1. Peter Thiel’s Start Up Essay Notes

In thinking about building good company culture, it may be helpful to dichotomize two extreme personality types: nerds and athletes. Engineers and STEM people tend to be highly intelligent, good at problem solving, and naturally non zero-sum. Athletes tend to be highly motivated fighters; you only win if the other guy loses. Sports can be seen as classically competitive, antagonistic, zero-sum training. Sometimes, with martial arts and such, the sport is literally fighting.

Even assuming everyone is technically competent, the problem with company made up of nothing but athletes is that it will be biased towards competing. Athletes like competition because, historically, they’ve been good at it. So they’ll identify areas where there is tons of competition and jump into the fray.

2. Build Your 90 Day Communications Plan

A slideshare presentation by Jaggers Communications.

3. Top 25 Tech Books of All Time

Technology teaches us to forget the past. Last year’s tech news seems like it has no use whatsoever. Thankfully, historians beg to differ, and they have begun to preserve the history of the tech industry as it becomes more and more important to the evolution of our lives and world. Those who understand the history of technology and the people who made it happen can probably figure out more quickly how to build on the shoulders of giants and advance technology further. Here’s some books that are great fun to read because they either relate great ideas that influenced a generation of technologists or because they chronicle the lives of people who changed the world. This list includes books that have stood the test of time and are worth a look for the history lover. And it includes new books, such as Walter Isaacson’s tome on Steve Jobs, that are likely to be the new classics. It doesn’t, however, include any tech textbooks. My focus is on books that deliver not just a technical understanding of how something works today, but hard-earned wisdom.

——

Self Tracking: Setting Up Your Own Daily Tracker

- Shikara oarsman at Dal Lake in Srinagar, Kashmir

The Question

One of my closest friends in the world recently asked me if I had any thoughts about how best to keep track of his progress on personal projects, as separated from his work life. He has a demanding job, works bizarre hours, and is occasionally saddled with unexpected responsibilities. I wanted to write up a quick post in answer to his question and share it here in case it’s helpful to anyone else interested in self tracking.

Self tracking is one of my favorite hobbies. I’ve written about it before here and here. Self tracking is a simple way to help you take stock of how you’re spending your time, boost your productivity, and hone your focus. Self tracking helps maintain a mental connection to your macro level goals and projects on a daily basis.

For anyone who wants to get started self tracking, I echo what Sebastian says here: start off with something relatively small and manageable.

Which brings us to the topic of the day: a daily tracker. A single question you answer every single day to help yourself stay accountable to yourself through automated email systems.

The Daily Tracker: Track Incremental Progress Every Day With Automated Email Systems

What question would you ask yourself every day to encourage yourself to action in a meaningful way?

• What was the biggest thing you did to move your business forward today?
• What was the biggest thing you did today to help your friends?
• What did you do to meet interesting new people today? Name, contact information, conversation.

Here’s mine:

• What was the biggest thing you did today to push your life forward?

I have this question emailed to me at 6pm every single day. That way, if I haven’t done anything seriously meaningful during the day, I still have time to do something meaningful at night. Even if I have to stay up late to do it.My question may be subjective, but I’m the only person answering it. There’s no single perfect question out there to prompt yourself to action, but whatever question you wind up choosing – I think it should resonate with you somehow.

I figur that if I’m doing at least one thing every day to move in the directions I want to move in, I’m in good shape. Sometimes I can answer this question with four or five big points, and sometimes only one. As long as I can answer with one meaningful point, I feel good about that day. You, of course, can choose to require however many “big points” you want, or ask a different question entirely.

Here’s what my daily tracker looks like when it’s emailed to me every day at 6pm.

How to Set Up and Automate Your Own Daily Tracker

It’s a really simple process, and takes advantage of two excellent services: Google Docs and Nudgemail. Feel free to poke around at each of those sites if you haven’t used them much in the past. These sites are your friends, and will aid you as you work towards your goals, your aspirations, or project deadlines.

Step One: The Form

Create a new “form” in Google Docs. It will look like this. I like for the question in my own daily tracker to be “Paragraph text” so that I can type out as much or little as I want to.

Step Two: Automation

After you get your question set up how you want it set up, click on “Email This Form” and email it to “daily@nudgemail.com”. Be sure that the “Include Form in this Email” box is ticked. Nudgemail is a great service for lots of things; it helps you manage your email through reminders, and is entirely free. We are taking advantage of Nudgemail’s “Daily Reminder” function with our daily trackers. There are other email management services out there – Nudgemail is just the one I use.

After you click “send,” Nudgemail will automatically email your daily tracking question to you at a set time every single day. Like I said before, I have my time set to 6pm so that I can do something meaningful at night if I haven’t during the day.

Step Three: Watch Your Progress, and Grow

All of your answers get automatically recorded in a spreadsheet in Google Docs. You can refer to this spreadsheet at any time from anywhere you can access the internet. Check in on it as often as you want, and be sure to give yourself an honest assessment. If you’re doing great for a week, celebrate. If you fall off the wagon, don’t beat yourself up too much. The value of a daily tracker is in making many incremental steps towards your objective. A day or two here and there won’t hurt too bad, but if you see that you’ve let a week or two pass without making much progress, you might want to change things up.

Good Rule of Thumb

If you can’t give a meaningful answer on your daily tracker for two days in a row, recognize that you need to make an important change to how you spend your time during the day. Then do something about it.

—–

I have a daily tracker set up for a few specific projects I’m working on right now that don’t fall into my overall tracking regimen. In theory, you can have as many daily trackers set up as you want to for separate discrete tasks. Like one for a daily run, one for something you want to monitor business-wise, one to make sure you’re getting out in the world to live an interesting life.

I don’t know at what point the law of diminishing marginal returns kicks in with self tracking and daily tracking. Get started today and play around to see what feels right for you.

Here’s a link to Google Docs again so you can go and make your own daily tracking form.

—–

Question of the Day

What would you track in your life on a daily basis? If you decide to track something and are comfortable sharing, I’d love to hear about it in the comments section.

In a year our company multiplied our income ten fold.

How’s that for a happy opening sentence?

We are a small company and that is why we were able to do that. As our revenue went up, so did our expenses. In the beginning I had very small capital and operating expenses and planned the budget on a monthly basis. Now I must plan on a yearly basis as well. Now we need to refine the model and project costs so that we can make decisions for a sound future fiscally.

These financial processes that occur yearly impact many decisions made on the monthly and sometimes weekly basis, impacting processes. Whatever the case may be, strategic planning and execution need to be done on a yearly basis if not on a semi-annual basis. We’re an agile, lean, and small company. I review and modify strategy on a quarterly basis to make sure were competitive.

Not even a month has passed and the initial strategy of FOCUS remains strong, but we have created six-month goals that we will review monthly if not weekly.

Products & Services

At the beginning of the year, I reviewed our client base and saw that we catered to three types of clients. 

1. CIO/CTO – Retainer Engagement
2. CIO/CTO – Emergency Engagement
3. Presence & Strategy Projects

We decided to focus our resources and strengthen what we did well and focus on them. This meant keeping clients happy.

Sales & Marketing

We noticed that we found most of our clients through client referrals and personal contacts.

We changed our strategy to meet people and tell them what we do.
Everything else was to support the act of meeting people for face to
face engagement.

Operations & Infrastructure

We know that without our team we cannot deliver. We invested resources to make out operations more efficient and create curriculums to cultivate future Internet Architects and Internet Strategists.

Research & Development

We plan to release Appleseed 1.0 , Mindful 1.0 and if possible Asitchanges 2.0

Finance & Accounting

We are planning another unprecedented year of growth which is stronger fiscally across all Key Performance Indicators.

Now that our six-month plan is laid out, it takes a lot of work to execute the plan. Everyone in the company needs to know where we are headed and how the six-month and year long strategy affects them and how they in turn affect the strategy. After we’ve communicated the plans across different media, we have to go back and review to see if people truly understand what they are going for. If they have incentives, they’ll pick up on it quicker.

A year is a long time. You must look back at the last year and see how progress came. After knowing your capabilities, you can decide on what to do the next year. I outlined a simple process of creating priorities and reviewing them each month. Yearly processes may have different steps at different months or quarters. Regardless of what the process is, people need to know about it and have a reason to support it.

—–

Question of the Day:

How do you measure your successes and failures on an annual basis, as an organization and as an individual? Is there any difference in how you measure annual success for an organization and for an individual?

—–

Img: OSU Special Collections

Here are the VCs’ five suggestions:

1. Get the right team in place (and be able to sing your team’s praises to investors)
2. Make your elevator pitch – your firm’s value proposition – perfect
3. Develop a clear and convincing exit strategy (that isn’t an IPO)
4. Don’t be too proud to take investors’ advice
5. Establish a fair valuation for your business before soliciting outside investment

The full piece is here – check it out, as it’s worth a read.

On that day in 2010, the founders (Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger) had to scramble to keep up with the load on their machine. They pulled through – and Instagram kept growing. It has added more than 30 million users in the two years it’s been around.

How did Systrom and Krieger achieve that kind of scalability? Aside from creating an app that resonated with consumers (no mean feat in itself), they homed in on three specific factors: simplicity, to the fullest extent possible; the minimization of operating resources; and instrumented testing of every software component.

In a recent presentation delivered at an Airbnb “Tech Talk,” the two men describe exactly how they built the platform that underpins Instagram. Even before the app grew to its current proportions, robustness and simplicity were the watchwords. And today, Instagram’s millions of users are supported by the efforts of just five (yes, five) engineers. That’s a ringing endorsement of the value of good design.

Mark Zuckerburg once said that most of Facebook’s initial development was done over the course of a few weeks. If Facebook can be built in a couple of weeks, much more can be done in month. With proper planning, coordination, and people, a team can move mountains.

One of the largest projects that we finished last year was delivered in one month. We flew out to a client’s headquarter on July 22nd. On August 22nd, a site was live and broadcasted to several thousand
people.

We were able to deliver the work because we had a process in place that we had practiced over and over again. Many of the complicated processes in our company take a month to execute. Some of the processes are for delivering “Products & Services” while others are for “Finance & Accounting.”

Why is a month of time so significant? It is a time frame that requires more than just an ability to see how many hours something takes. Designing processes that take a long takes a little vision. Thirty days can be used to move mountains or it can be used to move pebbles.

Monthly processes belong in the realm of executives and managers that can steer the process with authority and leadership if necessary. The sheer magnitude of complexity in a monthly process can be handled well with a team that is managed well. Of course there are month long processes that can be done by individuals.

Here are some examples of Monthly Processes:

• Collect and Report on Project, Practice, and Corporate Key Performance Indicators
• Screen, Interview, Hire, and Orient, and Train New Employees to take on Management Positions
• Plan and Execute a Client Appreciation Networking Event for 100 People
• Review and Respond to a Multi-Million Dollar Government Contract

The lesson about monthly processes is that they require a certain type of individual to track the various different steps from beginning to end. This requires the individual to see beyond the day and the week and anticipate situations that might throw a wrench into the machine.

—-

Question of the Day:

How do you manage your projects on a month to month basis?

—–

Img: Field Columbian Museum

• Practice Area Conference Calls
• Internal Training
• Accounts Payables
• Accounts Receivables
• Project Status Reviews

The weekly cycle gives people a chance to plan their daily tasks around the process check points. At any given point during the week people that are responsible for different processes feel that they can’t execute and complete the process, they can ask for help from other team members.

The bad side of having a weekly cycle.

Is that it’s easy to push things off to the process review meetings and not actually get things done.

Migrant Worker’s Rights in Qatar Leading up to the 2022 FIFA World Cup

“Qatar can expect exponential growth in the migrant population during the run-up to the World Cup when infrastructure investments are expected to top $100 billion. Some estimates suggest up to one million additional workers will be needed to build the 12 stadiums, 70,000 new hotel roomsand a network of road and rail links planned for the footballextravaganza.
The Qatari government has announced plans to improveconditions for the migrant workers expected to flock in for the 2022 construction boom, including model housing com-plexes and tighter laws to prevent abuse. However, pressure will be on the world football body FIFA and the Western companies lining up for lucrative World Cup contracts toensure that workers are provided with decent working, wage and housing conditions.”

Link. Hat tip to Aakash for the recommendation.

The Effect of Decreasing Electronic Storage Costs on Government Surveillance in Non/Authoritarian Countries

“Within the next few years an important threshold will be crossed: For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders – every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner. Governments with a history of using all of the tools at their disposal to track and monitor their citizens will undoubtedly make full use of this capability once it becomes available.”

Link.

Parasitic Flies Turning Honey Bees into Zombie Bees (Colony Collapse Disorder)

The science in the following article is definitely over my head, but Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, is one of the most important problems in modern agriculture out there. Did you know that 1/3 of the average American diet is composed of foods that couldn’t be produced without bee pollination? Seems like this goes a long way towards explaining the mysterious disappearance of bees, and subsequent failure of their hives.

“In this paper, we show that A. borealis has a profound effect on parasitized honey bees, leading them to abandon their hives at night. We use an Arthropod Pathogen Microarray (APM) to detect pathogens that have been implicated in CCD that are associated with adult flies and larvae and to detect the presence of phorids in commercial hives in South Dakota and California’s Central Valley. Understanding causes of the hive abandonment behavior we document could explain symptoms associated with CCD. Further, knowledge of this parasite could help prevent its spread into regions of the world where naïve hosts may be easily susceptible to attack.”

Link. Also – this seems reminiscent of zombie ants.

—–

Question of the Day

Reading anything cool lately? I always love getting reading recommendations, so please feel free to leave some in the comments section if you’ve got ‘em.

What is done in a day?

Everything.

Imagine the one person company in day one. Imagine what gets done by that person in a 14 hour work day.

Then imagine what gets done by be same company 15 years later with 15000 people working in concert in one day.

The daily grind is not why an entrepreneur or enterprise builder enters a new market. An enterprise builder enters new markets to create a better life for themselves and hopefully other people. It starts with one day.

Apart from the overarching processes that run a company which probably take up some of the time, the best time is the unscheduled blocks on a calendar. As these unscheduled blocks of time get “blocked” off, less and less time is available as free time.

There have to be boundaries in daily processes such that the enterprise builder can concentrate on the maintenance, growth, and overall success. Some simple processes we take for granted become full blown departments or systems as a company grows. Here are some examples.

- Moleskine Todos – Basecamp Todos

Cell Phone Contacts  Nutshell Leads

Reading books  Training programs

Eating lunch out  Catering a meal

Meetings  More Meetings

The left and right sides of those examples are wildly different but is it really that difficult to see how a daily habit can become a company habit?

Have you heard the ancient proverb about thoughts becoming words?

“Be careful what you think because your thoughts might become words.

Be careful what you say because your words may become actions. Be careful how you act because your actions will determine your habits. Be careful what habits you cultivate because your habits will shape your character. Be careful of who you become, because that will shape your destiny.

This is why one day is the fundamental capital of the entrepreneur. Or any person for that matter.

—–

Question of the Day:

What do you do with your day to turn thoughts and words into actions and habits?

—–

Img: Cornell Library

Over at Anant, we make it a point to read aggressively. We wanted to share a few of the more interesting finds we’ve come across in the past week to share the love.

1. CIO / CTO Perspectives from Peter Kretzman
   Pundits argue that since some key technologies are now a commodity, we no longer need a CIO to handle them. But I’d turn that argument around: that’s precisely when you do need a CIO, to rise above the commodity level and figure out how to leverage technology for competitive advantage and business value. And the way to do that means using something other than technology that’s available to everyone, just off the rack. You want a differentiator.
2. Do You Need a CIO, CTO, or Both from Alien EntrepreneurIf your a bit bigger, or more mature than a startup and you are in thetechnology space then you probably need a Chief Technology Officer.  If you’re not in the technology space, but are dependant upon IT to operate your business then you probably should have a Chief Information Officer, and if your really big and you meet all the criteria above then maybe you need both, but then you better delineate responsibilities really well, or have the CTO report to the CIO (rarely vice versa).  Finally very large organizations may have multiple CTO’s, one for each major line of business, or area of specialization.
   
   
3. 8 Core Beliefs about Extraordinary Bosses from Geoffrey JamesA company is a community, not a machine.
   Average bosses consider their company to be a machine with employees as cogs. They create rigid structures with rigid rules and then try to maintain control by “pulling levers” and “steering the ship.”
   Extraordinary bosses see their company as a collection of individual hopes and dreams, all connected to a higher purpose. They inspire employees to dedicate themselves to the success of their peers and therefore to the community–and company–at large.

Been reading anything cool this week? We’d love it if you’d link us up in the comments section!

—–

Img: National Media Museum