Aditya Kothadiya’s Blog

As I always say, opportunities are always abundant. Especially in this highly dynamic world, there is always something very exciting, very innovative or very valuable things are going around. And you always want to be a part of it.

For example, you always want to attend conferences like Word Economic Forus – Davos, Demo, The Crunchies, etc.

For early stage startups, you always want to compete in competitions like Y Combinator or TechStars or Android Developer Challenge.

There are always various networking events those are happening in Silicon Valley. There are always experienced entrepreneurs or senior professionals are ready to guide budding entrepreneurs. There is always a new technology invention or innovative idea that you want to start.

There is always something you want to do, and probably you can do.

But the real question in all these scenarios is not if you can or want to do all these things or not. The real question is – if you are really ready to do all these things or not.

I think, if you are not ready with appropriate objectives, then attending networking events or conferences will not make positive differences. You will rather waste your time if you are not sure what you want to achieve from any event or conference.

Similarly, if you are not very clear about what exactly you want to ask help for, then you will waste both of your advisor’s and your time.

If you are not going to continue working on a project that you won in the competition, then it might be waste of your time. Sure, you learned many things, but there might be other important things from your plate that you could have completed and learned as well. Just because there is a competition, and just because you can compete, do you really want to compete?

Sure, you also want to start a startup. But are you really ready to jump in? Are you sure about your financial debt situation? How about your family obligations? And how about your legal immigration issues? Are you really ready to sacrifice your comfort zone and slog day and night?

In all these examples, I’m just trying to discuss one point – if you are really not ready to do what you want to do, then do not jump to start just because you can do. It might be worthwhile to postpone your action and focus on some other important issue. But if you think you are ready, then just go for it. With full throttle speed!

My friend shared a great thought with me –

You should work for a company where you are more excited about Sunday evenings than Friday ones.

Very well said.

How about you? Which evenings do you love more? Friday or Sunday?

If you love Friday evenings more than the Sunday ones, then I think it’s a good time to introspect a little bit. Just ask following few questions to yourself. I think it will be a good exercise.

• What is that about your work that you hate most on Sunday evenings?
• Do you think you are not passionate enough about your work?
• If you hate Sunday evenings, then is it that you need a change?
• Or is it something that you can work upon to bring excitement in your current work?

Just discuss these question with yourself. I’m sure you will find some good conclusions.

On a side note, I guess many of you will not agree to this philosophy. You may argue that –

"We want balance between work and life. We don’t want to be a workaholic. And that’s why we need a break, and that’s why we love Fridays."

If you are thinking on the above lines, then you are misunderstanding the whole concept. If you read it carefully, you will notice that I asked – which evenings  do you love "more"?

I’m not saying you should not love Friday evenings. It’s just that, work for a company where you are passionate and excited about your job. I think you will start loving Sundays more than Friday ones, instead of hating them.

Have an excited week ahead!

Targeted Audience: Entrepreneurs

Background: Whenever I stumble upon any compelling article related to
Startup or Entrepreneurship topics, I link those resources in my blog.

Jason Goldberg is writing an interesting series on his blog – Lessons Learned From Startup CEOs. I read few posts from that series, and here are my favorite learning notes.

Jason Goldberg, Founder, ex-CEO of JobSter

The CEO’s job is to create value.  Determine early on what the keys to value creation are in your industry and map a path for value creation for your business.   Return often to measure how you are or are not creating value.  Weigh business decisions based on whether they contribute to value creation or not. Avoid paths that do not contribute to value creation regardless of how sexy or fun they might be.  Narrow the focus as much as possible.  Get one thing right then move on to the next.

Try to ride some powerful existing waves vs. just creating new waves.  Find some big and important industry trends and ride on top of them. It is very very hard to create your own industry trends.  Be careful about getting out too far ahead of any wave.

Technology companies are all about the product. Getting the product right is critical before aggressively going to market. 

Have fun.  Everyone looks to the CEO everyday to set their own moods and expectations.  Being CEO can be lonely — someone once said to me that CEO is the loneliest job in the world as there are days that your board hates you, your employees hate you, your customers hate you, and your family hates you — true.  That’s why you need to make sure to have fun every step along the way.  If you are having fun, people will see that and they will follow your energy.  Remember, behind every wrong turn is a better path.  And remember, that the beauty of startups is that you get to try, try, try again and again and learn a ton along the way.

Jonathan Abrams, Founder, CEO, and Junior Computer Programmer at Socializr

Focus is difficult but crucial. Until your product is complete, your technology solid, your customers or users happy, and your sales or traffic growing and near critical mass, most other things do not matter. A startup CEO can waste a lot of time on premature marketing, business development, partnerships, PR, consultants, board maintenance, etc. before the company is really ready for those things.

Hire based on passion, not resumes. If you attract candidates based on your prestigious investors, be wary. If you lose candidates because you don’t have prestigious investors, they weren’t the people who you needed anyways.

A startup can get more done in the same amount of time than a large company, and needs to, but a startup is still more like a marathon than a sprint. Things will still take longer than you expect to get done, and you will make mistakes. Making mistakes is ok, as long as you get more things right than wrong each week, and correct the things you get wrong. Avoid irreversible mistakes.

Losing control of a startup to investors puts founders and common shareholders in a vulnerable position and may not improve the company’s execution or increase the company’s chances of success. Surrendering the corporate governance of a company to the wrong people is typically an irreversible mistake.

For a software or Internet company, overall execution depends on engineering execution in the first few years — make sure your stuff works! A technical founder should stay involved in the technology until it does.

To read more lessons from more startup CEOs, read Jason Goldberg’s blog – Social Median.

Note: To read more articles from this series, please visit Startup and Entrepreneurship Resources.

I want to share a quick tip about improving your efficiency of getting things done that I learned from my colleague while working on a project. 

I already mentioned the power of creating to-do lists in regards to getting things done. But getting things done is not the only thing that we want. We also want to complete the tasks in a timely manner. And that’s why our conventional approach of just listing down the tasks in a to-do list is not enough. Here are two important tricks that you can add to your daily to-do list creation process to increase your efficiency –

1. Assign approximate required time to complete a particular task.
You don’t have to be accurate while assigning the required time. Make a reasonable guess.

2. Assign a failsafe action.
Failsafe action is basically deciding what will be your immediate next action item in case you fail to complete the task in required time period. When you fail to complete the task, first you may want to evaluate your progress. If you think you are closed to the completion, then you might want to continue working on the same task. But if you find that you haven’t done significant progress, then you might want to act on a failsafe action.

Example:
If you want to solve a bug, then you would assign say 2 hrs to find the issue. And the failsafe action you will assign to it would be – discuss the issue with supervisor. So if you fail to debug that issue in 2 hrs, and if you haven’t really made significant progress, then you may want to talk to your supervisor and get some hints to proceed with debugging. You don’t want to just keep trying and not measuring how much time you are investing in debugging just one issue.

I hope these simple tricks will help you to get things done in a timely manner.

Have a super productive week ahead.

StartupComics is a comic strip series about life of would be entrepreneurs towards their journey of starting their own startup. These comics are drawn on PostIt notes.

Note: To read more strips from this comic series, please visit: StartupComics

#1. My brain is an interesting organ. It starts working the moment I get up in the morning and does not stop until I get into the office. 

#2. I’ve not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. — Thomas A. Edison

#3. My Dad gave me a gold locket. It’s fake. I requested fake. Maybe I’m paranoid, but in this day and age, I don’t want something around my neck that’s worth more than my head.  (Inspired by – Rita Rudner)

#4. Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it. — Walter Chrysler

#5. Hard work never killed anybody, but why should I take a chance?

Have a joyful weekend ahead!

Note: To read more Funny Quotes from this series, please visit: Funny Quotes

Andrew Chen at Futuristic Play asks a question – Are you a product fanatic?

I think yes, I am.

To answer this question, he mentioend generic characterisitics of product fanatics as below. I have marked those things which I recognize doing most of the times.

1. You think MySpace is soooo ugly => It’s horrible.

2. You only use the best products:
Macbook Pro => Well, not Pro, but regular Macbook
Mac OS X => Yes, I love it.
Firefox => Firefox Fan!
Gmail => I thought that’s the only option we have in Webbased email services ;-)
Google Maps => It’s supercool!
Facebook => Those guys are geniuses.

3. You never use the popular products:
Dell => Had this laptop, errr..deskop before! Thank God I switched to Mac!
Windows => Avoid it as much as possible.
IE => IE Means PopUps!
Yahoo Mail => Okay, I lied earlier. I know Yahoo Mail. But it’s too slow!
Mapquest => Hey, I live in Web2.0 World.
MySpace => I still have my senses.

4. You try out new sites and judge them based on their features and functionality => Sometimes yes.

5. You assess a site’s quality based on if it’s written in Ruby versus Java => Not really.

6. You like things simple, functional, and uncluttered – cuz what else would you want? => Exactly!

7. You think your startup’s "secret sauce" is in the technology, or platform, or programming language (LISP!) => Dont’ think so for the most of the times.

8. You don’t require users to give you their emails, because it’s not what you’d want as a user => Nopes! I want it.

9. You say things like, "Just build something people want" => Yeah, and what they want – the fun stuff! Believe me!

10. You secretly worship Steve Jobs :-) => Truely. Now it is no more a secrete.

So I think I’m a product fanatic.

And with this conclusion, I also take Andrew’s advice for not becoming too fanatical about product

• I totally understood now that, Product fanaticism != User fanaticism.
•  I do overlook innovations in other places because of my product fanaticism. I will try to improve that.
•  I will also take atmost care that my product fanaticism don’t lead to beautiful and empty websites.

Thanks Andrew, for this great learning!

Today morning I received an email from Dreamhost, the web hosting company about my billing reminder. It was like –

This is just a notice that your DreamHost Account #xxxxxx has a balance of $xxx.xx (including any charges not due until 2009-01-18), with $xxx.xx due (since 2008-12-18).

You also have $xxx.xx past due (owed since 2008-11-18), and if by 2009-01-18 you do not pay at least the $xxx.xx part, your account will be automatically suspended until payment is received.

At a first glance, I was totally confused because I didn’t understand  why they are charging me for the next year? Then after re-reading it, I thought this has to be a blunder in their billing system.

But before I contact them and show my frustration, they sent me a following reply. It was very nice.

Through a COMPLETE bumbling on our part, we’ve accidentally attempted to charge you for the ENTIRE year of 2008 (and probably 2009!) ALREADY (it was all due to a fat finger)!

We’re really really really embarassed about this, but you have nothing to worry about. Please ignore any confusing billing messages you may have received recently; we’ve already removed all those bum future charges on your account and fixed everything up.

Thank you very very much for your patience with this.. we PROMISE this won’t happen again. There’s no need to reply to this message unless of course you have any other questions at all!

Sincerely,
The Foolish DreamHost Billing Team!

I really liked the way they handled it. I totally forgot my frustration because of the funny tone of their message. And I want to thank them for making me laugh. Kudos to their support team!

Update: Techcrunch has a post on the same issue.

I just read a fascinating list of commandments of web startup at Web 2.0 (Entrepreneurs) Facebook Group. I’m not 100% sure who is the creator of these commandments, but based on the comment on the group’s homepage, I guess it’s Mark Fletcher, Founder of Bloglines.

These are very useful thoughts that I highly recommend for everyone to read, even if you are not starting a Web 2.0 startup.

I have highlighted my favorite truths below.

25 Truths about Startup That We Should Know

1. Your idea isn’t new. Pick an idea; at least 50 other people have thought of it. Get over your stunning brilliance and realize that execution matters more.

2. Stealth startups suck. You’re not working on the Manhattan Project, Einstein. Get something out as quickly as possible and promote the hell out of it.

3. If you don’t have scaling problems, you’re not growing fast enough.

4. If you’re successful, people will try to take advantage of you. Hope that you’re in that position, and hope that you’re smart enough to not fall for it.

5. People will tell you they know more than you do. If that’s really the case, you shouldn’t be doing your startup.

6. Your competition will inflate their numbers. Take any startup traffic number and slash it in half. At least.

7. Perfection is the enemy of good enough. Leonardo could paint the Mona Lisa only once. You, Bob Ross, can push a bug release every 5 minutes because you were at least smart enough to do a web app.

8. The size of your startup is not a reflection of your manhood. More employees does not make you more of a man (or woman as the case may be).

9. You don’t need business development people. If you’re successful, companies will come to you. The deals will still be distractions and not worth doing, but at least you’re not spending any effort trying to get them.

10. You have to be wrong in the head to start a company. But we have all the fun.

11. Starting a company will teach you what it’s like to be a manic depressive. They, at least, can take medication.

12. Your startup isn’t succeeding? You have two options: go home with your tail between your legs or do something about it. What’s it going to be?

13. If you don’t pay attention to your competition, they will turn out to be geniuses and will crush you. If you do pay attention to them, they will turn out to be idiots and you will have wasted your time. Which would you prefer?

14. Startups are not a democracy. Want a democracy? Go run for class president, Bueller.

15. You’re doing a web app, right? This isn’t the 1980s. Your crummy, half-assed web app will still be more successful than your competitor’s most polished software application.

16. You will have at least one catastrophe every three months.

17. Outsource effectively, or be effectively outsourced.

18. Do you thrive on stress and ambiguity? You’d better.

19. The best way to get outside funding is to be successful already. Stupid but true. But you, cheapskate, don’t need money, right?

20. People will think your idea sucks. They’re even probably right. The only way to prove them wrong is to succeed.

21. A startup will require your complete attention and devotion. Thought your first love in High School was clingy? You can’t take out a restraining order on your startup.

22. Being an entrepreneur requires a healthy amount of ignorance. Note I did not say stupidity.

23. Your software sucks. So what. Everyone else’s does also, and re-architecting is the kiss of death for a startup. Startups are no place for architecture astronauts.

24. You do have a public API, right?

25. Abject Terror. Overwhelming Joy. Monstrous Greed. Embrace and harness these emotions you must.

Have a great weekend you budding entrepreneurs!

StartupComics is a new comic strip series about life of would be entrepreneurs towards their journey of starting their own startup. These comics are drawn on PostIt notes.

As I am traveling the journey of starting a startup, I thought of depicting the funny moments I experience along this journey into comics. As I want to focus my
part time energy more on starting a startup than drawing comic strips, I plan to create one strip per week, or as time permits.

Here is the first strip:

I hope you will enjoy this series. If you have some thoughts, or ideas
to create these strips, then please email me your inputs at
aditya.kothadiya AT gmail DOT com. I will take inspiration from your
inputs and will try to create a strip for next week.