Lazyant

Dec 07

Ten Reasons Why Building a Startup is Like Riding a Motorcycle

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Hello,

You probably know me as the ninja rockstar founder of social media local coupon friend sharing payment mobile startup really-er.ly

This morning while doing zen meditation at my stand-up desk a sudden realization struck me like a Techcrunch mention: Building Startups is like riding a motorcycle.

I’ve never ridden a motorcycle but I’m a seasoned startup entrepreneur (after all, I start feeling old at 23 surrounded my these younger SV wanabees and my extensive 6 month experience in my startup allows me to mentor early-stage startups).

Here are the reasons why building a startup is like riding a motorcycle:

You must train your mind to do things that are counter-intuitive to your body; what’s best for your startup may not be what you feel like doing now. In a motorcycle you have the countersteering technique for example, where you push the handlebar in the direction you want to go. At the beginning you can’t believe it’s going to work and you have to train your body to just trust and let go.
You have to hit obstacles head-on. In a motorcycle as in a startup is frequently best just to hit that obstacle in the road head on. Sure, you prepare for it as best as you can but instead of taking the problem at an angle (which makes it worse) you just attack your biggest problem right on.
Sometimes accelerating and swerving is better than breaking. We see a problem ahead and sometimes we tend to prepare too much for it, worry about it and as result the issue becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Often is better to quickly swerve or even accelerate to avoid the problem.
You are leading the pack but you are still alone. When riding in a group you are leading and therefore setting the pace for your people, and even if you are in the same group you are riding alone in your journey.
By obsessing about the destination you forget about the trip. Remember to stop and exercise periodically. Also stopping and pausing for a bit will let you check the map and the course you are taking.
When riding with a passenger, you both have to lean. If you have a co-founder this person needs to follow your movements on the motorcycle and lean into the curve with you, otherwise the motorcycle/startup becomes unstable.
You can crash at any moment. But you still ride. Riding is what you do, it’s your life. There are always risks but you have to manage those risks.
It will rain but you go on. If being uncomfortable because a bit of cold, or you feel it’s too hot, then riding a bike or building a startup is probably not for you.
If it keeps raining maybe is time to go home and plan another trip. You prepare for your trip, you soldier on when it rained but maybe riding a bike in Alaska in winter is not such a good idea: time to go home, regroup and pivot.

(Challenge accepted )

Jun 11

Mind hack: get yourself to sleep

I had trouble getting to sleep when I was younger and I was facing a test or something in the morning. Besides the usual no caffeine/moderate exercise/moderate eating etc good advice I came up with a “mind hack” inspired by Richard Feynman.

Summarizing: try to re-play or think about dreams that you had before. If you don’t remember any, think of a story that looks like a dream (with impossible things happening etc).

The trick is that when we transition between awake and asleep we have a train of thought and suddenly there are dream-like things like surprising jumps in the thoughts, impossible occurrences etc (this is what Feynman remarked and I observed too), so I try to recreate that state.

It worked for me.

May 28

Web servers of the most visited sites in the Internet

Google has published the 1000 most-visited sites on the web (they mention “Keep in mind that the list excludes adult sites, ad networks, domains that don’t have publicly visible content or don’t load properly, and certain Google sites.”)

An HN user got the response headers from these sites and I just parsed the given file and used Google charts to generate this images (yes, the default colors are meh and I know pie charts are bad)

May 11

Keep your computer clean with virtualization

Apr 26

[video]

Apr 06

My MacBook power supply cable went up in flames. Same with a previous Dell notebook. WTF?

Mar 12

Mythbusters: they could use a scientist

The Mythbusters guys could use a science guy.

I’m all for practice instead of theory and I love this show but there are some instances where a scientist on the show with some back-of-the-envelope calculations could have predicted some of the experiments’ outcome (heck, I did).

Let’s see:

Checking if a coin (a dime or quarter, can’t remember) dropped from the Empire State can kill someone
Testing if you can kill or hurt someone by throwing a playing card
Checking if you get more wet if you run in the rain, instead of walking
Replicating a story about a Chinese king and a chair loaded with powder rockets

The first two can easily be calculated to be mostly harmless due to the low mass of the objects (coin and card). I mean Chris Ferguson can cut carrots throwing cards but that’s it.

The fact that you get more more if you run under the rain instead of walking, that can be proven with some math, a freshman in Physics should be able to do that.

For the rocket chair, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that the thing had no control at all; all the rockets cannot be positioned exactly a the same angle, with the same power and be ignited exactly at the same time, so any variation and the thing will go like when you let go a party balloon and that’s what happened.

Mar 10

Things I don’t need

I got a suggestion from Amazon, it was a “watch mover” and for a moment I pondered if it was something different from what my initial thought was but no, a watch mover moves watches, what a surprise.

So are you kidding me? what kind of person has a movement-powered watch, doesn’t wear it but needs it to be ticking? Oh well, I guess somebody with 10 expensive watches who picks a different one on different days and can’t be bothered with setting the right time when putting them on.

I also saw in a toy store a cup stacker game. Can you believe? just a bunch of plastic cups, for the people who don’t have the imagination of getting them at Wall-Mart or whatever. But the jaw-dropper happened when I saw a rock, paper, scissor game, wtf?

I get a gratifying feeling sometimes when walking around a big store and thinking “you know what, I don’t need almost anything of this”.