ankeshk

Thanks for pointing out what is wrong with India today.

Go back a bit. And you will actually see that while things are bad, they are actually improving. And improving at a very quick pace.

Sure curroption is a big problem. But it always was.

Conflict over Kashmir is there since India's independence.

Naxal conflict in the South is there since 1970s.

So your conclusion of "but what is certain that India won't have a congenial atmosphere necessary for stability and wealth creation" does not seem quite right if you take history into consideration. Because things are improving.

Some of the things that were bad are still bad. But some of the things have improved tremendously.

* Per capita crime is down

* Illiteracy rate is down (Yes some schools are very bad - especially in rural areas. But overall, they are better than it was 10 years back.)

* Death rate is down.

* Infant mortality is down.

* Mal nutrition is down (even though there are food scams in some villages)

* Per capita income - in both cities and villages - is up. Way up.

* Government is actually going to reduce corporate taxes after a year (making things better conducive for businesses).

* Trade relations with other countries is way better. Indians can travel to 60 countries without visas now.

* Infrastructure is way better.

* Standard of living is higher than ever before.

* Pollution is worse though.

Things are actually getting better. Not worse. But you won't know this if you just follow the current news (which is way too sensationalist in India). You need to see things from a 50 year historical window. I don't see a growing cancer in India like you do.

tl;dr: Some of the things that were bad 30-40 years ago are still bad. But some of the things have improved tremendously since the past 2 decades. Very few things have actually gotten worse.

Thanks for your comment.

In countries with lower cost of labour, reducing or removing taxes on software companies will lead to folks starting outsourcing and service related companies. Not entrepreneurial product based startups.

India is a prime example of this. Compared to the number of software developers in the country, the number of startups that pop up from India is very very low.

So from Chile's point of view, I think its a great pilot plan.

I had a friend who used to install peep holes on doors. He would go door to door and try to sell his peep hole installation service.

Usually, he would get 2-3% of the houses he knocked on to buy his services. He would install the peep holes in 15 minutes and be off.

He later managed to get this 2-3% to 20%. What he did was revisited the houses that had refused his offer during the first time - and told them: so and so of your neighbour installed it. Would you want to install it too?

He later on bumped that 20% to an insane 90%! How? Got endorsement letters from the local fire houses. And from the homeowner's association.

The strategy teachers may call this the Bowling Pin strategy. He simply called it "saturating an area." And getting approvals from the influentials.

I'm a complete non-techie. Use Windows.

What I did is: bought a new portable hard drive. And installed Ceedo on it (Ceedo.com - $50). And then installed all the softwares I used on the portable hard drive via Ceedo's installer.

And then backed up this entire portable drive using Ceedo's Backup & Restore app ($10). Took 2 backups.

Any time something happens to the portable drive, I buy a new portable drive - restore Ceedo and everything else on it - and am running back within 15 minutes.

Thanks for disagreeing and extending the dialogue.

Friendster and Myspace didn't have a chance to figure out a way of making money that earns billions a year. Facebook has. That is why - Facebook is now in a position to not wither away like Friendster and Myspace. But thats just my opinion.

Just like a better search engine can't kill Google anymore, a better social networking site / solution won't kill Facebook. Open protocols won't kill it. A shiny new more exclusive social networking site won't kill it.

It can only die if:

i. Government intervenes with some crazy law.

ii. An entrepreneur somewhere thinks of a better idea for people to spend time on - instead of on social networking and quiz taking and game playing online. (Hmm... Maybe something like Hunch - but a lot more user friendly and socially interactive (an updates stream).)

iii. Facebook does something crazy and self destructive.

Rolling round is done with convertible notes. No valuation talks take place.

Convertible notes are loans that can be converted into equity if some predetermined event takes place (usually you raise another round of money or you get a buy out offer.)

You're not selling X shares at Y price. You're issuing a loan that may get converted into X shares. Every investor who gets these convertible notes usually will end up getting the same valuation in the future if the note converts to equity.

So with rolling round, you're just taking on debt. And you can take as much debt as you want to (unless you've added a clause in any of the notes that determines that you can't go over a certain amount of debt.)

Thanks. It could also happen that the startup doesn't require more capital and is self sustaining. But doesn't get a buy out offer until after the convertible notes expire. In which case, the investor doesn't get to enjoy in the returns - he just gets his money back with some interest.

YC companies get a lot of publicity. And so their chances of raising another round of capital or getting bought out are very good. This is not the case with most startups. So a rolling close with convertible notes may not be the best option from investor point of view - no?

(With an equity deal, the startup can get an exit until it goes out of business. With a convertible notes deal, you have a fixed timeframe and you (as an early stage investor) lose out if the exit happens beyond that time period...

...So I thought one never did a convertible notes deal unless they knew there was a very very good chance of an exit within the specified time frame... am I missing something?

My point is - I don't see rolling closes with convertible notes getting too popular with most angels.)

So question: in a rolling close with convertible notes, what happens if the startup neither gets a buy out offer nor raises another round of capital?

1. Quickly send an email to the Top 20 writing sites out there. And make them an offer: they could get a white label version of your script to be on their URL with their logo for a fee. Strike while the iron is hot.

2. On the results page, quickly create a form that asks for peoples email id. And then publish a newsletter that helps folks become better writers. Capturing email ids also give you a big base of folks with whom you can share your future apps with. Faster seeding.

Some statistics show that left handed people are more creative. Does that mean you should only buy art from left handed folks?

Thats the argument in the article - central locations are good for communication and faster work. Hence you should only invest in centrally located teams.

But good startups can come from distributed work environments too. WordPress comes to mind.

I am a single founder of my startup and don't know coding (except HTML and some CSS.)

>I have a number of startup ideas.

Thats a bad thing to have - "a number of ideas". You need to focus on just one idea at a time. Get it at a stage where you can either sell it - or hire someone to run on its own - before you venture on to the 2nd idea.

>and I don't have any coder friends.

That is also a bad thing. Because you need coder friends to help you:

i. Hire coders (a non-coder should never interview a coder. You will rarely ask the right questions.)

ii. Make sure the coders are not shoddy in their work.

You don't need coder friends who can become co-founders in your startup. But you do need coder friends who can help you out from time to time - in an unofficial capacity.

Networking helps. Go to hacking events and barcamps and just be friendly and helpful. And grow your circle of coder friends.

>I'm thinking I might outsource the coding

Thats do-able. A few things to remember:

i. Hire 2 coders if you can afford. So that each coder can keep the other one accountable - and go through his work.

ii. Keep in mind that most things will take more time than your coders estimated time line. But getting impatient doesn't help.

iii. Never hire the cheapest coder you can get.

You can't go by averages. Average wages are low in India. But India also has more billionaires than UK or Germany.

The market for smart phones is pretty big in India.

(Don't have the sales numbers at hand. But Admob metrics report shows that in the first 3 months of 2010, they served 2.8 billion requests to cellphones in India. 63.1% of them were from smart phones. This doesn't mean that 2 out of 3 cell phones in India are smart phones as folks without smart phones don't usually go online much. But it does mean that the Indian market for smart phones is bigger than the Australian market - where Admob served 656 million requests in the first quarter of 2010.)

Is this a problem people search for?

I think direct marketing (postcards, ads in trade journals, banner ads on trade portal websites) will work better than Adwords for this.

Because I think that your solution is something that a lot of businesses need and can get a benefit from. But its not a solution that all of these businesses search for.

So you will do better with a more pro-active marketing tactic. Take the educational approach - get case studies written about your first few clients - in their trade journals. Such a PR / case study approach will work better for you than Adwords.

I used to buy celebrity domain names and create "fan" pages. And this is not true.

.com .net .org worked equally well in getting ranked for the keywords in that domain.

A lot more people buy .com domains. So we see a lot more .com rankings higher up in the search engines.

But as far as my personal tests and experiences show, keyword.org will work as well as keyword.com in getting ranked if the same amount of link building is done for both of them.

The only downside of a .org is - if you plan to sell the site or the domain, a .org gets a lower price than a .com. But from search engine point of view, both work equally well.

There is definitely a demand for this product.

Idea #1: add a recurring feature. Where I can schedule a phone call or an SMS to be sent every week / month / year on a specific date.

Idea #2: This may complicate your pricing plans a bit. But you want to offer: $79 for first 300 appointments per month. 50 cents for every additional appointment.

Or maybe implement the credit system. Like how istockphoto.com does. $1 for every 2 credits (with a minimum $10 purchase). $79 a/c comes with 300 free credits that last for a month.

Such a pricing strategy helps you retain folks who don't want to or can't get stuck (because of policy) to a recurring payment plan.

Seems like 23andMe doesn't ship to either India or China. They are leaving out half the world's population!

(I'm from India and would have loved to buy their $99 special - even if shipping was $99 more.)

1. Bundle your app with the ask or yahoo toolbar. People get an option to install those toolbars too while installing your app on their desktops. You get paid per install of those toolbars.

2. Sell private label rights to the software. Other productivity websites can attach their logos to your app. And give it away for free to their audience.

3. Sell Corporate accounts. Basic accounts are free. But if a corporate wants to track how productive their employees have been - you make money out of that.

Maybe a possible option is trying to find someone who faces a similar catch-22 situation to date too?

(But this could end up being doubly difficult for both the people too... don't really have a good perspective on this.)

Can you redirect the comment link for each summary to comments over here?

Are you saying that the Chinese government could reduce poverty quicker BECAUSE they restricted freedom of speech?

Thanks for your comment.

For the reward to capture or off a local elder, that just opens up a spot for another person to fill in.

If you put up rewards on local elders if they provide anchoring permission, there is no incentive for local elders to provide the permission anymore.

If the local elder still provides permission and he is successfully captured for a big reward, then he may be replaced. But I doubt the new elder will provide permission to anyone else again.

Thats actually a very good question. I can think of a few ways to make pirating unprofitable. Or dangerous. But unfortunately can't think of any non-violent way.

* Equip all the ships with armament. The pirate teams are small in size. So hopefully, the investment in arms wouldn't be a lot to fight them off.

* Turn the table. Offer an insane "Reward" to anyone who captures one of the local elders - the people who give anchoring permission.

Thanks CodeMage.

>Also, bear in mind that he wasn't charting the emotions of the protagonist, but the protagonist's fortune.

Taken from the article:

"Is she even sadder now? No, she’s already a broken-hearted little girl."

"and she becomes off-scale happy" [draws line upward and then infinity symbol]

So I don't think Vonnegut differentiated much between fortunes and emotions of the protagonist. He exchanged the terms for one another freely.

Why chart the emotions of the protagonist to evaluate the story? The value of a story is not in how happy or sad the protagonist was - but how it makes you feel.

If I had to evaluate stories, my vertical axis would have 4 parts. From top to bottom:

* Unpredictable and irrational

* Surprisingly Unpredictable

* Tolerantly Predictable

* Predictable and stale

The closer the story is to "Surprisingly unpredictable" the better it is.

Cinderella, Kafka, Hamlet - all reach that point.

(But to be fair - Cinderella reaches that point only because its amongst the first few stories you ever hear.)

Titanic reached that stage for many teenage girls by killing the hero.

The best book I've read - Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov reaches that "surprisingly unpredictable" point too.

Countdown to failure. Make it into a game.

Rookie salesmen - the best instruction they receive is not: go and get 10 sales. The best instruction they receive is: go and get 30 Nos.

The goal of 30 Nos means they won't give up before that even if they face a lot of shit.

A lot of pickup artists do this too. They instruct people to go and approach as many girls as they can with a made up opening line before they are rebuked a 100 times.

Counting down to failure works better in making sure you don't give up before you can raise your confidence level.

Action Summary:

Figure out what you consider your failure point.

Come up with a number. You need to reach your failure point that many times.

Eg: It could be 10 people asking you to stop playing your guitar within 2 minutes of you starting to play.

Invest in a small tech firm from a country where labour is cheap. India. Ukraine. Philippines.

$50,000 = annual salary of 3-4 employee team.

Get them to make iphone apps, android apps, facebook games.

If you go with a 4 people team, the division should be: 3 developers and 1 marketer. And one of them handles everything for a bit higher salary and a very small equity stake.

If you had $100,000-$200,000 to invest, I would get the team to flip websites. You buy the websites (with the remaining $50,000 to $150,000). They make it better with new features / redesign etc and then increase traffic to it for 4-6 months. You then re-sell the websites.

In this instance, I would go with: 2 developers and 2 marketers.

The article makes wrong conclusions.

Money doesn't run the economy. Confidence does. Economy is and has always been a confidence game.

If people in the baby-sitting co-op are confident to find / earn more scrips in the future, they will spend their scrip today - even if its their last remaining scrip. But if they have no confidence of earning a scrip in the future, they will save it.

But if everyone starts saving the scrip, exchange doesn't happen. And economy suffers. And because the economy suffers, people save more scrips. And it creates a downward spiral loop.

On the other hand - if everyone gets over-confident and starts spending scrips they don't have, we see a bubble and then a bubble-burst. Which leads to some very bad consequences too.

So the trick has always been: make sure the people remain confident about the future. But that they don't become over-confident.

Buy all the Russian school and college name domains. Allow members to add content to those domain names (Ning style) if they have joined that particular school group - from your social network website itself.

Then do the same thing with Russian city names.

Collaboration doesn't scale.

You can't have 500 people in a room all discussing one topic. Well you can - but it won't be efficient. And people will actually end up learning less.

I think - past 30-35 people, collaboration starts losing its value.

But yes - if there are only 20-30 people in the room - collaboration works better than the lecture format.

(Paulo Freire actually taught English to Brazilian farmers in less than 60 days by using a collaborative approach instead of a lecture approach. His techniques are worth studying. But his techniques don't work for TED type events where huge audiences show up.)