Letters Remain

Tag: entrepreneurship

  • Developing a Web App on a Shoestring Budget

    As the title suggests—and the tips prove—this brief guide to getting a web app up-and-running on a small budget requires, well, a budget (as opposed to no budget and doing it all yourself). The steps: Create a clear wireframe model Outsource the development Use an open source content management system Start a design contest Leverage…

  • Harnessing Collective Intelligence Online

    The ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ theory, as popularised by James Surowiecki’s 2004 book of the same name, is an important—if misunderstood—theory that has influenced a lot of recent online ventures that rely on social networks and collaboration to work intelligently. For those who want to take advantage of the wisdom of crowds for their own ventures,…

  • Don’t Implement Ideas, Solve Problems

    Taking inspiration from Paul Graham’s Ideas for Startups essay, Martin Zwilling offers some further thoughts—to wit, don’t start with an idea, start with a problem. Potential startup founders are always looking for ideas to implement, when they should be looking for problems to solve. Customers pay for solutions, and there is no market for ideas.…

  • Entrepreneurs Not Learning From Mistakes

    Entrepreneurial failure is an integral part of eventual success and an important opportunity for learning, or so goes the conventional wisdom (hence in some part the quote—commonly attributed to Lisa Amos—that entrepreneurs average 3.8 failures before success). Ignoring the anecdotal success-after-failure stories that stick in peoples’ minds, a team at Harvard Business School decided to…

  • Frugality and Entrepreneurship

    Inc. Magazine has a (possibly too lengthy) profile, complete with the expected insights, of Paul Graham—author of Hackers and Painters, co-founder of Y Combinator, and all-round entrepreneurship guru. Cheap meals are, in a strange way, part of Y Combinator’s formula for start-up success. Graham wants founders to spend as little money as possible. Live cheaply…

  • Advice for Design and Life, from Milton Glaser

    Milton Glaser, the designer best known for creating the ‘I ♥ NY’ logo, offers ten pieces of advice from a life in design: You can only work for people that you like: “all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client”. If you have…

  • Creative Capitalism

    ‘Creative capitalism‘ is a term popularised by Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos, 2008. Here Gates delivered a speech saying that many of the world’s problems are “too big for philanthropy” and that the free-market capitalist system itself would have to solve them. Creative Capitalism: A Conversation has a transcript of Gates’ speech but it…

  • Good Employees and Successful Entrepreneurs

      In an article profiling Google’s Marissa Meyer (employee number 20), there’s this quote on Meyer’s views with regard to hiring practices:  One candidate got a C in macroeconomics. “That’s troubling to me,” Ms. Mayer says. “Good students are good at all things.” Another candidate looked promising with a quarterly rating from a supervisor of…

  • Risk Tolerance as a Competitive Weapon

    After Josh Kopelman sold Half.com to eBay in 2000 he stayed on with the company to witness eBay’s defeat by and eventual acquisition of PayPal—at the time a relatively small startup. Kopeland suggests that the main reason for PayPal’s success was their risk tolerance in a number of situations: Legal Risk Paypal’s product was widely…

  • Unsolicited Internships

    Expanding on an idea originally posted on the Freakonomics blog, Andrew Lynch suggests soliciting people you admire or respect for an unpaid internship: Find someone you really admire or respect. Email them. Describe your skills, how you can help them, what you have to offer. Link them to your blog full of quality posts. Then…