Just Raised Money! Vacation Must be Due...

Fundraising isn’t easy and we entrepreneurs keep ourselves motivated by mentally promising that everything will go back to normal afterwards. This is, in fact, not often true. Here’s a quick anecdote from a CEO who just raised an A round, which is generally pretty representative.

Startuup Tailwind

The Αsymetric Νature of Startup Employee Performance

Much like startup performance follows a power law, so do startup employees. The most effective employees create 20x more leverage than an average employee. This is not true in an efficiency company — the best employees might work 2x faster than their peers.

Apperances aside, you mostly want stars to work for you. 

Read more on what Herny Ward has to say on the issue here.

The Increasingly Blurred Lines of Being Employed

There’s no argument that the current on-demand economy is highly challenging. Whereas a decade ago, workers in the U.S. and Europe worried about jobs being outsourced overseas, today’s companies, such as Upwork and Bench.co, can assemble teams “in the cloud” to provide sales and customer support, help with editorial work, conduct research and perform many other tasks. New digital platforms are beginning to act as real-time global online staffing agencies, but staffing agencies that bridge borders and integrate the global workforce at levels never seen before. Meanwhile, coordination platforms like Uber and Shyp are multiplying almost daily, powered by smart synchronization algorithms that can route tasks to those who are best qualified and available to perform them.

 

On Demand is In Demand

The danger is that we will use old classifications, like W-2 (wage -based employment) and 1099 (non-wage based employment), to solve problems that are unique to this new work landscape, laying groundwork for polarization and years-long legal battles.

More on the issue by Marina Gorbis & Devin Fidler.

Self-Sensoring: Facebook Knows Better

Facebook’s business model is founded on the monetization of its user data for various marketing purposes including market research and targeted advertising. As a result, a user signing up to use Facebook must agree to the SNS’ terms of usage and data use policy. By doing do, a user gives Facebook permission to monitor and track pretty much everything that they do or store on the site including their profile, postings, photos, friends, and likes. 

While many users may be aware of this, most don’t realize Facebook’s data collection policy is actually so aggressive that it even tracks information that a user “self-sensors” such as posts that a user types but decide not to post. Regardless, many are being put-off by what they consider to be a blatant invasion of their privacy.

A recent survey conducted by a market research Eircom shows that 48.3% of the users that have quit using Facebook did so due to privacy concerns. In the meantime, the SNS keeps growing in absolute numbers and in 2015 is expected to surpass China as the largest "coutry" in the world.

Marketing With Spice

100-page-long marketing plans packed with detailed forecasts and spurious assumptions just don't make sense in the world of startups that have to churn out minimum valuable products (MVPs) and build a customer base under immense time pressure. 

After all, the main tenet behind this forum is that marketing and growing a young business is about trying, tasting, adjusting, and trying again. The market is your kitchen; your ideas are your ingredients; your products are your dishes. While preparing your marketing plan, we have found that these 7tips are just the right spices to use!

So, listen closely, engage, measure, address, fix, delight, remain patient, and repeat again until you get it right.

The Science of the Future?

It’s that archetypal scene from “The Graduate”. But instead of “plastics,” the hot field is “data science.” And the career advice would seem to be well founded. A Harvard Business Review article of 2012 dubbed the field, “The Sexiest Profession Alive.”

According to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute, there will be almost half a million data science jobs in five years and a shortage of up to 190,000 qualified data scientists, plus a need for 1.5 million executives and support staff who have an understanding of data. Institutions of higher learning have responded. In 2013, a handful of universities began offering data science courses, some leading to degrees in the field.

Read more on here.

18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently

Creativity works in mysterious and often paradoxical ways. Creative thinking is a stable, defining characteristic in some personalities, but it may also change based on situation and context. Inspiration and ideas often arise seemingly out of nowhere and then fail to show up when we most need them, and creative thinking requires complex cognition yet is completely distinct from the thinking process.

Carolyn Gregoire explains how here.

The Technology Haiku

Technology develops

from the primitive

via the complex

to the simple

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

On The Share Economy

AirBnB on the "share economy" on Charlie Rose:

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Starting And Running A Business

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Starting And Running A Business (in the US)

Read James Altucher's concentrate here.

We are not sure about #22 or #57 (at least in the medium turn) but the rest will save you a lot of time pondering on the essential decisions entrepreneurs face while starting a business.