Another trip around the sun

It is on January 4th, just two weeks away, that the earth comes closest to the sun and we start another of our year-long orbits.

January 4th marks not only a destination (the earth closest to sun), but a continuing event: starting-over.

This great celestial event is also a time of much social busy-ness, with a multitude of celebrations of various sorts so it is a challenge to find the time to be still, and quiet, in solitude, to focus and prepare to create our destiny in the year ahead.

What an excellent time to be rethinking our achievements over the past year in our trip around the sun, and, realizing we are about to get a cosmic do-over (for the 4 billionth time), we get to choose what we will do with our lives during the coming year.

Let us choose wisely...

:)


Additional reading on the subject:
http://earthsky.org/tonight/earth-comes-closest-to-sun-every-year-in-early-january

The Greatest Thrill

As a pilot, I know this to be true.  However, what if you have never experienced flying?  What then would be the greatest thrill a human can experience?  

Here what Nikola Tesla said of it:

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success... such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

As an entrepreneur, a serial entrepreneur, a man addicted to entrepreneurial behavior, I must totally agree with Nikola Tesla. 

Imagine: the ability to create a new life form, starting with only an idea, and build it to the point where it makes money and helps people​.

Why build in the belly of the Beast?

Want to build your app based on Google, facebook and/or twitter?  Don't do it!  For several years I have felt that this would be a sucker play, but just today Jason Calacanis spells out all the reasons why not.  Read all about it, according to Jason:  (wordy but worth it)

Here’s a composite of a three discussions I’ve had with whip-smart founders over the past couple of months about building companies on the backs of existing ecosystems like YouTube and Facebook.

“Jason, I’m building a startup around the @Youtube ecosystem -- which I know from your writing that you’ve got some issues with -- we want you to invest!” said the founder.

“That’s an awesome set of tools you’ve built there. Clever indeed. However, if any of them work, you know YouTube is going to copy them and make them free, right?” I replied.

“But YouTube is going to be 10x bigger than it is in the next five years... and you said if it was a stand-alone company it would be worth $50b!” he replied.

“I did say that, and that’s even more reason for you to be worried. As they get bigger and more powerful, they will have even more resources and rationale to rebuild your ideas -- and they will have an even bigger firehouse to spit it out to customers,” I said.

“But look at all the examples of huge companies built off of large ecosystems: Norton Antivirus on Windows is a Fortune 500 company, Hootsuite exploded on the back of Twitter and it has a $1b valuation, Buddy Media rocked Facebook and sold for $800M,” he said.

“You left out PayPal... built off the back of Ebay for billions and now the most valuable piece of the company,” I added.

Then I said, “Now, while all of the examples above are true, they are a small, small percentage of founders who were able to get escape velocity from the exogorth, the space slug in Star Wars that almost ate the Millennium Falcon.”

Ironically, as I was having this discussion, I found out that YouTube had built a tool that did EXACTLY what one of the founders in the above composite had built: a tool to help you connect with your top YouTube fans!

Here is how a blog described YouTube’s new “top fans” tool:

-- A Top Fans dashboard will exist as a new page inside the Video Manager
-- Creators will be able to view a feed of the latest activity from the most-engaged and influential fans instead of having to wade through hundreds or thousands of comments
-- Creators will be able to send out exclusive postings only to top fans

The startup described their tool a year ago:

-- Get to know superfans and influencers
-- Be notified of influential new subscribers
-- Never miss an important question or comment
-- Reply, comment and sub/unsub effortlessly

In other words, YouTube studied this founder’s startup and built all his features into YouTube, made it free and made it better. And they’ve got 100% market penetration on day one for zero dollars!

And you can’t blame YouTube, as they probably had this startup’s idea on their roadmap before the startup began working on the problem of “who are my best YouTube fans.”

Right now YouTube might need Maker and Machinima, but as you can see from YouTube’s Geek Week -- and YouTube’s personal channel breaking into the top 10 -- they have no problem aggregating a bunch of YouTube stars and selling ads around them.

Think about it, Maker and Machinima do two things:

1. Collect a group of channels together to make content.
2. Sell that bundle to advertisers.

What did YouTube just do with “Geek Week?”

1. Collect a group of channels together to make content.
2. Sell that bundle to advertisers.

The only difference is that Machinima and Maker can’t put their promotion in the *logo* of every single YouTube page.

If you work for, or have invested in, Maker, Machinima or another MCN (multichannel network) you should understand that YouTube is taking your business out from under you RIGHT NOW!

YouTube doesn’t need MCNs, they’re using MCN innovations -- like collaborations and group sales -- and putting them to work against their own editorial calendar!!!

MCNs are toast.

They’re done.

YouTube is killing them.


Five Reasons Why You Should Not Do This
================================
There are a couple of thing to keep in mind about the “build in another ecosystem argument. Let’s dissect each one.

1. They’re watching you -- closely: If you’re building inside of Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, they are watching you closely. You’re connecting via their APIs in all likelihood, and they can see everything that’s working. Also, your clients are their clients, so the second they hear 10 of your shared clients talking about your awesome new feature X, they are putting it on their road map.

It’s like playing poker with someone better than you and the person knowing your hole cards. You. Can’t. Win.

2. You’re doing free R&D for them: Not only are they studying you, they’re also studying the 20 other schmucks building on their platform. Since none of you know what will work, you’re all testing things -- so they don’t have to!

If you build a tool to help folks do commerce on YouTube -- and I’ve seen a half-dozen of these businesses -- and it works, they’re going to make it native. Not only that, they’re going to look at the five or six players doing it and pick the best features of each.

3. The harder you work and more successful you are, the faster their base grows: This is the biggest reason to not invest in tools and services around another company. As Tweetdeck, Seesmic and countless other Twitter clients built cooler and cooler features, they didn’t benefit from them -- Twitter did! Their features made Twitter accounts more valuable -- not the client’s. The value aggregates to the one who has the direct relationship with the customer.

A couple of bargain-basement purchases occurred; we saw this with Twitter buying clients like Tweetdeck, but to be honest I think those were a PR cover. Twitter did it because it looked good and it might have saved them a couple of months of work.

4 & 5. They will change the rules & converting is hard: Facebook changed the rules on “partners” over and over again, extracting more and more value from the ecosystem until even the mighty Zynga was crippled. Mark Pincus, a brilliant strategist, couldn’t convert the largest Facebook audience off the platform to his domain name.


But Jason, They’ll Buy Us!
====================
I hear this all the time: "If we build something really valuable Facebook will just buy us!" That’s certainly a possibility, but on the small chance they do, here is how your negotiation will go:

Zuckerberg: “Thanks for taking the meeting, we think what you’re doing is neat and we want to buy your company for X.”

Founder: “That’s great Mr. Zuckerberg, but X is actually half of what our investors put into the company, and if we accept X our investors will be screwed and the common share will get nothing.”

Zuck: “F@#$K your investors, I’ll give you a great salary and some nice equity.... plus we have free Philz coffee. Plus, if you don’t take it we will build a better version of your product for 50% of X and push it to 1B people.”

Founder: “Wow... that’s great! Now I can screw the investors who believed in us and work on some obscure advertising feature, crush my dreams and hate my life. Sign me up!”

Building your business to be bought by someone who can rebuild your product better than you can and distribute it to 10,000x your user base puts you in a really bad negotiating position.

It almost never works out.

Bottom line: A wise person once told me it takes the same amount of effort to build a small company as a big one.

In other words, if you’re a great entrepreneur, you’re putting 100% of your life into your startup. If you do this on your own platform or another, it’s still 100%.

For my money, it’s better to go after the big prize -- being your own platform -- than to spin your wheels being a monkey in someone else’s.

I learned this the hard way, and I’m never going back. Mahalo.com was built inside of Google Search and YouTube, and in both cases we had huge success ($10m run rate, 15m+ uniques) only to get crushed in the jaws of the giant exogorth.

And that’s not exactly how stupid I was! In fact, I got crushed by Google over their search update one year and the very next year did a deal with YouTube expecting a different result.

What an idiot I am!

Don’t be an idiot like I was!

Getting your startup crushed in the teeth of a giant sucks. Years of work that could have been spent building your own, perhaps slower growth, startup is a much better deal.

My next startup, Inside.com, is built specifically on technologies that Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter can’t own or control. You know, base-level stuff like email, domain names, phone numbers, a trusted brand, some massive consumer value and mobile apps.

Startup Advisor Equity

Founder Institute has handy system for come up with the short answer at this link.
They figure the range from .15% to 1.0% depending on the level of contribution and the stage of development of the startup.

The smart people on Quora.com give a range of .25% to 7.0%. It depends on how much value they bring to your startup.  Search Quora for Advisor Equity.

The Startup Toolkit suggests a normal range of .5% to 2.0%.

These are all guidelines, but of course all of life is a negotiation!

Testing: Big Five

To learn about the Big Five (free, anonymous) personality test, 

read more on the Wikipedia page.

Take this psychology test to find out about your (and your potential hires') personality! This test measures what many psychologists consider to be the five fundamental dimensions of personality.

• Learn more about the Big Five by reading answers to commonly asked questions.
• Read the consent form, which explains the benefits of this free, anonymous test and your rights.
• There are no "right" or "wrong" answers, but note that you will not obtain meaningful results unless you answer the questions seriously.
• These results are being used in scientific research, so please try to give accurate answers.
• Your results will be displayed as soon as you submit your answers.

I took the test last week, and here are the results:

50 Ways Ordinary People Get World-Class

1. Know what you want. Clarity is power. And vague goals promote vague results.
2. Remember that every problem has a solution. Maybe you just can’t see it. Yet.
3. In this Age of Dramatic Distraction, the performer who focuses the best wins the most.
4. Before someone will help you, you need to help them.
5. Become the most passionate person you know. It’ll be contagious.
6. Know more about your craft/the work you do than anyone who has ever done the work you do…in the history of the world.
7. Join The 5 am Club. Your most valuable hours are 5am-8am. They have the least interruptions.
8. Devote yourself to learning something new about your field of mastery every day. Success belongs to the relentless learners. Because as you know more, you can achieve more.
9. Remember that when you transform your fitness, you’ll transform your business.
10. Don’t check your mobile when you’re meeting with another person. It’s rude. And rude people don’t reach world-class.
11. Every time you do what scares you, you take back the power that you gave to the thing that scared you. And so you become more powerful.
12. A problem is only a problem if you make the choice to see it as a problem.
13. Stop being a victim. Your business and personal life was made by you. No one else is responsible. To make it better, make better choices. And new decisions.
14. You can lead without a title. Don’t wait to get a position to stand for excellence, peak quality and overdelivery on every expectation.
15. Find your own style. Be an original. Every superstar differentiated themselves from The Herd. And marched to their own drumbeat.
16. Understand that when you play small with your success, you betray your potential. And the birthright you were born under.
17. Eat less food and you’ll get more done.
18. As you become more successful, stay really really hungry. Nothing fails like success. Because when you’re successful, it’s easy to stop outlearning+outOverDelivering+outthinking and outexecuting everyone around you. (Success is Beautiful. And dangerous).
19. If you’re not overprepared, you’re underprepared.
20. The only level of great manners to play at is “Exceedingly Polite”. In our world, this alone will make you a standout. And differentiate you in your marketplace.
21. Remember that the moment you think you’re a Master, you lose your Mastery. And the minute you think you know everything, you know nothing.
22. To double your results, double your level of execution.
23. Invest in your personal and pro development. All superstars do.
24. You don’t get lucky. You create lucky.
25. When you push through a difficult project, you don’t get to the other side. You reach The Next Level.
26. Smile. And remember to inform your face.
27. Spend time in solitude every day. Your best ideas live there.
28. Debrief on how you lived out your day every night in a journal. This will not only record your personal history, it will make you uber-clear on what you’re doing right and what needs to be improved.
29. If you're not being criticized a lot, you’re not doing very much. Ridicule is the price of ambition.
30. Develop a monomaniacal focus on just a few things. The secret to productivity is simplicity.
31. To get the results very few people have, be strong enough to do what very few people are willing to do.
32. Rest. Recover. It’ll make you stronger.
33. Buy a smaller TV and build a larger library.
34. Remember that the bigger the goal, the stronger a person you must become to achieve that goal. So goal-achieving is a superb practice for character-building.
35. Food fuels your body. Learning feeds your mind.
36. Don’t ask for respect. Earn it.
37. Finish what you start. And always end strong.
38. Breathe.
39. In business, don’t play to survive. Play to win.
40. Protect your good name. It’s your best asset.
41. Remember that words have power. Use the language of leadership versus the vocabulary of a victim.
42. Give more than you take. The marketplace rewards generosity.
43. Know that if it’s not messy, you’re not making progress.
44. Be a hero to a kid.
45. In business, aim for iconic. Go for legendary. Make history by how awesome you are at what you do.
46. Please don’t confuse activity with productivity. Many many people are simply busy being busy.
47. Your doubts are liars. Your fears are traitors. Stop buying the goods they are attempting to sell you.
48. The best anti-aging remedy in the world is working really hard.
49. World-Class performers have no plan B. Failure just isn’t an option.
50. You have the power to change the world—one brave act and one person at a time. Please use it.

(Robin Sharma via Quora)

Never Hire Friends or Family

A very successful serial entrepreneur gave a talk recently and this was one of his screens.  Under "Building The Team", the second point, after Trustworthy, is listed "Never Hire Friends or Family".  You rarely see it so unequivocally stated, or with such a high priority, but there it is.

The phrase "Friends or Family" is the term used to describe the first source for funding for startups.

Therefore, when it comes to Friends and Family, it's OK to take their investment money, but don't hire them.