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Zaki Mahomed news

You are not Steve Jobs
Or more aptly, you are not in the same position Steve Jobs is in. I?m going to rant and vent a little here about how it's become really very fashionable for web folk to casually display their disdain for their users. I've heard founders call their users 'idiots', 'morons', even dumb f*cks. This has to stop. Your users are not stupid. Most likely, many of them use your stupid product much more than you do. Or in different ways than you do, at the very least. Unless being a moron is pre-requisite to choosing your product over the hundred possibly (probably) better options available, they have something interesting to say. And while I'm ranting, you're not Henry Ford either, you fool. Customers can have a car in any color they want today. Truly. You are not Steve Jobs. Listen to your customers/users. Take the good and discard the bad ideas they have. Throw in stuff you think would make them do a dance, even if they didn't realize it at first. How do you know the good and bad is? You don't. There is no recipe. Think, or give yourself a long runway to be able to make mistakes. While you have your Customer Development/Lean Startups gaining steam recently, the above had to be said. (I love lean companies that are const...
The Business Development Blackhole
One of the biggest cash and energy drains for a new company are your business development staff. Every time I meet someone who identifies herself as the "Business Development" person for a startup, I always come away less than impressed by them (by always, I mean 99% of the time, of course!). The bigger/hotter the company, the less I feel the BD team will achieve (a function of having more money and the accompanying itch to hire more people). Honestly, I was the "business guy" in both the companies I founded, and found myself pretty helpless/redundant at the beginning (read: at the mercy for my technical co-founders while they built the product). I realized that my natural response to this guilt due to not having 'enough to do' was to try and find more to do. While this comes naturally to founders and early employees, it might not be the innate response for Employee No. 5. Your job is to make this the natural response for every BD person in your startup. It's that simple. If you do this well, your life will be greatly simplified. If you don't, you'll be micromanaging them all the way to a stress induced heart attack. Align every single person in your team to growing the company. They need to be asking themselves every t...
Prioritizing
Here's something that works for me: I'm famously disorganized, so I tend to rely on tricks to make sure I keep getting things done (hey, I even started a company that helps others do the same!: TimeSvr). Here's are a few things that work for me. Step 1: Nothing replaces a notebook. As in an actual real honest to god pen and paper notebook. Put down ideas, to do, notes, etc. in here. Step 2: Use an electronic To Do list to clear things. Once something goes from doodling/brainstorming, I input it with various arbitrary deadlines into my To Do list. I might set a deadline for the same day, the next day/week or even Month. But you always need to put a deadline or the system doesn't work. I use a fantastic piece of software called Things. I believe it's Mac only. Step 3: Just look at Today's To Do and don't worry about every missing another appoint or item every again. If you don't finish something today, it shows up the next day as Overdue by X Days. Then it really bugs you! Step 4:Step 4: Your only goal is to make sure you have 0 pending To - Do items by the end of the week. Don't leave work on Friday/Saturday until you've cleaned this list up. Assign new dates to pending items which couldn't be comepleted due screw ups...
The Best Hiring Tip
When you're growing, you're always looking to hire great people and identifying the wheat from the chaff is pretty much a subjective guess for most people (except the rockstars who come in by reference, of course). Here's what doesn't really work: * How many golf balls can you fit into a school bus (who cares?)
* CV's (people lie) and reference checks (everyone knows 2 people they like)
* Where do you see yourself in... (again, who care? Question is: will you get there?)
* Greatest achievements (You're now trying to hire the best BS artist) I'm not asking you to totally disregard all of these. But you need a solid dependable question you can casually throw in once the prospective employee has been asked the usual golf-ball-where-do-you-see-yourself questions and you're still confused. Or perhaps when you're scoping a prospect and they don't even know it yet (always be hunting for talent!) So now for the good part: what really works, almost always. Here's the best question to * What have you done outside of work/school that you are the most proud off? When you ask people about what they're willing to do for free, on their own time, their passions are on display. Really good programmers, designe...

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RoMeLaVT - Robotics and AI leadership at Virginia Tech

Congrats to Virginia Tech's Dr. Dennis Hong who runs RoMeLa (The Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech) for recognition as a Popular Science Brilliant 10 for leadership in Robotics and Intelligence

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How bad do you want to win at Jenga?

Then you will have to build yourself a Jenga Pistol (design and instructions courtesy of Matthiaswandel). You can't buy one for now due to this market analysis!

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