vs. B2B is not a meaningful segmentation of Internet startups anymore because the Internet has changed the rules of business. We found 4 different major groups of startups that all have very different behavior regarding customer acquisition, time, product, market and team.

You can get the full report here: The Startup Genome Report | Direct Link