March 1st, 2012 § Comments Off on Business Advice: Your Next Board Member Should Be A Woman § permalink
Image via Wikipedia
Even after 50 years of intensive fights, this gender inequality persists, almost everywhere in the World.
I believe it still exists for two reasons:
- the current, male-dominated, business environment is ‘good enough’ to provide society with whatever it needs. so the amount of energy going into changing it is limited.
- there is a qualitative difference in how man interact with other man vs. women, specially at the age in which most startup founders are these days.
because of these two ‘facts’, some would say, is it really a ‘problem’. i’d say it’s evidently out-of-balance, but to figure out what exactly is broken here, we have to dig deeper.
Good questions have been asked lately of tech companies without gender diversity on their boards of directors.
[…]
If you’re not aware, studies also show companies with gender diversity at the top drive better financial performance on multiple measures – for example, 36% better stock price growth and 46% better return on equity. And, studies show the more women, the better the results.
[…]
Mike Maroone, AutoNation’s President and COO explained, “We looked at our board [and realized] it’s male dominated, while women make over 50% of the purchasing decisions in our business. And, the travel, music and news industries have been transformed by digital. We’re trying to transform the auto business and connect with the thinking of the digital generation, and we need this level of insight at the board level.â€
via: techcrunch.com
Image via Wikipedia
What might significantly change the way businessman look at gender inequality, and possibly classify it as a problem worth solving, is exactly this kind of research – pragmatic, practical, common sense even. if we are not employing women, we are by definition missing opportunities.
if you are in the business of making money, you are potentially vulnerable to competitors who understand the other half of the market better.
if you are in the business of changing the world, you have no chance to actually do so on your own.
now, my wife did an observation, that given how male-dominant the business is, any woman to actually make it to the top had to be 100x better than any man, so it’s no surprise that those companies are doing better.
wouldn’t it be great if the fate of the economy didn’t rely entirely on statistical luck?
February 29th, 2012 § Comments Off on Could crowdsourcing be a better way to make legislation? § permalink
yes! yes! yes!
Crowdsourcing has proven to be a pretty good way to accomplish things that require a lot of input from different people, including the creation of encyclopedias and the financing of personal projects such as movies and comic books. But could it be used to create legislation as well?
via: gigaom.com
but really, to actually get there, we need more transparency. basically, that’s the hope behind the open data movement right? if all the data is open, and real-time controlled using automated agents, then everyone can help on decision making. if all data is distilled to transparent chunks of information, then the politics is cleansed back to relationships management, without deceit or manipulation.
the challenge is not so much collection of information anymore, but figuring out when to present which.
February 22nd, 2012 § § permalink
Image via Wikipedia
this is really amazing document. at first i meant to quote bits and pieces, but there’s just too many. so i will rather summarize high level takeaways without specific connections to each other:
- to paraphrase my great teacher: “learn enough strategy to be able to lead like this” – specially first time founders/ceos face great challenges trying to figure out what ‘leading’ and ‘strategy’ really mean, and separating the operational hat from the insightful one. in this letter, we can see just how much is possible to infere from a handfull of data – internet was 3 years old at that point, and Bill was able to predict accurately next 15. Strive to become a business thinker like him.
- reading this letter feels like we have not entirely left the era it describes. IP telephony still doesn’t work as good as landlines, streaming media is slowly becoming standardized, 3d is hoping to have a comeback, cross-web collaboration is still painful. i’d say we are in the final years of the first version of the internet.
- mobile and social currently seem to be in the same explosive growth stage as internet was back then. if they actually prove to be as transformative for the society as the web was, i’m not very optimistic. as Bill noted in this memo, internet was built heavily on open values. the mobile is being built based on values of telcos and apple, and social networking is taking us back to the primeval societies, where everyone knows everything about everyone else. next era might bring de-urbanization of our minds.
- i love this site – Letters of note – absolutely best way to learn is by observing great people doing / explaining what they’ve learned.
February 21st, 2012 § Comments Off on when cultural differences hit you – smile! § permalink
Silicon Valley Rocks 2011 (Photo credit: thekenyeung)
Lots of people move to US to start their business and are surprised by the obstacles they face in the beginning. I like this advice because it’s straightforward and actionable:
Israelis Tap In to Silicon Valley – WSJ.com
A group of visiting Israeli technology entrepreneurs recently got some blunt advice on how to do business in Silicon Valley. Be positive, smile a lot and don’t bad-mouth a competitor, venture capitalist Itamar Novick told them. When meeting with potential investors, think of it as a wedding proposal, not a transaction.
online.wsj.com
I recently noticed with myself, that I started using exclamation marks in almost every email I send out. the change happened after year 2 of living in US.
it might read as a cliché, when in reality, it merely lowers various expectations. you don’t really have to do much else in the valley than play the game. you need to be determined that this is the game you want to be playing and have humility to accept that you’re a foreigner that has to go humbly trough a process of re-integration into the society.
there is nothing you can do to make this process more controlled, because it’s human nature. smile is a signal that you’re friendly, as people around you start to trust you they’ll share more opportunities with you, and in your second year you will be a different person in a different place.
if you’ll be pushy, they’ll just look away. you can try it the hard way and loose lot’s of energy in vain. smile and have fun is the first rule of this game. you might not like it, but startup entrepreneurship these days is a lifestyle business.
February 15th, 2012 § Comments Off on Calypso Cases § permalink
Didn’t get a chance to write about them earlier, but this Ljubljana-based company is truly amazing.
the little case you see on the picture bellow – it’s made of 17 different parts and materials. I was privileged to see the drawer with all the variations they’ve built for testing purposes – 3 feet long row of cases of all shapes and sizes, with one common denominator: they all fit the phone perfectly, and they are all without a sew.
I’ve been heavily testing (read: beating up) a new Calypso Case for more than a month and it’s easy to say simply put, I’m impressed. Based in Ljubljana, Slovenia the founders are hand making iPhone 4 cases which are simply perfect in fit, function and design. They’re made of conite, titanium, leather and specially designed microfabrics.
via: joshspear.com
great work guys!
February 6th, 2012 § Comments Off on Facebook Math: $10K Investment = $8M § permalink
talk about ROI:
Comments () The world of venture capital is rich with tales of colossal payoffs. The partners at Benchmark Capital invested $6.7 million in eBay in 1997 – and saw their stake mushroom to $400 million when the company went public one year later. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers invested $12.
via: www.thedailybeast.com
now, while this does make a great media story, it also creates totally false expectations to new entrepreneurs – if you are thinking about being a painter, because once there existed Michelangelo, you’re wrong.
January 24th, 2012 § Comments Off on it’s a huge market – farming § permalink
Image by paulamarttila via Flickr
I mentored a great startup last year, Farmeron – they are an awesome team, your, hungry and able to produce their own food. I also felt they are trying to bring the second largest market on the planet to the digital age– farming. this news is a great confirmation of the hunch, and I’m looking forward to the future where IT will actually make a difference for the quality of life.
IBM has set out to prove it can revolutionize the food industry with data, starting with China. Six industrial slaughterhouses and 100 markets in Shandong Province are part of a large scale test in tracking pork from farm to customer.
via: singularityhub.com
July 24th, 2011 § § permalink
every time you buy something, you contribute to increasing the risk of the next large scale armed conflict on the planetary scale.
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
until further notice, fossil fuels remain this planets key resource. they are causing the largest political and economical benefits and risks for all the coutries in the world. they represent 95% of worlds enery sources and as basis for cheap plastic, they are part of nearly every product, without much ability to recycle them.
if we dont discover efficient replacements for both and actually start using them before we run out of oil, the world will experience resource shortage like never before in history. people stop being polite when they are hungry.
if we take processed food as prime example, lets compare a bag of flour american consumer buys today, with a bag of flour farmer brought from the mill only a hundred years ago. todays flour is enhanced, bleached, delivered with trucks accross the states several times, packaged in plastified containers. all of this is an ‘upgrade’ from plain flours core value, and all of this requires energy to to do.
Image via Wikipedia
an even better example is bottled water. no need to explain the amount of excess energy needed to deliver it to your glass instead of the tap one. we could list infinite number of everyday things that got this ‘upgrade’ in the last century, from basics like water, flour and butter, up to frozen microwave dinner. even the apparently fresh fruit for instance – there is nothing fresh about most of it – it’s all last years crop, deeply frozen or preserved, so that they can guarantee even supply troughout the year. in other words, strawberries picked up now dont go to the shops, last years do.
if you could actually see the energy contained in the packaging and delivery of all the food you buy these days, your fridge would shine like a smal star. this shinning has to be powered by some sort of energy, most of the time that energy comes from oil. this shining is your everyday contribution to world conflicts that are caused by energy trade.
you can imagine the same applies to the content of your closets, storages, garages, offices, cars.
of course, you need this food and some other stuff to survive and to be able to do things yourselves. hopefully you do good things, that will offset your contribution to potential third world war.
the more unnecessary things you buy, the more unnecessary processing is involved in producing and delivering them, the lower your chances of successfully offseting the risk are.
April 6th, 2011 § Comments Off on Missunderstood § permalink
While wandering around Ljubljana yesterday, I met two friends from previous lives. While briefly catching up, they’ve asked me two very interesting questions, that made me realize two important points about my current life and how it’s different from other segments of Slovenian reality.
A friend from academia, professor, has asked me what is it again that we are doing, “something web right, I mean, I’m guessing you’re doing everything by now…” She was assuming that a successful company must be expanding the portfolio, rather than be successful in one niche. Kind of old school, but predominant assumption in our society.
A friend from NGO, now freelance designer, has asked me “so you guys are still focused? Is it hard to keep working on just one thing?” My answer was “it’s hard, but it makes sense to focus”. His question was excellent, to the point, and surprisingly nobody asked me this ever before. And it neatly expressed the modus operandi of the freelance crowd over here – be overwhelmed by projects, doesn’t matter if you finish them really.
October 6th, 2010 § § permalink
OK, So I have a wish.
I wish there was a publisher who would gather best posts from best business/entrepreneurship/marketing bloggers and publish them as an eBook, so that fresh entrepreneurs can read all about their future in advance. I guarantee it will boost innovation like anything!
Here’s my list, add to it, and if we come up with decent Table of contents, maybe it will write itself 😉
