What not to read as an entrepreneur

Do you feel inundated every morning? How can we focus when our world is full of so much stuff?

The amount of information we create every year is now in the zettabytes, which is 10 to the power of 26. Frankly, a lot of that information sucks. Case in point, Twitter, the blood of the internet, is testing a new feature that will curate your feed automatically based upon previous web page visits. This change is the catch-22 of a successful internet company: incredibly viral, scalable, addicting, and often full of irrelevant information. 

While information is being created at an explosive rate, quality is definitely not correlated. Not everything we put on the internet is a gem. For an entrepreneur, there are endless opportunities to learn be distracted. The high amount of noise makes it difficult to delineate what is valuable and what is not. 

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Is Winter coming? Naw, its just a cold.

Facebook is up this week. :-0

No, you are not in the Twilight zone. 

Since Paul Graham’s doomsday letter was sent to his portfolio, the mood in the Valley has felt a little muggy and snickery about Facebook’s “failed” IPO. Entrepreneurs and investors fear Winter 2.0 has arrived with several publicly traded tech firms are trading depressingly low and failed tech IPOs continue to mount. 

At this time when $FB is looking up, a little perspective is needed on the markets.

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Employees, think like an investor

This week, I am visiting my family in Texas. I decided to take break from the insanity of buzzwords and ideas with no gravity that is prolific in the Valley.

I discussed my life in the Valley with my family and what it is like to work in a startup. My parents, as most Americans, worked their way up the corporate latter to a title that starts with a “C”. I described the “startup mentality” and they replied:

“The point of working a lot in a startup is there is not enough people to go around. There is too much work to do. You don’t just work hard for no reason.”

When I hear a friend who joined a large startup company and is working crazy hours for below market pay because of a “startup mentality” or “startup culture”, I scratch my head. The phrase “we are a startup” seems to be used as an excuse for underpaying and over-working employees, so does it make sense to be an employee at a startup? According to most prominent investors in tech, the answer is no.

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How to be a great entrepreneur: sleep, breaks and a spouse

When I moved out to Silicon Valley, I heard it was the best time in my life to take a risky decision, work insane hours, and do something stupid, like start a tech company. Among tech entrepreneurs, there is a strong bias towards the single lifestyle for the sake of focus and an obsession pride of working 80 hours a week, but the data suggests these biases are wrong. 

Last year, it was hotly debated among VCs and the tech media whether or not there was an optimal age to start a company, similar to how professional athletes plateau (lets pretend Jordan and Jason Kidd don’t exist). The mid-twenties was proposed to be the optimal age to start a company. At 25, entrepreneurs can give “everything to their company”, suggesting that founders should not be “hamstrung” by families and non-business related commitments. They can take as much risk as possible. While heuristically this may feel true being stuck in the Silicon Valley bubble, there is convincing evidence to suggested the opposite is true. 

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