This is one of the coolest infographics I’ve seen in awhile – it’s officially called “The Conversation Prism 4.0”. Still not sure what you’re looking at? Well…
Developed in 2008 by Brian Solis, The Conversation Prism is a visual map of the social media landscape. It’s an ongoing study in digital ethnography that tracks dominant and promising social networks and organizes them by how they’re used in everyday life.
Source: ConversationPrism.com
Found via: Cool Infographics
The Term Sheet – that enigmatic, not quite binding legal document that every entrepreneur both craves and fears. There is no shortage of resources to help one understand a term sheet but there are a few worth highlighting. I’d be remiss to not mention Brad Feld’s term sheet series over on his blog or his book Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. Brad is one of the early pioneers of demystifying term sheets and deserves being mentioned first.
In addition, Founders Fund has a Transparent Termsheet section on their website that allows you to plug key terms into a calculator and play around with various exit scenarios. They also have their own plain english guide to a term sheet as well.
Finally, embedded below is probably the most plain english term sheet I’ve come across yet. Provided by UK based Passion Capital.
Check ’em all out!
… for Non Developers.
A very helpful guide to the basics of web development:
Source: Lemi Orhan Ergin
If you are an entrepreneur, deal with startups, or have seen the movie The Social Network then you’ve probably at least heard of Peter Thiel. He was one of the founders of PayPal, the first outside investor in Facebook, and has made countless other investments through the various funds he manages (Founders Fund, Clarium, Mithril, etc.). In short, the man is not some one trick pony that got lucky a couple of times. His advice is valuable; when he speaks you should listen – especially if you’re involved with startups.
Last year he taught a startup class at Stanford. As you might imagine it was incredibly popular and hard to get into. Fortunately for those of us that were unable to attend, one of the more diligent students not only took incredibly robust class notes but decided to share them with the world through his blog http://blakemasters.com/.
You can check out his notes here: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup Class Notes.
Thank you Blake, thank you PT. A few notable quotes highlighted on Pinterest of all places are below:
Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action
I’ve been periodically watching this video for a few years and I’ve been meaning to blog about it for quite a while. This 20 minute talk is well worth your time – the concept is simple but resonates incredibly well.
The punchline: why you do something is more important than what you do or how you do it. That’s not to say the “how” or “what” aren’t important but it’s the “why” that ranks supreme. People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
There are leaders and there are those who lead. Leaders are people with power and authority, we follow them because we have to. Those who lead inspire us, we follow them because we want to.
The Golden Circle
If you spend much time in Silicon Valley you’d have to go pretty far out of your way to avoid the constant tech-love-fest that is taking place here. After all, there is A LOT of hype and nonsense attracting A LOT of money (see Hardly Working Startup Guys clip below for a fairly accurate portrayal or just spend 20 minutes reading the headlines at TechCrunch).
Every now and then it’s good to take a step back, catch your breath, and just admire the mania. One blog does this exceptionally well: Jesus Christ, Silicon Valley.
JC,SV is a well written and hilariously offensive reprieve from the non-stop, disrupt-the-world-and-get-rich-quick-while-pretending-to-not-take-yourself-too-seriously mantra that pervades the valley. Cutting larger than life companies / entrepreneurs / investors down to size is what this blog does and it does it well. It seems the bully has finally arrived in the land where the nerds get the money and the girls.
To be fair the Valley and tech-scene is not all bad – despite all the BS and hype, it is an amazing hotbed of innovation and the world is better off for it. So there.
*Postscript: (later that day…)
While the YouTube video embedded above is a scripted joke, the one below is not. These guys recently raised $15M from Andreessen Horowitz. The host’s hairdo is the icing on the cake. It all just goes to show that the tech bubble spans well beyond Silicon Valley. I hope JC,SV blogs about them.
… or did they?
Dan Primack has an interesting article highlighting new data from Dow Jones VentureSource that shows a 79% drop in median pre-money valuations from Q4 to Q1. He’s quick to note this could just be an anomaly and a few other VC market reports coming out tomorrow should help clarify things.
Stay tuned.
Source: Fortune
Nice infographic from the WSJ for their article on messaging apps – check it out here. They say that on average few app developers make much money, which was a surprise to me. Every startup I’ve worked with / talked to over the last 2 years routinely complains about a shortage of talent – mobile app development is particularly problematic because you have to develop for multiple platforms (iOS, Android, and to a lesser extent Windows, and Blackberry) you’re not just designing one web page accessible by any device.
“Everybody’s got to find their own way. Listening to me, maybe it’s fun, maybe it’s boring, who knows, you’re not going to succeed until you find your own way. I mean if you’re a musician you’ve got to find your own sound, your own way. Great musicians through history were the people who had their own madness, and were proud of their madness, especially if it was not what everybody else is doing. Well, the same is true of art, literature, politics, finance…especially finance. Yeah, you can copy other people, and many people do, that’s why everybody invests in the same thing, and that’s why it winds up being a bad investment. No, you’ve got to figure out your own way, no matter how absurd your way may sound, especially if your own way sounds absurd to others, you should pursue it even harder. You can learn from other people, but don’t try to be like Joe or Sally, try to be like yourself.” – Jim Rogers in Investor Guide
Found via Jim Rogers Blog
Photogenic Thoughts 