Friday, December 12, 2014

Top 10 Lies of Entrepreneurs (and Investors)


By Guy Kawasaki
Read these two sets of top ten lies: one of entrepreneurs and one of investors, so that you know what not to say and what not to believe.

Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs
  1. "Our projections are conservative."
  2. "Jupiter says our market will be $50 billion in ten years."
  3. "Several Fortune 500 companies are set to do business with us."
  4. "No one else can do what we're doing."
  5. "Hurry up because other investors are about to do our deal."
  6. "Our product will go viral."
  7. "The large companies in our market are too big, dumb, and slow to compete with us."
  8. "Our management team is proven."
  9. "We filed patents so our intellectual property is protected."
  10. "All we have to do is get 1% of the market."
The average number of these ten lies that I hear in most pitches is ten. At the very least, tell investors new lies.


Wednesday, December 10, 2014

The $7 Israeli device that just might change the world forever

Screen Shot 2014-09-02 at 11.27.58 PM
The $7 device is loaded with Google’s Android 4.4 operating system. Plug it into the USB port of any old laptop or desktop, and you’ve got a personal computer.
If you can put data on a USB drive, why not put an entire operating system on a stick?
It’s a simple but brilliant idea. Nissan Bahar of Israel and Francesco (Franky) Imbesi of Italy are making it happen in remote places of the world where computers aren’t a dime a dozen. They discovered that five billion people, or 70% of the world’s population, have no access to personal computing, and they intend to change that. 
The $7 Keepod thumb drive is loaded with a unique version of Google’s Android 4.4 operating system. Plug it into the USB port of any old laptop, netbook or desktop, and – voila! – you’ve got a personal computer with your own password-protected settings, programs and files.
Bahar and Imbesi have introduced the Keepod (Hebrew for “porcupine” but with obvious wordplay in English) to a school in the Mathare slums of Nairobi, Kenya, through a partnership with the organization LiveInSlums. They use refurbished computers that would otherwise clog landfills.
“We’re breaking a few paradigms in the world of computing and digital devices,” says Bahar.

Sunday, December 7, 2014

4 Steps To Increasing Your Emotional Agility

English: Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions
English: Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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It may be cliché but the saying that “attitude is contagious” is true. How you, your team, or your leader shows up is everything—inspiring or depressing, happy or sad, tense or terse. Managing emotions and applying them to the right situation is critical to expression, communication, and mission success.

Navigating relationships is a necessity everywhere in life as divergent interests and scarce resources are always at play, and it requires strong situational awareness to know when to zig instead of zag depending on the personalities you’re dealing with.

To navigate the chaos of communication and relationships requires emotional agility , or the ability to apply the right emotion to the right person in the right situation at the right time. Here’s how:
Understand the situation. Context is everything. To be situationally aware is to interpret the inter- and intra-personal emotions within a group and to integrate your understanding of both with any previously held schemas so as to anticipate the situation’s outcome. Four questions to consider in developing your situational awareness are:
  • Who is involved? Why?
  • What is the activity or situation? Why?
  • When does the activity take place? Why?
  • Where will the activity occur? Why?
The key to the above four questions is to follow-up each one with a “why?” This way, you force your brain to search for an answer to the context, thus forcing yourself to interpret and anticipate situational dynamics.