Data Sufficiency

It looks like I'm opening a new chapter from the Kaplan's book and gain the same (or higher) level of frustration almost right away. It happens with the Data Sufficiency chapter as well.

Four to five pages about nothing. Some points that they put a stress on which lead to nothing meaningful. More like: know the topics and think sufficiently. Damn, that's funny.

Very often I saw the AD-BCE combo for DS questions (in different books). Kaplan's editors decided to go further and changed it to ABD-CE. What a heck? But I need to make it clear -- in sample questions and answers later on they've used the AD-BCE approach also.

Once again I'm confused by the example of guessing in DS problems. While definitely, this is something I'm going to do whenever I'll stuck, the sample question could be solved with two or three math equations with no guessing at all.

I would prefer to see more small, but useful tips & tricks to be remembered as x^2 - y^2 then x != y (sorry for a little bit programmish style), m^3 is even (or odd) when m is even (or odd), square root of m is even, then m is even, and so on.

I could not complete the 50 questions quiz tonight, as I'm a little bit pressed in time -- need to complete the memcache part of the code for one of the projects, as well as prepare a little bit for upcoming session at Founder Insitute on selecting key vendors for your company.

My experience is pretty poor on this topic, however, I believe it's pretty sufficient for the needs of small company. Definitely gotta learn more to run something bigger then 20-30 people's one. Hopefully, today is the day to learn the missing points.

I've completed the 40 questions (10 missed), but with so disgusting score, that I would not do anything anymore in a hurry. Too many careless errors, however, with an a lot of concept errors, too.

On the other note, just upgraded Firefox on my Macbook Pro. Wondering why it provided me with numerous 3.0.x updates, when 3.5.x was available for a while?

So I downloaded it manually and installed over. So far so good, feels faster and nicer, however, interesting how much time will it take to fuck up the whole thing again? ;) (My previous FF 3.0.x was freaking slow, but I didn't want to rebuild the profile.)

I also try to download Arthur Hailey's The Moneychangers to my Kindle. Even that it's written in 1975, I've been told that it reads pretty well for 2009. I'm going to give it a try. It's not available in native Kindle format, so I'm hunting the sites for either plain text, PDFs or DOC or whatever they have available. I've got a few downloaded copies with a pretty broken lineage, so I need a better one. However, after half an hour of looking for the good copy, I didn't find any. It looks like all of them are the same one. So I decided to get the audio book of it, to use in the gym.

Roadmap

New week, new class at Founder Institute. Next week it'll be devoted to the company's roadmap.

Personally, I think that it's a rather wide topic for a session. And a little bit general, although still reasonable.

So what is roadmap? I am sure you can come up with different definitions for it. However, every business needs a framework that will allow business leaders and stakeholders to pursue the strategic plan. So the roadmap enables business people to clearly understand each element and step required to roll out the strategy. And in easy words this is the plan. Functional. Sometimes informal. Precisely clear and acknowledged by every decision maker in the company.

I have to acknowledge that even if I usually have some meaning of a formal roadmap in my companies, I rarely had them cover anything, but the near future. The roadmap for my companies was an iterative process, which we adjusted within the run. And while someone may find this approach acceptable and agile, I still think that the strategy was one of our weak points.

Our next speakers are mostly known to the students. They are:

1. Trip Adler, CEO of Scribd. Smart and young. Hopefully that he'll be able to make it this time, as he dropped the second session though.
2. James Hong, Troublemaker from HotOrNot. Very inspiring, knowledgable and interesting person. I'd love to hear his approach to the "roadmapping" of the company.
3. Peter Pham, CEO of BillShrink. I don't know much about Peter and never heard him before, but his portfolio of companies and being advisor to many respectful ones like Doctstoc and Ustream, talks for himself.

Once again, I can't agree more with Adeo choice of speakers for the next session and looking forward to it.

Everyday brings me something new and this is what we're living for. We leave only once, so nobody of us has a luxury of wasting time.

What I learned

Yesterday we had a "quick-pitch" meeting with our Purple Star team (from Founder Institute). We're lucky to be the smallest team in the class, so it will give us extra advantages whenever our group will meet investors. The course will have three public meetings for investors over the period of four months.

So we decided to gather together and try the 3 and 5-minutes pitches of our ventures and get some real life feedback from it. I should say it was very productive, even if we had to leave Starbucks and move to Borders at 9pm. (I had no freaking idea that Starbucks in downtown San Mateo is closing at 9 pm! That's absolutely ridiculous. Are we supposed to move to City next time? :)

So, few thoughts on the pitch:

1. Clearly state the purpose, but not the process. Purpose comes first, process next.
2. Make sure to have very clear about the process, have a use-case if it's easier for you to explain.
3. (Consumer will ask) What does it give to me? What do I get back? (We were talking about B2C idea)
4. Make sure not to scary people by thinking that you're building a new social network. Be clear about overhead which you add and how it balances with benefits gained.

Overall, we had a great time together. Everybody has got very nice ideas and in our team of 5 people all of us are working in a very different industries and directions. That's why we always learn something new from our peers. Personally, as a beer fan, I think our discussion could be better over the pint of some nice german lager, but whatever, Starbucks' double-shot Mocha was good, too. However, I was wearing only the t-shirt and got cold shortly after starting our meeting. Next time need to think ahead and grab something warm. :)

Naming and more

After our third session at Founder Institute I decided to try the new techniques for choosing the name for the my new project.

Well, I failed. First of all, I am very bad at giving quantitative scores to the names (and that was one of methods). I just can't say how distinctive or how much energy is in the name, especially, given range from 1 to 10. That's not the way my brain works. :)

For the second, I found useful to have more name characteristics, but I'm still pretty stick to just a few of them, constantly trying to understand what other ones should mean. I can understand:

1. The ease to say and spell.
2. Brevity and energy.
3. Is the name is attributed to the business? (not always important)
   
4. Dot com availability. I can also consider awkward names like here.i.am, but I'm still much to the old school of dotcoms.

So basically that's it.

And, yes, normally I start from searching the domain name, considering it's going to be the name. I don't really find it useful to come up with the names, and then look for the availability. Dot com is pretty much tight now, so likely you'll not have your name available. And I hate paying big bucks to get the domain name from resellers especially when your business even does not exist. I'm not a big believer into the fact that only the different domain name can make you a fortune (unless you got a really gold one and going to resell it for big times :).

I definitely learned a lot from the process of naming, but it looks like I'm going still do what I used to do before, maybe altering the process a little bit and add some more tricks and attributes to it.

On the other note, our next (fourth) session is going to be about IP. For those who thinks about IP as Internet Protocol only, in this case it's Intellectual Property. :)

I would be happy to write more on this subject, however, I never had any experience with protecting my IP rights before. I know how important is this, however, I don't really have a good idea of when should I do this and what actually should I protect. I saw so many weird "patents", that sometimes they feel to be more stupid, then crazy. I'm definitely going to learn a lot this time.

Third session @ Founder Insitute

The 3rd session at Founder Institute will be devoted to Name & Branding. As always, we will have three mentors for tomorrow. They are:

1. Bryan Thatcher, CEO of Empressr,
2. Jay Jamison, Founder and CEO of Moonshot, and
3. James Hong, one of co-founders of Hot or Not, listed under Troublemaker title now. :)

I really know nothing about all of them, but James Hong. Somehow his startup was so popular that a lot of people used to mention it. I actually first heard about him when I was living in LA, and he and his business were often discussed during (rare) entrepreneurship events. It would be very intereting to meet him in person and ask some questions.

Well, so now few thoughts and ideas on what branding and naming are, and how did I use them in my previous ventures before. The first thing I should say, that I never took either academic or research approach on this. I tried to keep the name of the company pretty related to what it's actually doing, but I should say I wasn't paying to much attention to it. Of the most important things I wanted to have were:

1. Conciseness — I don't like long names (well, but I had something like "Extra Communications Company" before :) I also prefer "classic" name to be used with dot com at the end. However, I'm willing to choose extremely weird spellings, like nam.es for the short.
   
2. Easiness of saying and spelling — the name should sound good and should be easily spelled out. It should easy enough to be said by either native speaker or not. When you say the name of your company, nobody should ask you about it again. It should be aboslutely clear. And when it's said, it should be easy enough to type it in the browser's location bar, without saying "How do you spell that?". Oh, and when you read it, you should be able to say it right away from the first try. :)
   

So how do I do that? The short name is always a headache, especially, as there are no more 5-letters domain names left in dot com. And 6-letters is already too much. :) That's why I prefer to start from #2, and get back to #1 when I have a good idea about the name.

So, I use to start with a set of names, written down, which can be related to the nature of the business. They don't have be connected. Normally, they should be a legal English words (like web, search, etc), but not a Web2.0 abbreviations (like tumblr, loopt, etc). We'll have a chance to deface them later on. :)

I'm not good at shortening names to Web2.0 notation, so as for now, I think I don't have any names like that (well, maybe but the Tweeplies).

So, when I have the list, I'm starting to looking for a good and available domain name. You need to be able to read it, and actually, have some associations with the words, that will bring you to the right direction. It's like when you're looking at the lemon-like fruit, you are ready to something like citrus, while you might not know what is it exactly.

Normally, I'm ending up with the several lists of 15-20 available domain names, that can also be a company name. I'm trying to avoid more then 5-7 combinations of the same words (or pairs of the words). This keeps you pretty limited to one meaning, while we can have a thousand of them.

When I have the lists of names, I'm just emailing them to about 5 friends of mine, quickly describing the idea of the business (very very lightly!) and the list of domain names. If there is a good association with the nature of the business and the name, you don't need to know the idea deeply, as it makes you a little bit biased. This something that I believe to be a place for improvement, as I think I need to rely on opinion of more then 5 people.

From the other hand, I'm not sure if I need to spend that much time on choosing the name, as just a name doesn't do anything. It's not a brand, it's not a trademark, it's nothing, but a name. You can make it strong, or you will forget about it as soon as it fails. Well, I know, there is also a different point of view, and some people suppose that good and proper naming can add more maturity, trust in your business, which Web2.0-like stuff can be totally unacceptable for a serious business. I can't take a solid position on any of these approaches, but I believe that something like Cornigerous, Inc. is a bad choise, no matter what you're doing.

I don't really have any specific questions for the third session of the Founder Institute. However, I'm not less excited about it, as I want to learn more about other people naming approaches. Except, the only question I might have is:

1. Did anyone experienced changing the name of the company, and having it going up or down because of that? (I'm not talking about screwing up with brand, but keeping in mind that everything else is the same, but just a different mame.)

I'm also going to take some time and discuss this with purple start team members. Four heads are always better then one, right? :)

Second session at Founder Institute

Well, after the terrific first session at Founder Institute, new week comes and our new topic is "Validate your idea with industry professionals". Sounds interesting, huh?

Especially, if I'll mention our mentors for it. They are:

1. Joe Betts-LaCroix. I don't know pretty much anything about him, except that he's Founder and CTO of a just ceased operations OQO. And this is going to be something everybody would be happy to hear about. Could be a great lesson to all of us. I also know that he's a Harvard and MIT graduate.
   
2. Ken Ross. Once again, I know almost nothing about him as well. He's told to be Founder and CEO of ExpertCEO, MIT and Stanford MBA graduate.
3. Trip Adler. He's a serial mentor for Founder Institute so far, as he was one of the mentors for the first session. Well, yeah, I already know much more about him now. He looks to be a smart guy, ignoring the age.

Hopefully, you're already jealous.

Well, so let me get back to topic of the session. My understanding is that we're going to listen how these serial entrepreneurs learn about the market before turning product into a real life. Personally, I found this to be pretty challenging problem, because the wrong market estimation can turn your product into "the great thing that nobody wants".

So, well, let me share with you my experience in this subject. Previously, I had a number of startups myself. However, I'd like to make a stress on only two of them.

One of them was our first company in Ukraine, telecommunication and Internet service provider Extra Communications (often abbreviated as Extracom), which we built, run, broke even and sold in 8 months. I can't get into deep details on this, but overall it was a great experience, but not really anything else. We didn't make a fortune, but we were lucky to get the investments back (it was self-funded by myself, and "triple F" — Fools, Friends and Family, well, maybe without Fools though :).

We were the local ISP for high-speed Internet. Those days the "Internet over the phone" service was pretty mature, but the phone companies were pretty bad. This mixture made a lot of people mad. And there were no DSL on the market, available to home users, yet. Mostly, because it was still a headache to acquire the phone line, which will allow to run DSL speeds on it. Yes, we're doing something close to what cable companies are doing through their cables, but we had no such service there, as well.

So we decided to built a high speed Internet provider aiming the multi-family residential buildings (it's like 20-40 entrances per building, 10 floors per each entrance and 4 apartments per each floor). And the typical building was about 800 apartments each. Internet service was a very first draft of our idea. Actually, we're planning to create a huge, very high-speed social network of neighboors, with streaming music and movies, TV and radio channels, games and whatever not.

Building an ISP is a pretty expensive thing with a long-term payoff. We had little money, so we tried to keep the cost of experiment very low. So all of us decided that we need to research the market first, although we're sure there is an interest in such service. So what did we do? First of all, we developed a plan of how we would like to start our expansion. We choosed the buildings with the maximum amount of apartments, came up with the subscriptions costs and estimated the minimum number of users that should express intent to subscribe, for us to start into this venture.

I really don't remember these numbers, but they were rather modest, we lowered a bit a number of available apartments, but raised a little bit higher the minimum number of users who'd like to subscribe. Second, we had to get a phone number where people should be calling for sales. We got a mobile phone, with free local incoming calls. As far as I remember, it was about $60 or $70/month per month. That was pretty expensive, but we could keep the phone number if we'd like to run into this venture later, and we didn't have to have an office. Why not the office? The cheapest and two-persons-only reconstructed studio like hole-in-the-wall could cost us about $200/month plus landline phone service of $10/mo with no chance to keep the phone number later on. And somebody always should stay there, as the most phone calls, as we discovered later, were coming after 7pm and till 12am (yep!)

The next thing was advertisement, and we purchased a "running text string" TV ad block, which was supposed to run during prime-time on the local TV channel. It wasn't expensive, but we've got only 1 or 2 calls while having it running. So, that was unacceptable. And we decide to go into printed ad. It was regular A4 papers, printed on our own printers, with description about what we do, our plans, prices and phone number. Then, we split into teams and start to go through every single apartment and put the paper into the door. That took a lot of time, but that was great. We started to receive calls almost the same one or two hours when one of our teams were "attacking" the apartments with "SPAM". ;)

And, yeah, we decided that 30 days would be enough to make a decision about are we going into it or not. Well, we've got a little bit less than planned number of "intentions to subscribe", but during the last meeting decided "what the fuck, lets do it!".

To crown it all, I should say we had some kind of formal marketing research, that had to be done before we'll get into the venture. We did a good job on estimation of the numbers. We were aiming only 20% of potential customer base during out research, so we had a potentially growing market. And as we figured later, a lot more people actually was aware about us, but were just waiting for the "second call". To make sure this is not a scam and not just a marketing research. :) So the conclusion is — taking time for the market research is not a bad thing and not always a waste of time.

Okay, now my other startup I'd like to tell you about is Atomkeep. It was one of my first startups since I moved to US, which was remarkable by the facts that:

1. It was built in less then a month.
2. We've spent absolutely nothing on marketing, but got about 10,000 of subscribers in the first month of our release.
3. We've got our server crashed because of being featured in Life Hacker. :)
4. Eventually, we've got featured in Read Write Web and Mashable (no crash anymore!), and
5. Atomkeep was named one of the Top 50 Web Tools 2008 by LAPTOP Magazine.

Well, I can come up with more facts about why I believe Atomkeep to be an interesting thing to tell you about, but why bother? :)

As for Atomkeep, we choose a very differnet approach and we did absolutely no market research at all. We had a few reasons for that. First of all, we had the problem of social profile synchronization ourselves. I like to try things, but hate to keep them updated. Why bother anymore? For the second, we had a group of about 5-10 close friends and fellows, who expressed the same need — which was to keep the track of accounts and keep the updated. And the cost of experiment to enter this market was unbelievable low. It was our time only and that's it. So what should we wait for?

Frankly speaking we're very excited about Atomkeep and stupidly didn't pay attention to many minor details which become very major bottlenecks eventually. But this is not what the story about. :)

I can't come up with a good conclusion for our market research affair with Atomkeep, as we basically didn't do that, but if we did, I don't really see how would it save us from our mistakes that we made. But that's the nature of Web. Things tend to happen very fast here. You're given only a moment to make a decision and rock the world, or somebody else is here in line waiting for his turn.

So, well, I've been there and done that, so once again, I'll be very excited about listening how to approach markets and estimate the potential payback before bringing the product for real. Hopefully, I'll get all answers very soon.

My questions for the session would be:

1. How to research the Web market without sharing your idea? Should we be afraid to share it?
   
2. How to make a preliminary research and gather "expressions of interest" without having a real product done?
3. Should we be afraid of waking up next day to make our market research and finding out that somebody already released the similar product, just because he though "screw it, lets do it!" ?

Maybe something else will come later on.

My mentors for the Tuesday

Few words about the mentors, whom I will be listening to this Tuesday, as a part of Founder Institute program. They are:

1. Trip Adler. I know that Trip graduated from Harvard and joined Y Combinator winter program right after the school with the Scribd. I was paying attention to what his startup does, as he was entering already established market (by my mind) with some pretty clear leaders on it at this time. I know that he was introducing a new experience to the same problem, but I never though it will be enough. While I found his startup interesting (comparing to other ventures produced by YC program), I was really wondering how far he can go on with it. As the time shows — he went far enough. :)
   
2. Philip Kaplan. I wasn't very aware about who Philip is, except that he's founder of AdBrite advertisement network. I tried it once, but it didn't outperform the AdSense for me. I also know that Philip was a founder of Fucked Company, which he decided to abandon. I never used to be a fan of it, anyway. And one of the recent projects of Philip that I happen to be familiar with is Fast140, a Twitter fast typing game. Fun, but not really addictive for me.
   
3. Jason Calacanis. I think first I met Jason at one of the startup events (few years ago) in Los Angeles. I don't really remember what was that, but it wasn't very interesting. Among that, I use to read Jason's maillist — I find it rather interesting. I heard that Jason is a very "weighted" person, and he performs a very deep investigation before starting something.
   

The list of mentors is impressive, so I'm preparing myself to a very productive session.

Coming up with idea

I was one of the first applicants selected in the pioneer round for The Funded Founder Institute program. It's about to start shortly (actually, in two days only) and all students will have a chance to ask their mentors questions beforehand. I'm preparing to that, as I'm always have a lot of questions, however, not always ready to ask them in advance. :)

So, the first session is devoted to vision and ideas, and, hopefully, will answer to the question: "How to come up with a great idea?". Personally, I do not know, yet. If I knew, I would be running the successful business right now, by implementing that great idea. (You bet!)

But first things first, so lets start from brainstorming or coming up with a rough draft of idea. As Albert Einstein said:

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

So my first question to the mentors would be:

How do you put yourself in the condition to brainstorm and think creatively? Do you need to brainstorm at all or your ideas are coming as they come?

Well, I need to put a disclaimer here. I'm not a "boyscout" type of the guy. I had my past (as the most of us), and in my early ages I tried a lot of things. (I don't find those things appropriate for a productive activity at all.) So, I'm not asking about drugs or some illegal activity. (Not only about drugs, as it's still would be interesting to hear though. :)

So now it comes to the brainstorming process itself.

How does it look for you? How big is your brainstorming group and how you chose people for it?

Well, there is one more question:

How would you brainstorm with people when you cannot meet in person?

Let me give you an example. While I have some local friends here, most of them are very far away for IT. More then that, they are pretty far away from entrepreneurship. And those who share my passion about the business, they're too busy with their own ventures. But, lucky me, I still have some people who are sharing my passions, but the life put us pretty far away from each other. How could we brainstorm new ideas then?

More to go.

How to find the perfect idea and make yourself stick to it?

Well, it's an easy shot. It goes without saying that there are some ideas that have "Wow"-factor, and other ones that seems to be good enough, but doesn't turn you up too much?

I have a personal example — one project was keeping me from sleep and I was forcing it every single moment — it was so great and terrific, has got an impressive resonance around, but I failed to monetize it. It's like something you love, spend money on it and keep alive just because people love it, too. But you can't get anything back from it (and maybe you never will). But it has a great Wow-factor.

From the other hand, I had a different venture — with a clear monetization scheme, pretty interesting, having some traction already, but — no Wow in it. Mean, every time I need to make myself re-acknowledge the interest of idea.

So what's better? The pragmatic approach with a straight path, or your passion with no good idea where is it coming to?

And now another thing comes.

Is it distracting to try several ventures at the same time? Is it bad?

Nowadays, it is the high tech and very agile world, things tend to change very fast. You just can't wait while you first idea will break the bank or loose, and you can't put all eggs into one basket. You're done with something, and ready to do a new something, while the old something is being cared now by your designer, QA, PR or whatever else. But isn't this something that adds a distraction and follows you the wrong way? Should you stay focused on something one?

And I don't know if this is a question to upcoming session or market research one:

How do you evaluate your idea? Are you going into it if you love it and that's it, or you first make sure everybody else will love it (and pay for it!), too? How do you do this?

And finally:

Which idea is better — something that was already done (similar, or badly executed, whatever), or something that is unique and never been done before?

First one seems to be more common, as nowadays the cost of experiment is really low. People can try things many times per day at low or no cost at all. However, choosing this path you'll pretty likely face a competition and will have to steal customers (can be pretty hard). From the other side, the second option — a unique and never done before idea — first of all is a very rare thing, and for the second asks a question: is there any market for it at all?

I also have a question (or proposition :) to Adeo and all other people who bring the program together. Now, when you own our personality tests, you're having a powerful mechanism to mix and match people. Are you willing to promote team building and cooperation between the students, possibly leading to new business ideas and merging companies?

Let me paraphrase it. You made a stress during the application process that you don't really care about the idea, but about a people. And I like that! This is the Institute and people would be learning something new. There are plenty of high class entrepreneurs around that aren't good in putting the idea on the table. Why should they be eliminated (like this happen in many other programs) when they can be taught or partnered with idea generators instead?

Adeo, I can see at least two options here. First of all, as it was said, you have our personality information, so you can use it to group people in a smart, academic way. (But you might need to involve some PhDs in psychology and whatever not to do this though. :)

Another option is to publish short bios of all students who'll be in program, so they can mix an match themselves (like, choose 5 people whom you want to work with, blah-blah-blah). And you'll make a final changes to make sure it works.

I don't know how big group of people it's worth creating. Personally, I think something like 5-10 students in the group would be good enough.

Yeah, I know, I know — I tend to write relatively long texts. (I don't do this often though, so I'm also inconsistent. :) And as Max Levchin told me once:

I think a critical skill for a startup founder is brevity ;-)

And I can't agree more with that. But while this is my blog and nobody is forced to read it (although very encouraged to :), so I'll use it to sort out and group my thoughts together.

Feel free to ask more questions. So here comes mine in a nutshell:

1. How do you put yourself in the condition to brainstorm and think creatively? Do you need to brainstorm at all or your ideas are coming as they come?
2. How does it look for you? How big is your brainstorming group and how you chose people for it?
3. How would you brainstorm with people when you cannot meet in person?
4. How to find the perfect idea and make yourself stick to it?
5. What is better: the pragmatic idea with a straight and clear path or something you're passionate about with no clear idea where is it coming to, but willingness to go through it?
6. Is it distracting to try several ventures at the same time? Is it bad?
7. How do you evaluate your idea? Are you going into it if you love it, or you first make sure everybody else will love it (and pay for it!), too? How do you do this?
8. Which idea is better — something that was already done (similar, or badly executed, whatever), or something that is unique and never been done before?
9. Adeo: Are you going to group people into the teams (possibly rotating within time), by personal preferring or personality test results, to cooperate together and generate new and, potentially, brilliant ideas?

Hopefully, I'll get them answered very soon. :) Oh, no, I forgot one more question:

Can I have a private session brainstorm with my mentors? :)

P.S. Meanwhile, I'm going to think it over and maybe I'll come up with even more questions for the mentors. I'll do my best to keep the post updated as well.