Letters Remain

Category: entrepreneurship

  • Peak or Trough – You Are a Start-Up

    Are you on a peak or in a trough? Looking for a kick-start? Then you can do worse than reading, absorbing, and taking to heart Ryan Holiday‘s article, This is My Life: [Look at developing yourself] like a start up. You are a start up. Don’t worry about monetization. Or a safety net or health…

  • Don’t Follow Your Passion – Fix Your Lifestyle

    Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there. A novel take on the typical inspirational graduation speech. It’s not about following your passion or not taking yourself too seriously. They’re important, but this is different. The idea is to not think of your ideal job, but to think of your ideal lifestyle. To…

  • Six Habits of Highly Effective Mentees (and My Start-Up Life Excerpts)

    Personally and professionally I always thrive to learn. Nine months ago I moved from programming into systems/business analysis: I knew what the job entailed and knew I could do it well. I still asked for a mentor. Specifically, I asked that my mentor be the person in our organisation who is always lauded as being…

  • Bribing Employees to Quit

    One of those ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ moments. An ingenuous—yet obvious—business practice from Zappos.com (a start-up company given funding by the infamous Sequoia Capital venture capital firm)… bribe your employees to quit so only the truly committed and enthusiastic are left. More at Harvard Business’ Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You…

  • Tips on Mini-Retirements from Tim Ferriss and JD Roth

    How to Take a Mini-Retirement: Tips and Tricks from Timothy Ferriss is the first part of a two-part interview between JD Roth (of the excellent personal finance site, Get Rich Slowly) and he of 4HWW fame, Timothy Ferriss. There’s an apt quote in the interview on something I’m currently struggling with: The hardest part is…

  • Ask Y Combinator – The Archive

    I’ve written about Y Combinator before, and if you followed the link you’ll have realised by now that ‘Y Combinator‘ is analogous to ‘Grade A Columbian Nose Candy‘. Well get ready for another binge on the dandy candy, as the Startups Wiki has now produced the Ask YC Archive – a site highlighting the best…

  • You’re Not a Blogger

    The simplest blog post I’ve seen in a long time. The best blog post I’ve seen in a long time. Do what you love… be an entrepreneur. Richard Branson on Copyblogger

  • Y Combinator and Starting a Startup

    Y Combinator is a seed-stage startup venture capital firm with a refreshingly novel outlook on venture capitalism. Their Startup Library provides a wonderful selection of links to stories, articles, and many other resources. Be careful; once you start thinking about going ‘startup’ you’re likely not to go back for a long, long time.