Max Levchin vs. Kirill Makharinsky

“Start-ups in London face a tougher time than their regional peers when trying to attract early stage finance through grants, awards and deals led by private individuals.

…Silicon Valley currently attracts ten times the investment of London, according to figures from Ernst & Young.”

One for the bookmarks.

The Gutenberg Project collects books on the internet. Here are the top 100 downloaded books (it’s free).

Some highlights:

The notebooks of Leondardo Da Vinci, Da Vinci
The best American Humourous Short stories
Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
Thus spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche

Not a fan of reading off the screen but you can always print! Respect to lifehacker for this.

From O’Reilly radar, proverbs that every wannabe entrepreneur should read.

my fav:

“Momentum builds on itself — just start. Do whatever you can. Draw a user interface. Write a spec. Make something, anything, that people can see and touch and try. A prototype is worth ten thousand words. Once you start moving, you will find that people start to carry you along.”‘

Like why don’t you guys just stab me in the eye while you’re at it?

It’s been 7 months since I left Deutsche Bank to work full-time on Boso and IBTalk. I want to summarise my experience.

You have to be stupid before you can be clever

Sounds obvious, but there is a lot to learn, and you can only really do this by making the plunge into business and getting started. The most obvious example of something I was naive about, is what level of commitment, detail and preparation would be demanded of you by an investor. We hear plenty of stories of people getting funded and so on, but actually, very few ideas get funding, and it is really hard. We had to become proficient very quickly, and it took a good five months before we closed the money.

Don’t let age be a weakness

Quite simply, if someone tries to use your age against you, walk away. You shouldn’t do business with them. This advice was given to me by Naval Ravikant, the founder of Epinions. In London, I came across this attitude, and at first we blindly believed that our age was a big weakness that we would have to balance out, until we realised that this was a mere negotiation tactic, and perhaps also, that there are people resent those who are trying to be successful at a young age.

Experiment

We all make assumptions, but sometimes we are unaware of the extent that we do. In business, assumptions can be especially dangerous, so it is much better to test them extensively. Experiment with your marketing strategies - be scientific, reject ideas that don’t work. Google are the best exponents of this. Apparently Marrisa Mayer never lets anyone use subjective statements such as “I like this design better”, but forces them to say “our research showed that this layout was 25% better at converting visitors” and so on. I like testable hypotheses, if they aren’t, they are meaningless.

Organised Chaos

Also a Google philosophy, operate at the edge of your comfort zone. You should always feel a little uneasy with everything going on. If it’s easy, then you’re not doing enough.

Diversity

I believe it’s important to cast your social net far and wide. You want to know just as many people outside of your industry as you do inside. Meet people who have different beliefs to your own, it’s very sobering and reminds us of how our perspective is only one of many. This has something to do with the wisdom of crowds-type-thinking, which I always hark on about, but I honestly believe that you can improve your product and business technique by mixing with a variety of people.

Be Curious

Ultimately, I think this is the most important quality to be successful. If you are naturally curious about the world, people, your business/industry and so on, you will learn lots, and that knowledge inevitably proves useful. There’s an excellent podcast which argues this. I shall look for it.

ps: hyperlinks to be added