A VC focuses on…
1. Track Record – Your successes.
2. Proof of Concept – Your product.
3. Team – Your people.
4. Idea – Your vision.
… in that order
… in Serbia.
(Source: Milos, a cool guy who managed to sell a food service startup in Serbia.)
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Kevin Chiu
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Kevin Chiu
Someone do this startup idea!
Problem
In New York City, subways and buses are cheap, convenient, but not as plentiful as taxis.Solution
Taxi drivers should organize and have routes, making a distributed bus-like system. People save money, taxis save gas, time, and make more money per trip.It’s a win-win solution!
(I pitched this to a taxi driver today and told him to go do it.)
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Kevin Chiu
Microsoft and Facebook Hook Up
Microsoft just invested $240 million in Facebook for rights to be the sole advertiser on the social networking site. Microsoft’s 1.6 percent stake would put Facebook’s valuation at $15 billion, ignoring Microsoft’s expected profits from advertising, which I am sure must have been really high, or such a huge investment would not have been approved.
Via Business Week
Facebook is visiting Columbia tomorrow!
Update: And now they have my pizza-stained resume.
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Kevin Chiu
Actually Useful?
I’ve noticed an influx of people looking for my short paper on Procrastination. I would love to hear from you if you find it useful!
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VinceP
Kevin, I just wanted to say thanks for the article. Although short, it strikes right at the heart of procrastination, and I really think it's a common sense approach to what is a VERY stressful problem. Being overwhelmed or bored into inaction is a state that, once it becomes severe, is very hard to shake. The simple solutions you offered are key for me and, along with tracking my time usage in a detailed way (including just being honest and tracking the times I procrastinated), should help me stay out of the inaction tarpit in the future.
Anyone reading this should realize that it might seem silly to have this problem (or to just admit that one has this problem), but if you ever stretch yourself (or even just think about stretching yourself – we all dream), you WILL hit this at some point.
Having just gone through an intense period of this myself, all I can recommend is just being honest about it instead of ashamed. Recognize it for what it is, and make a plan to get out of that state as soon as possible. Letting it fester can actually turn into a “job changing event”, if you know what I mean.
Kevin, a suggestion / though for the article – Your paper didn't address the 'Bored' side of the procrastination graph. One is bored because the perceived difficulty of the tasks is much lower than one's perceived abilities. My suggestion there is to make the boring work interesting by either a) reducing the boring task into chunks like you suggest then make the completion of each chunk a semi-competitive game or b) find a way to automate the boring work by using a more interesting way to work – so for example modifying 100 XML files by hand (for a webmaster for example), would be very boring but learning how to automate that with a short script would be much more fun.
FYI – I found your paper through the links on Wikipedia in the procrastination entry.
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Kevin Chiu
Less is More
I was going to keep this idea a secret, but since it would most likely benefit the online community if I release this to the blogosphere, that is what I will do.
Online advertisement companies, Google et al., need to realize something about advertisement and social capital. Building up a readership involves being a trusted source of information that presents itself if a clear and concise way.
Ads are annoying, even if they are relevant. They trade the social capital a visitor has invested into your site into cold, hard cash.
Ming Jack Po 4:51 am on September 22, 2008 Permalink
not quite. Check David's great talk on TED.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_s_rose…
Kevin Chiu 11:27 am on September 22, 2008 Permalink
Yeah, saw that talk. I should add an addendum to my article… (only applicable in Serbia).