This week I enrolled in three interesting classes at Startup School. First one, with Zulfigar Deo about MBA for startups and project management with a view of different project management techniques like Agile, etc… Second one by Supercool School CEO Steli about how to demo your product. And last one about mistakes made in presentations by Nathan Gold. They all promise to be interesting and fun, learning new things, remembering about these topics and most important interacting with presenters and audience.

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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.

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It was nice to watch this video. Daniel is a great communicator and as allways TED content has great quality. This event was at Oxford, would be great to attend to these events life.

Panda CEO some months ago was talking that stock options and so forth creates merchandisers instead of a good team of talented individuals. I had  my doubts at that time. Watching the video I agree on Dan terms. While working 100% on my start-up the three motivators mentioned in the video got me moving. These three are:

1. Autonomy: Desire to direct our lives.
2. Mastery: Desire to get better and better in something that matters.
3. Purpose: Participate in something larger than ourselves.

I think these three motivators can work for most people. I think that this will depend from person to person the level of motivation for each point. For overall will work for most people. People that value security and belonging would go with #3, active people will love #1, etc…

Working as consultant in software development for clients I found that people I talked about this they were not that much interested in better salary but rather that their opinion counts, they are listened and influence, etc…which would go to #3 becaouse if you are working on a project and have no level of influence then “you can no purpose”, right? becaouse you are not really participating.

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A couple of weeks ago I went to a couple of events that have influenced me a lot, thinking days after those events the advice and knowledge shared. One of them was the founder of Panda Security, Mikel Urizarbarrena, and the other the founder of Dinamic Multimedia, makers of PC Futbol by Jesus Alonso.

The case of Panda Security shows that it is possible to start and develop a technology business in Spain without venture capital and do that even internationally. This guy is really unique, reinvested profits to make the business grow, without government help or investors, just by listening to the client needs and be able to manauver and be productive compiting with others. After some years developing the business, he has left the management part of the company, run by a experienced manager and some partners from a venture. They have plans to grow in the USA, which leads to my second conclusion: No matter what, for a tech company the US connection is a need, it is needed to be strong in that market, have good partners, etc… They implied that if they grow better than expected could go to stock exchange in the US. My conslussion is that I must design and define carefully the US connection for my tech startup so that grows in that markets and has great aliances, but having attachments in Europe.

The second event was great too, came a guy that revolutioned the PC gaming industry in Spain back in the 80? 90? He was a very sales-oriented guy with great communication skills, so the advices to entrepeneurs were really interresting. He said that when the bank calls you asking how the business is going and you know that if not running good, the bank will get your house and you will have to sleep under a bridge, that you somehow get so much motivated that if you are good, something great will come out, like the FX Interactive game they developed. So this guy also a 4×4 of business activity. Since I am in that category, needing commercial activity desperately I understand that pretty good. I will not loose my house fortunately, but will have troubles.

So no wonder why entrepeneurs in Spain are lacking, it is like jumping with no parachute: If things go wrong and only way to get money is to offer your house as guarantee, you not only loose your house, you will have to pay for the rest of your life the difference between the price sold y bank and the mortgage, plus you will owe any workers fees for the rest of your life too. It is not like the US whene is game over, starting a new game. Here is game over, and you are done! That is why people here when you fail you fail for the rest of eternity. In the US is like “great, you failed”, let’s start a new thing now that you learnt.

So the final conslussion is that entrepeneurship si so damn hard that we must be fucking crazy, right? We do it cause we love innovation and starting things up, but can be pretty dangerous, expecially in Spain. I also like living in Spain but I agree that somethings are harder here, which leads me to the conclussion that harder=more motivating

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