Dejar las finanzas para emprender

17 People Who Left Finance Careers For Startups And Will Make Way More Because Of It

ALYSON SHONTELL

If you want to make a lot of money, you get a job on Wall Street.

If you want to make even more money, you might dump that Wall Street job for a startup.

It isn't a career path that works out for everyone. But for the founders of Wikipedia and Amazon, for example, ditching finance for tech was a smart choice.

Joshua Kushner worked for Goldman Sachs before he started Thrive Capital, which invested in Instagram and Kickstarter

Flickr via Number10Gov Instagram's Kevin Systrom (L) with Joshua Kushner (R).

Joshua Kushner graduated from Harvard and worked for Goldman Sachs. After a short stint there he left to pursue a career in venture capital.

His firm, Thrive Capital, has invested in startups such as NastyGal, Kickstarter, Instagram, and Makerbot. He also recently gathered $40 million to start a new health insurance company, Oscar.


Alexa Von Tobel was a trader at Morgan Stanley before she founded LearnVest, a startup that's raised more than $40 million to give affordable financial planning to the 99%.

LearnVestAlexa Von Tobel, LearnVest founder and CEO

Alexa Von Tobel began her career at Morgan Stanley where she rose up the ranks to become a trader. She quit to attend Harvard Business School, then dropped out to found LearnVest.

LearnVest has raised more than $40 million to tackle an important issue: there should be financial planners and advisors available for the middle class, especially with such a high percentage of the population in debt.

Whether LearnVest will succeed or not remains to be seen, but Von Tobel looks well positioned to clean up as a tech founder.


Scott Belsky quit a job at Goldman Sachs to start Behance. After bootstrapping it for five years then raising a few million dollars, he sold it to Adobe for $150 million.

Daniel Goodman / Business InsiderThe founders of Behance. Belsky is on the right.

Scott Belsky is now an angel investor in companies like Pinterest with his own, very big startup success. Last year he sold a portfolio site for designers, Behance, to Adobe for $150 million.

Prior to founding Behance, Belsky worked for Goldman Sachs. He told Business Insider about his decision to leave Wall Street for a startup.

"I figured I might just become a middle manager living a great life, but not doing something extraordinary. I came to believe that doing something extraordinary is never achieved through ordinary means. I remember that moment at Goldman where I was thinking I should leave and start something. I shared that with colleagues and they thought I was crazy. I gained confidence from being doubted."


Chris Altcheck worked for Goldman Sachs before founding PolicyMic, a media startup with more than 6 million monthly readers.

Duncan Wolfe Chris Altcheck, right, with his co-founder.

Chris Altcheck left Goldman Sachs to found PolicyMic in 2011. He's gone on to raise more than $1.5 million and his team of one dozen is pulling in more than 6 million monthly unique visitors.

PolicyMic is written largely by unpaid contributors who write analytical stories about pressing issues, politics, and entertainment.


Amy Jain and Daniella Yacobovsky began finance careers before creating a jewelry e-commerce company that decks out Rihanna and Justin Bieber, BaubleBar.

BaubleBar via Brew PRDaniella Yacobovsky and Amy Jain, co-founders of Baublebar

Amy Jain and Daniella Yacobovsky worked for the same investment bank, then later attended Harvard Business School together.

There, they came up with the idea to be an online destination for beautiful, affordable jewelry, the way Sephora is for makeup. But it wasn't an easy decision to give up finance for BaubleBar.

"We were at this crossroad," Yacobovsky tells Inc. "We could take this very secure road we had planned, or we could become entrepreneurs and turn this project into a real business. We chose to dive into the start-up world."

Marc Katz of CustomInk left a Wall Street career to start a business his father didn't think would be very good.

YouTube CustomInk CEO and founder, Marc Katz


Before he founded CustomInk, an online apparel retailer that generates more than $70 million in annual sales, Marc Katz was a financial analyst on Wall Street. The profitable business employs more than 250 people from its McLean, Virginia headquarters.

One of Katz's first investors was his father, a 3-time entrepreneur, who didn't think his son had a great idea.

"I told him I thought it was a terrible idea," Steve Katz tells Forbes. "Selling T-shirts on the Web, I just didn’t see how you distinguish yourself, so it would be a race to the bottom in terms of price...It’s amazing what you can do with a mediocre idea extremely well executed."

Neil Capel was initially a consultant for Morgan Stanley. Now he runs content recommendation company Sailthru, which has raised nearly $30 million.

Mashable/YouTube Neil Capel, CEO of Sailthru

Before he started personalized email and online content recommendation company, Sailthru, Capel had a number of gigs including one as a consultant to Morgan Stanley.

Sailthru's revenue grew 270% last year and it has raised nearly $30 million to date.


Before he founded Amazon, Jeff Bezos* held a number of jobs at banks and hedge funds. As a teenager, he worked for McDonald's.

Reuters

Bezos worked as a computer scientist on Wall Street after he graduated from Princeton. Then he headed to a company called Fidel, and later to Bankers Trust where he became its vice president. After that, he became SVP at a hedge fund, D.E. Shaw & Co.

He dabbled in entrepreneurship prior to founding Amazon. He nearly created a news-by-fax company with the founder of CNET, for example.

D.E. Shaw was Bezos' last stint in finance before he created an online book retailer which, coincidentally, held most of its early meetings in the local Barnes & Noble.

*Jeff Bezos is invested in Business Insider through Bezos Expeditions.


Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga, attended Wharton and Harvard Business School. He worked for financial firms in between.

Fortune Live Media / flickr


Pincus' career began as a financial analyst for Lazard Freres & Co. He then became a VP of Asian Capital Partners in Hong Kong and later, was one for Columbia Capital.

Zynga was Pincus' fourth company. It was founded in 2007.


Barry Silbert was a bored investment banker with a startup idea. That led him to SecondMarket, an online hub where users can buy and sell illiquid assets.

Barry Silbert got his idea for SecondMarket, a marketplace for illiquid assets, while working as an investment banker.

He tells Inc about founding SecondMarket:

"I was an investment banker for about 5 ½ years, working on distressed type of situations like bankruptcies, things like that, and I was a bored investment banker. I'd been doing it for a while and the idea for to create this marketplace really kind of came out of a lot of the deals I was working on where I kept on seeing situations where there was a liquid assets being held by customers or clients that we had who needed liquidity. It was shocking to me that there was no one place where you could go to, an eBay-like marketplace, to sell these assets. And so I decided that I was going to leave investment banking with the big salary and roll the dice. I kind of figured I could always go back and be banker again and fortunately, I never, ever looked back."

Jimmy Wales worked at a future and options trading firm. Then he created a search engine for guys, Bomis, before founding online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Wikimedia Commons Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, didn't begin his career on Wall Street, but he was a financial professional. He started out at a future and options trading firm, Chicago Options Associates.

Here's how Wikipedia describes his transition to entrepreneurship: "Inspired by the remarkable initial public offering of Netscape in 1995, and having accumulated capital through 'speculating on interest-rate and foreign-currency fluctuations', he decided to leave the realm of financial trading and became an Internet entrepreneur."

His first venture was a "guy search portal" full of female images, Bomis. He used money from Bomis to launch the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Dan Leahy and Ben McKean gave up Wall Street careers to found restaurant discount finder, Savored. Savored was acquired by Groupon.

Ben McKean and Dan Leahey, cofounders of Savored

Dan Leahy worked for Silver Lake Partners then Brown Brothers Harriman. His friend Ben McKean worked for Merrill Lynch.

The pair teamed up in 2009 and created restaurant discount finder, Village Vines, which raised $4 million from investors like Salesforce's Mike Lazerow.

It was renamed Savored and sold to Groupon in 2012 where McKean is now a general manager.

Other former finance professionals who are building even better careers at tech startups:


Twitter Olga Videisheva, Shoptiques

Olga Vidisheva, CEO of Shoptiques; Andy Dunn, CEO of Bonobos; Rob Cromer, CEO of AdCade; James Gardner, Founder of Create The Group; Andy Pickens and Moses Soyoola, founders of Jamplify.


Business Insider

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Publicidad dirigida a vos

Llega la publicidad que sabe quién la está mirando
Los avisos con cámaras de reconocimiento facial o chips que detectan la cuenta de Facebook del transeúnte ya no serían parte de la ciencia ficción



Las cámaras de reconocimiento facial ya están siendo instaladas en los avisos publicitarios para que las empresas puedan controlar que anuncios ven las personas al ingresar a un local o pasar frente a un cartel electrónico.

"Se las arregla para reconocerlos a través de una serie de rasgos", dijo a la BBC Mike Hemmings, director de marketing de Amscreen, una de las empresas que ofrece esta tecnología.

"Estos rasgos pueden ser las cosas que caracterizan a un hombre, una mujer o una persona de una edad determinada", continuó. Así, estas cámaras le informan al anunciante cuántas personas y de qué tipoestán viendo su publicidad en pantallas que se ubican tanto en la vía pública, estaciones de tren, aeropuertos y hasta estaciones de servicio y salas de espera del médico. 

"Next está presentando anuncios en tiempo real a las personas que están de pie en una fila", añadió Simon Sugar, presidente ejecutivo de Amscreen. "Lo que estamos tratando de hacer es replicar lo que está sucediendo en Internet en un mundo fuera", aseguró.

Pero el reconocimiento facial no es la única forma de llevar la personalización de Internet al mundo real. Los estudiantes en el Instituto Europeo de Tecnología están trabajando en un sistema para vincular las cuentas de Facebook a los chips de RFID (identificación por radiofrecuencia) que están incrustados en las tarjetas de fidelidad de las tiendas.

Estos chips se podrían utilizar para lanzar anuncios personalizados y ofertas especiales en las pantallas cuando los consumidores visitan las tiendas.

Por caso, la marca de lujo Burberry ya está utilizando etiquetas RFID mediante la incorporación de la tecnología en sus últimas colecciones. Cuando los clientes se paran delante de los espejos de su tienda insignia en Londres, las pantallas muestran imágenes de cómo esos productos se vieron en la pasarela.

Por ahora, este sistema sólo puede reconocer los productos y no a la gente que los usa, aunque no se descarta vincular en el futuro a las etiquetas RFID y la base de datos de los clientes.

El chip del desarrollador Qualcomm tiene otro enfoque. Su sistema Gimbal Proximity está diseñado para activar las notificaciones de publicidad dentro de aplicaciones de Android y teléfonos iPhone cuando pasan cerca de una tienda u otra organización que paga para utilizar la tecnología.

La aplicación recoge datos de los sensores del teléfono y los combina con el historial de navegación web de los propietarios, el uso y otros datos guardados para construir un perfil del usuario. Con base a sus intereses y el tiempo del día, el teléfono elige qué anuncios mostrar sin necesidad de revelar los datos personales a las empresas que ejecutan las campañas.

Japón fue el primero en lanzar esta tecnología. Qualcomm dijo que los ensayos sugirieron que los usuarios son tres veces más propensos a hacer clic en estas notificaciones que en los anuncios no contextualizadas.

Pero todas estas tecnologías despiertan ciertas dudas respecto de la privacidad de las personas.Y ya ha sucedido, por ejemplo, que las tiendas de indumentaria Nordstrom cancelaron por quejas de los clientes un plan que seguía sus movimientos en las tiendas a través de la señal de wi-fi en sus teléfonos.

iProfesional

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Cómo determinar el tamaño de tu mercado (1/2)

Cómo determinar el tamaño de su mercado - Parte I


por Allen Weiss

Tal vez la pregunta más importante enfrentarse a cualquiera que esté pensando en crear una puesta en marcha o la comercialización de cualquier producto para el caso, es determinar el tamaño del mercado potencial.
No hay una respuesta fácil para esto porque, francamente, un "mercado" no es una cosa, sino una idea. No se puede ver un mercado, pero sólo tiene una idea de que existe. Por lo tanto, si usted no puede ver algo, pero que desea medir, ¿cómo se hace esto?
Bueno, en realidad hay varias maneras de abordar este problema, y vamos a considerar uno de estos métodos aquí y de otro tipo en el futuro tutoriales.

¿Es el tamaño de su demanda primaria o secundaria?

Independientemente del enfoque, la primera cosa a considerar es si desea determinar el tamaño de la "demanda primaria" o "demanda secundaria".

La demanda principal es el tamaño del mercado para una categoría de productos - como "discos duros virtuales". la demanda secundaria es el tamaño del mercado de una marca en particular - como xdrive.com o idrive.com. Como se puede imaginar, la demanda secundaria está asociado de forma natural con la cuota de mercado. Puede leer más acerca de la demanda primaria y secundaria en nuestro tutorial sobre firstmovers.

Como la mayoría de las empresas hemos tratado con tendencia a estar interesado en la demanda de nuevas tecnologías o servicios, nuestra atención se centrará en la demanda principal - o el tamaño del mercado para una categoría de productos.

DESCOMPONGA Y RECONSTRUYA

La primera cosa a tener en cuenta sobre casi todos los métodos para estimar el tamaño del mercado es que se basan en la descomposición de la más grande "tamaño del mercado" problema en problemas más pequeños, y la construcción de los resultados de estos problemas más pequeños en el tamaño del mercado. La mejor manera de ver este enfoque se encuentra en el conocido método de estimar el tamaño del mercado de la siguiente manera:

Tamaño del mercado = número de compradores en el mercado x
cantidad comprada por un comprador medio en el mercado en el año x
el precio de una unidad de media

Observe cómo el problema total se descompone en sus elementos constitutivos (es decir, el número de compradores, la cantidad por el comprador, etc.) y agregada hacia arriba (a través de la multiplicación) para obtener el resultado final.
Esta es una técnica común utilizada por muchas empresas, con las principales diferencias es cómo dividir el problema y cómo se construyen en una copia de seguridad.
Por ejemplo, un proveedor de servicios de Internet puede pensar en el número de compradores en el plano de una casa - desde una casa compra el servicio de Internet, no un individuo. Por el contrario, un proveedor de servicios de aplicaciones (ASP) que vende a las empresas probablemente centrará en los empleados de la empresa cliente que va a utilizar el servicio, no la propia corporación.

Método de los cocientes encadenados 

El arte de descomponer un problema y lo construye también está en el corazón del "método de cocientes encadenados". Similar a lo que acabamos de describir, pero más centrado en el tamaño del mercado en términos de número de clientes, en lugar de los dólares. Piense en este método como tratar de determinar el "número de compradores en el mercado" en la sencilla ecuación anterior.
El método de la razón cadena puede ser utilizado por cualquiera de las primera descomponer el problema en problemas más pequeños y luego construir, o estimar (en realidad casi adivinar) el tamaño del mercado total y luego hacer algunos ajustes. Nos centraremos aquí en este último enfoque de ajuste fino de una amplia estimación general del mercado por mirar el problema del gato infame.

El problema de los gatos

Veamos la cuestión firmas de consultoría como para preguntar a los empleados potenciales para determinar cómo piensan. La pregunta es: ¿Cuántos gatos hay en los EE.UU.?
He aquí cómo responder a esta pregunta. Nótese cómo vamos a acercamos a esta puesta a punto por una amplia estimación del mercado total.
En primer lugar, determinar la unidad de análisis. Se podría decir que la unidad de análisis es dueño de un gato, pero que se vería rápidamente que tiene más sentido pensar en el hogar como unidad de análisis.
A continuación, cuántas personas hay en la U.S? Digamos que 250 millones
A continuación, vamos a suponer que hay 5 personas por hogar - - Eso significa que hay 250 hogares / 5 = 50M.
A continuación, acerca de cómo muchos de los hogares tienen mascotas? Asumamos 1/5 - - eso significa que hay cerca de 10 millones de hogares con mascotas.
Cierto, pero ¿qué porcentaje de los animales domésticos son los gatos? Digamos que el 50% - - significa que hay alrededor de 5 millones de hogares con gatos.
Ahora, sintonía fina de dejar que esto. Vamos a suponer que de estos hogares han 5M aproximadamente 2,5 M y 2,5 M tiene 1 2 Gatos - - Eso significaría que hay cerca de 7,5 millones de gatos.
El tiro en algunos perros callejeros (supongamos .5m gatos callejeros), y tiene sobre los gatos 8M!
Se dará cuenta de que hemos utilizado una gran cantidad de supuestos aquí. Al igual que en todos los problemas de negocio, hay supuestos y estos no son diferentes. Algunos de los supuestos se puede verificar con los datos (como el número de personas por hogar). Algunas suposiciones que no pueden verificar, pero para estos le pueden hacer análisis de sensibilidad - - cambiar los números y ver cuánto de un cambio que tiene en el resultado final - para ver si el supuesto de que es realmente crítico o no.

Lo práctico del método de cocientes encadenados

Antes de pensar que esto es sólo un truco interesante considerar cómo se podría utilizar esto para determinar el tamaño de su propio mercado. Siga el proceso básico como acabamos de esbozar.
Comenzar con el universo de todos los posibles compradores. A continuación, utilice sistemáticamente porcentajes para ajustar con precisión el problema. Lo importante es hacer esto de una manera lógica, y es evidente que indicar supuestos a medida que avanza.
Recuerde, un capitalista de riesgo - o cualquier otra persona, para el caso - no conocer los porcentajes reales o números de los diversos elementos de su problema. Lo que van a saber, sin embargo, es que usted ha pensado en el problema correctamente y lógica se mantiene. A fin de centrarse en la lógica y hacer lo mejor que pueda en conseguir un número razonable.

Comentario final

Cuando era Laboratorios Bell (ahora Lucent Technologies) Hace varios años, mi grupo se le preguntó una vez si pudiéramos averiguar el caudal en la desembocadura del río Mississippi en Nueva Orleans. Todo lo que teníamos era un pedazo de papel y nuestra mente para completar este ejercicio.
Tuvimos ayuda (por suerte) de alguien que realmente entiende este proceso de descomposición de un problema en elementos constituyentes. Dada la naturaleza del problema, empezamos por la estimación de la respuesta a varios problemas pequeños pero más manejables, y luego para la agregación.
Sorprendentemente, al hacer estimaciones sobre tales cosas como la lluvia al este de las Montañas Rocosas, empapando las tasas en el suelo de las Grandes Llanuras, y otras ideas esotéricas, hemos sido capaces de estar muy cerca de la velocidad de flujo real. ¿Nos hemos exactamente a la derecha? No. Pero hemos sido capaces de acercarse y, más importante, entender realmente lo que pasa en la respuesta final.
Esto es lo más que se puede esperar de cualquier método para estimar el tamaño del mercado. Pero cuando se piensa en ello, eso es realmente mucho!

Marketing Profs

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Organizarse como un piloto de caza

Get your organization to think and act like a fighter pilot

Chris Taylor is an executive with TIBCO Software and a former U.S. Navy pilot.

We live in a time of disruption. The average lifespan of a corporation is dropping fast, and technology and culture are changing at a remarkable rate. We can see disruption as a negative force, or we can see it the way a classically trained fighter pilot sees it — as an advantage.

Fighter pilots have a mythical place in our minds. But the romance of barrel rolls and “coming up on his 6″ belie the difficulty and danger involved in controlling the high-performance cockpit. The training is arduous and most candidates never make it off the ground.

Those who reach their aircraft learn a few things the rest of us may not know. First, since the 1950s, American fighter pilots have been trained to understand and follow the OODA Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. This process is the disruptor’s handbook.

Second, every sortie is studied in retrospect, as a critical part of rapid cycles of improvement — part of a culture of nameless, rank-less debriefing.

Executing OODA loops

Air Force pilot John Boyd first introduced OODA. At the time of the Korean War, American pilots were flying an aircraft that was less maneuverable than their opponent. Boyd observed that despite the Russian-made MIG-15’s advantages, the American F-86 won a majority of dogfights simply because the Americans had a better field of vision and hydraulic controls that were faster and easier to use.

Of the four steps in the OODA Loop, American pilots had clear advantages in observing and acting, the first and last stages of the Loop. They were in a position to disrupt their adversary’s process by having better information and faster execution.

Disrupting the OODA loop

This same advantage applies no differently in today’s business landscape, a ‘dogfight’ of its own. Of course, business teams stand in place of the solo pilots in this metaphor, but the behaviors and benefits are the same.

Terry Deitz lived the OODA Loop as a U.S. Navy F-14 pilot. He now coaches executives and their teams on how to make their workplace more effective and competitive as part of Afterburner.

Deitz says, “In warfare and in business, the speed at which the OODA Loop is executed becomes the largest factor in disrupting the enemy in the battle space, and the competition in the business space.”

Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst Roy Schulte offers that disrupting your opponent often comes from using a systems approach that shortens your own OODA loop so that you can ‘turn inside’ the adversary’s process. Schulte talked about OODA Loops at TUCON 2012, a gathering of TIBCO customers and partners last September in Las Vegas.

Schulte showed how each of Boyd’s four activities maps directly to an engineering or management discipline and an associated category of technology:

1. Observation maps to the discipline of gathering data on what’s happening in a company and its environment. As raw data increases exponentially, this is now a double-edged sword and requires the use of ‘big filters’ before meaningless data (“noise”) enters the workplace and muddies the view. Managers need to monitor a wide variety of data sources and understand how to apply the right filters to each. This runs the gamut from B2B data to physical sensors and social media.

2. Orientation maps to the discipline of event management and the associated tools that process streams of incoming real-time event data. Organizations need to actively monitor the environment by calculating key performance indicators, making predictions, preparing real-time business dashboards displays, and issuing alerts to enhance the situation awareness of decision makers. This takes a combination of software tools and human judgment to put incoming information into context with past experiences and their understanding of how the business works to quickly and better predict what to expect next.

3. Decision-making maps to the discipline of decision management. Rule engines, optimization tools, and other kinds of prescriptive analytics (when applied in real time) are used to make better, faster, and more-repeatable decisions at less cost when the environment indicates. Many decisions can be ‘pre-loaded’ and anticipated.

4. Action maps to the business process management (BPM) discipline. It may lead to the use of BPM technology, such as workflow or process orchestration engines, at run time to control the flow of work and trigger the execution of human or automated activities at the right time.

Leading-edge businesses benefit from executive management strength and increasingly powerful analytics software in each of these areas. The pressures of mobile, social, and big data make the situation urgent for the rest.

The power of the debrief

Deitz goes on to explain that there is a key additional contributor to of success that is key to Afterburner’s version of the OODA Loop. It is called the “Flawless Execution cycle” and involves four steps: plan, brief, execute, and debrief.

Deitz says, “As disruptive as the OODA Loop is, what the modern day executive can do to boost his [or her] performance greatly is to add a nameless, rank-less debrief. It can be the most effective and disruptive tool they have.”

Today’s fighter pilots rely heavily on the ability to review every mission as peers, without assigning blame, as a way to very quickly improve performance and minimize avoidable mistakes. In today’s corporate world, cloud, Software as a Service and other techniques give us a lower cost of experimentation than ever. That also gives us the ability to ‘fail fast’ and pivot when necessary. But trying and failing requires an honesty that many organizations struggle to find. Making cycles of attempt and failure happen quickly is also a new way of thinking that benefits greatly from the fighter pilot’s relentless debriefing culture.

Deitz emphasizes his point with this additional comment: “90 percent of the businesses out there have neither the processes in place nor the proper culture to debrief. Do you want to accelerate your version of the OODA loop to supersonic performance? Create the culture and processes to put that knowledge capture back into your next mission at Mach speed.”

Replacing the Industrial Age

Disruption isn’t just a phase we’re going through. Disruption replaces the industrial concepts of the 1800s and 1900s with faster cycles of change coming with lower levels of investment and risk. The nimble business — behaving as an innovation lab, operating in tight iterations, and striving to be faster than the adversary — replaces the traditional factory.

The executive’s role is crucial because he or she creates and sustains a culture that allows nameless, rank-less debrief. That has to come from the top. But the people executing the OODA loops in business — the pilots — are mostly managers, supervisors, and individual contributors in operations departments.

The OODA loop depends on four kinds of mental (and sometimes software) models:

• Models of what facts are relevant and what to look for (observe),
• what they mean in context (orientation),
• what to do about them (decide), and
• how to execute the response (act). 

Managers then

• develop those mental models (plan),
• communicate them (brief),
• carry them out (using OODA loops in the execution phase), and then
• revise and improve them (debrief) in the larger cycle.

Those who see disruption as their advantage and understand the twin values of the OODA Loop and debriefing will occupy the mythical place held by people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Venture Beat

Chris Taylor flew for the US Navy before finding a home in hands-on technology 17 years ago, first with Perot Systems, Accenture, and ILOG (now IBM) before becoming a marketing executive with TIBCO Software.  He lives in Southern California, often speaks on technology at tech conferences and events, and manages SuccessfulWorkplace.com, “A place for new ideas in a fast-changing world.” He can be found at @FindChrisTaylor.

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Cuando 2 notebooks administraban todo Facebook

La verdad hilarante acerca de los primeros días de Facebook: Dos pibes con notebooks controlaban a todo lo que los usuarios veían
NICHOLAS CARLSON - Business Insider


Izquierda a derecha: Andrew "Boz" Bosworth y Chris Cox
Hace unos 8 años, cofundador de Facebook Dustin Moskovitz vio un chico vestido con un traje en una oficina gris lúgubre de Facebook en el centro de Palo Alto.

Este pibe era la única persona que llevaba un traje en la oficina de Facebook ese día, así que era bastante obvio para Moskovitz que él estaba allí para una entrevista.

Resultó que este chico era Chris Cox, un reciente graduado de Stanford.

Moskovitz trajo a Cox a una habitación y le habló del trabajo que sobre el que lo iba a entrevistar.

Moskovitz y otros co-fundador de Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, habían querido a Cox para ayudar a construir la primera página de Facebook que ayude a los usuarios de Facebook mantenerse al día con noticias de sus amigos.

Hasta ese momento, la única forma en que un usuario puede descubrir que un amigo había subido una nueva foto o publicado una nueva actualización de estado era ir a la página de perfil de los usuarios.

Cox aceptó el trabajo, y luego, Ruchi Sanghvi y Andrew Bosworth, construyó lo que hoy se llama la noticias de Facebook. Se puso en marcha en 2006.

Los usuarios odiaban. Más de un millón de ellos formaron un grupo en Facebook para protestar por la nueva característica.

Cox estaba encantado con la reacción.

Antes de News Feed, no hay grupos en Facebook nunca habían sido tan grandes. La única razón éste se hizo tan grande era que los usuarios de Facebook se leían las noticias RSS y al ver que sus amigos se habían unido al grupo.

Muy pronto, los usuarios de Facebook se olvidaron que odiaban el News Feed, y se convirtió en lo que es hoy: probablemente la característica más importante, central de Facebook.

En 2007, Microsoft sorprendió al mundo de los negocios cuando se invierte en Facebook en una valoración de $ 15 mil millones.

Esto no podría haber sucedido si no fuera por lo que Cox, Bosworth ("Boz"), y Sanghvi habían construido el año anterior.

En 2007, decenas de millones de personas venían a Facebook todos los días para ver noticias, fotos, enlaces y actualizaciones de estado de sus amigos - todos organizados en una sola columna en Facebook.com.

Es increíble pensar.

Lo que es más increíble es cómo, en ese momento, Facebook era decidir exactamente cuántas fotos, enlaces y actualizaciones de estado de los millones de usuarios deben ver. ¿Cuál era la mezcla perfecta.

Cada vez que un usuario comprueba Facebook, Facebook tiene que decidir cómo ordenar unas 1.500 piezas de información de ese usuario News Feed.

Teniendo en cuenta que la escala y la sofisticación de Facebook en estos días, usted asume que hubo algún tipo de inteligencia, aprendizaje automático, el algoritmo de potencia super-ordenador artificial en el trabajo, incluso entonces.

Nope.

Fue sólo dos tipos de sillas giratorias, sentado en un rincón de la oficina de Facebook.

En una conferencia de prensa ayer, Chris Cox describió esos primeros días.

"Boz y yo nos sentamos en estas dos mesas en la esquina de la oficina de Facebook y tenía todos estos mandos. News clasificación RSS giraba Nobs. Suba las fotos un poco. Baje las historias de la plataforma un poco. Básicamente estábamos tratando de responder a lo que estábamos viendo y oyendo desde comentarios de los usuarios ".

Tal vez usted se imagina que Cox y Boz había al menos responder a las "sugerencias de los usuarios" en la forma de los datos recogidos en el comportamiento del usuario en el sitio.

Una vez más: pues no.

Ellos estaban tomando decisiones sobre lo que debe ir en millones de Facebook News Feeds basado en correos electrónicos de los usuarios y, a veces sólo conversaciones en la calle.

Cox dice: "Usted caminó fuera de la oficina y que estaba rodeado de los usuarios de Facebook que eran muy vocal con usted acerca de lo que estaban viviendo y lo que querían."

"También nos dieron un montón de correo porque la gente sabía Boz y yo éramos responsables de ranking."

Este método no siempre funciona bien. Una vez, durante esos primeros años, Facebook firmó un acuerdo con ESPN para poner su cobertura de la Locura de Marzo en el News Feed.

De repente, millones de piensos se saturaron con las puntuaciones de baloncesto.

Hola, regeneración.

A través de los años, Facebook, evidentemente, ha vuelto mucho más sofisticados en cómo decida organizar los 1.500 historias para cada News Noticias user.

Otra actualización del algoritmo fue el punto de la conferencia de prensa de ayer.

Cox es vicepresidente de producto en Facebook en estos días, y supervisa las noticias gerente de productos de alimentación, Lars Backstrom. Backstrom supervisa un equipo de programadores que están, Cox lo admitiría, mucho más talento que él y Boz nunca fueron.

Pero aún así, dice Cox, "

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Experiencias de un fundador de empresas

57 things I've learned founding three companies
Venture Beat  

Jason Goldberg is the founder and CEO of Fabulis, a gay social network and previously founded Jobster and Socialmedian. He originally published this essay on his personal blog, Betashop.

I’ve been founding and helping run technology companies since 1999.  My latest company is Fabulis.com.  Here are 57 lessons I’ve learned along the way.  I could have listed 100+ but I didn’t want to bore you.

1. Build something you are personally passionate about.  You are your best focus group.

2. User experience matters a lot.  Most products that fail do so because users don’t understand how to get value from them.  Many product fail by being too complex.

3. Be technical.  You don’t have to write code but you do have to understand how it is built and how it works.

4. The CEO of a startup must, must, must be the product manager. He/she must own the functional user experience.

5. Stack rank your features.  No two features are ever created equal.  You can’t do everything all at once.  Force prioritization.

6. Use a bug tracking system and religiously manage development action items from it.

7. Ship it.  You’ll never know how good your product is until real people touch it and give you feedback.

8. Ship it fast and ship it often.  Don’t worry about adding that extra feature.  Ship the bare minimum feature set required in order to start gathering user feedback.  Get feedback, repeat the process, and ship the next version and the next version as quickly as possible.  If you’re taking more than 3 months to launch your first consumer-facing product, you’re taking too long.  If you’re taking more than 3 weeks to ship updates, you’re taking too long.  Ship small stuff weekly, if not several times per week.  Ship significant releases in 3 week intervals.

9. The only thing that matters is how good your product is.  All the rest is noise.

10. The only judge of how good your product is is how much your users use it.

11. Therefore (adding #’s 11 + 12):  In the early days the key determinant of your future success is traction.  Spend the majority of your time figuring out how to cultivate pockets of traction amongst your early adopters and optimize around that traction.  Traction begets more traction if you are able to jump on it.

12. You’re doing really well if 50% of what you originally planned on doing turns out to actually work.  Follow your users as much as possible.

13. But don’t rely on focus groups to tell you what to build.  Focus groups can tell you what to fix and help you identify potentially interesting kernels for you to hone in on, but you still need to figure out how to synthesize such input and where to take your users.

14. Most people really only heavily use about 5 to 7 services.  If you want to be an important product and a big business, you will need to figure out how to fit into one of those 5 to 7 services, which means capturing your user’s fascination, enthusiasm, and trust.  You need to give your users a real reason to add you into their time.

15. Try to ride an existing wave vs. creating your own market.  If you can, catch onto an emerging macro trend and ride it.

16. Find yourself a “sherpa.”  This is someone who has done it before — raised money, done deals, worked with startups.  Give this person 1 to 2% of your company in exchange for their time.  Rely on them to open doors to future investors.  Use them as a sounding board for corporate development issues.  Don’t do this by committee.  Advisory boards never amount to much.  Find one person, make them your sherpa, and lean on them.

17. Work with the best possible people for your project, regardless of where they are located.

18. Co-locate as best possible but be willing to travel to remote offices to make multiple offices work.  Online collaboration maxes out at 3 to 4 weeks apart, which means you need to commit to traveling almost monthly to make remote offices work.

19. Work with people you like to be around.  There’s no sense in going to war with people you don’t like.

20. Work with people you trust like family.

21. Work from home as long as you can.

22. Position your desk in a way in which you are staring at your co-founders and they are staring at you.  If you aren’t enjoying looking at each other each day, you’re working with the wrong people.

23. Use a tool like Yammer to share internally what you’re working on.  It’s easier for many people (especially developers) to post a status update than to write an email.

24. Use a file sharing service like basecamp for your team.  It’s impossible for everyone to keep track of every file sent to their email in-box.  Use basecamp so there’s a history and central repository.

25. Figure out quickly what you are personally really good at and focus your personal time around those activities.  Let other people do the other stuff.

26. Surround yourself with people who fill your gaps.  Let them do the stuff they are better at.  Don’t do their jobs.

27. Work with people who are smarter than you at certain things.

28. Work with people who argue with you and tell you no.

29. Be willing to fight like hell during the day but still love each other when you go home.

30. Work with people who are passionate about solving the specific problem you are trying to solve.  Passion for building a business is not enough; there needs to be passion for your customer and solving your customer’s problem.

31. Push the people around you to care as much as you do.

32. Be loyal.  Cultivate and coach people vs. churning through them.

33. You’re never as right as you think you are.

34. Go to the gym and/or run at least 4 times per week.  Keep your body in shape if you want to keep your mind in shape.

35. Don’t drink on airplanes unless you are on a flight of longer than 8 hours. It ruins you and wastes your time.

36. Choose your investors based on who you want to work with, be friends with, and get advice from.

37. Don’t choose your investors based on valuation.  A couple of dilution points here or there wont matter in the long run but working with the right people will.

38. Raise as little money as possible when you first start.  Force yourself to be budget constrained as it will cause you to carefully spend each dollar like it is your last.

39. Once you have some traction, raise more money than you need but not more than you know what to do with.  This is tricky.  Don’t skimp on fundraising because of dilution fears.

40. Spend every dollar like it is your last.

41. Know what kind of company you are trying to build.  There are very few Googles and Facebooks.  A good outcome for your business might be a $10M exit or a $20M exit or a $100M exit or no exit at all.  Plan for the business you want to build.  Don’t just shoot for the moon.  From a money-in-your-pocket and return on time spent standpoint, owning 20% of a $20M exit in 2 years is much better than owning 3% of a $100M business in 5 years.

42. Related to #41, understand whether your business is a VC business or not. A VC business is expected to deliver 10x returns to investors.  That means if you’re taking money with a $5M post-money valuation, the expectation is that you are building for a minimum $50M exit.  $10M post-money valuation = $100M target.  That’s not to say that you might not sell the company for less and everyone involved might be happy with that outcome, but that’s not what you are signing up for when you take VC money with such a valuation.  Know what the implications of taking VC money are and what it means for expectations on you.

43. Make sure your personal business goals are aligned with the goals of your investors.  The business will only succeed if you are motivated.  Investors can’t force the business to succeed.  And they certainly can’t force a CEO to care.

44. Conferences are generally a waste of time.

45. Smile.  Laugh.  Wear funny socks. I wear funny socks to remind myself to not settle for boring and to be creative.

46. Do something, anything that shows you’re not just a robot.  Let people get to know the real you.

47. Hang a lantern on your hangups.

48. Wear your company’s t-shirts everywhere.

49. Do your own customer service.

50. Tell a good story.

51. But don’t lie.  Ever.

52. Find inspiration in the people around you.

53. Have fun every single day.  If it’s not fun, stop doing it.  No one is making you.

54. It’s true what they say in sales, you’re only as good as your last sale.

55. Make mistakes, but learn from them.  I’ve made hundreds.

56. Mature, but don’t grow up.

57. Never give up.

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/27/57-things-ive-learned-founding-three-companies/#RgtEpYu6IQlIASUz.99 

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4 modos baratos de medir la demanda de mercado

4 Low-Cost Ways to Measure Market Demand

KEVIN COLLERAN: There is that magical “a ha” moment when you have an idea for a new product or service so brilliant that it is truly your mission to turn the idea into a reality (and yes, hopefully make a fortune).Yet an “a ha” moment doesn’t quantify a market. So how do you show the world—and more specifically, investors—the market’s demand?

At this stage of the business planning process, the majority of entrepreneurs will seek to determine the overall market size and specific market demand for their business idea. Unfortunately, traditional market research methods are both expensive and time consuming—luxuries few entrepreneurs have.

However, social media and other technologies provide free resources for entrepreneurs to roughly gauge market size and consumer interest quickly and efficiently. In an effort to illustrate this, I posted this week’s Accelerator question on Facebook … and within hours had dozens of responses from entrepreneurial friends who have faced the barrier of measuring market size and customer demand for their own business ventures.

Suggestions:

1. Fake it … An online façade of a company can be created overnight (long before the product or service is ever developed), allowing immediate feedback from the target consumer. You can quickly utilize ads on Google and Facebook and word-of-mouth to start recruiting potential consumers to give product feedback, place pre-orders, sign up for a mailing list, or be placed on a wait list to be notified when the product is launched. Services like Kickstarter involve your end-consumers in the development process and help grow an active customer base earlier than ever before. The investment community will give money to a company that has shown proven market demand by collecting pre-orders or signups from real consumers.

2. Leverage your online and offline networks … Between Twitter, Facebook and real life, you have a significant sampling of friends, family, acquaintances and followers who could all be potential customers willing to offer feedback. As one friend recommended, though, you may not want to tell certain ones the idea is yours, so that you don’t get polite, sugar-coated feedback from those who ultimately mean well.

3. Search the Web … Seems obvious, but many potential entrepreneurs don’t search for market data or surveys that may already exist on your desired topic/industry. A few quick searches could either justify (or kill) the market opportunity for your idea. Through searches you may also find other businesses in the same industry that could provide a strong indication of the market opportunity.

4. Listen … When you have that “a ha” idea, sometimes it’s hard to think beyond it. Yet many of the most successful companies in the world originally started with a very different product or focus. Remain flexible and open-minded enough to allow others (especially potential customers) to influence your product development even if it means radical change.

The Wall Street Journal

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44% de aumento en el eCommerce argentino

Argentina, uno de los países con mayor crecimiento en el comercio electrónico

El país sudamericano experimentó un crecimiento del 44% durante el año pasado. Cifra que supera con creces al esperado y lo convierte en uno de los países con mayores expectativas con respecto al e-commerce de cara al futuro.



“Si bien estas cifras continúan siendo alentadoras, seguimos teniendo por delante el enorme desafío de seguir trabajando de manera conjunta con el gobierno, las empresas, cámaras empresarias y la comunidad académica para potenciar aún más el comercio electrónico en Argentina y convertirlo en el más competitivo de la región” afirmaba Patricia Jebsen, Presidenta de la Cámara Argentina de Comercio Electrónico (CACE).

La CACE ha presentado recientemente los resultados de su último informe sobre el e-commerce en Argentina. Estos datos han aportado mucha esperanza sobre el futuro del comercio electrónico en este país:

Durante los 4 últimos años el e-commerce se ha disparado en este país, llegando a culminar en 2012 con un crecimiento del 44%, cifra que se espera superar durante este año (las expectativas para 2013 son de un trepidante crecimiento del 48%)

Podéis ver el informe completo aquí: Estudio de Comercio Electrónico Argentina 2012

MathMen

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Video: Lean Start Up, construye, mide y aprende

Lean Start Up: Construye, mide y aprende
Conferencista: Celeste North

La metodología de Lean Startup sigue cinco principios básicos:
1. Los emprendedores están en todos lados
2. Emprendimiento es administración
3. Aprendizaje validado
4. Contabilidad de innovación
5. Construye-mide-aprende

Siguiendo estos principios muchos de los problemas más comunes al emprender pueden ser amortiguados. A diferencia de la noción común, existen procesos que podemos seguir para acelerar el proceso de aprendizaje y encontrar un modelo de éxito a tiempo.

En esta charla hablaré de los conceptos básicos de la metodología Lean Startup y los proceso que podemos realizar para no fallar en el proceso de experimentación y aprendizaje al momento de emprender.

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La Historia del SEO

The History of SEO from HubSpot All-in-one Marketing Software

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