Today I had the pleasure of meeting this man, he is huge in knowledge and human values. He told us his beginnings in business as human needs for getting money to solve humanitarian problems, as well as advice on lessons he learnt over 20 years of business. Apart from metting a very interesting person with great stories about entrepeneurship, I would focus on these points:
Listen to what your users “use”, don’t ask them what they want
This is a nice thinking, specially after metting about A/B testing. I agree with this since generally people will not tell you what they want. Even more, they don’t even know what they want many times. But when they use some service over and over again, then you listened to them, even if they never told you to accomplish this or that.
So feature requests and requirements from partners and users should be put in a can and consider them but no more than your own intuition and the trends in your users: what they use, how they use it, etc…
Skills change over time
He undervalued people resumes, since changes happen fast and what someone did great 2 years ago may not be good to what he needs to do 2 years from now in a new venture or start-up. Also, reward people when they deliver not for having a great resume or cv.
His philosophy of funding businesses and start-up companies can be found on the book he wrote, will have it in my wish list, must be great reading.
Also agree on the bootstrapping as long as you can, and start getting income as soon as you can, forget about investors in eraly stages, stating that we know many sucess stories but not the fail stories.
Ah, by the way, this guy helped to make Xing a great success, investing and delivering a product along with the founder in 90 days. He likes to develop software globally with people in India, Pakistan, Canada, US, and use Ruby On Rails. I think this is ok, but would not focus on language, just development philosophy, does not matter in my opinion which language you develop on, but have a great software development team.
Tweet This Post 
Plurk This Post 
Digg This Post 
Ping This Post
Loading ...
Recent Comments