Skip to main content

Read More

I started to read more entrepreneur related books. Two weeks ago, I finished reading a book named "Hackers and Painters" written by Paul Graham. Now I'm reading another very interesting book named "The Lean Startup". I finished half of the book and found the concepts helpful in building a small&beautiful tech startup. However, practise is somewhat more important. Shamefully, the readpeer project didn't really follow the lean startup approach, but more of a traditional way. We didn't plan for the MVP(minimum variable product) the users' need. Instead, we focused too much on completing features we thought the users might love. We really need to test on the ideas before driving too deep to the development. We've tried to use Scrum for project meeting. However, the fact that most other teammates are part-time undergraduate students made it very difficult to build a real startup. The productivity is also quite low. In the past one month, the PHD and I are the two major contributors, however, I didn't find self-motivated developing Drupal in the old system. The only moment I found exciting in the past one month is when I used angular.js to polish the reader. One entrepreneur once told me that "To focus on building the team, not the exact product". I think that's a fair suggestion. However, the fact that the current company didn't spend enough energy strengthening the team made the so-called startup vulnerable. I may spend some extra money and energy on the human resource development of the company. Otherwise, it's very unlikely to become a dynamic&healthy growing startup.

Yesterday, a hacker from Beijing introduced three ruby books which can help me better understand the language and the framework. Thanks to his recommendations, I will read the books to better understand the fundamentals.

Other good things:
I started to play keyboards on sunday worships.
I bought a nexus 7 from Amazon. Android is cool.

End with a note from "Hackers and Painters". There is no ending for a paint, it's just that you no longer draw it.


Comments

  1. benleong28 October 2013 at 19:55

    "To focus on building the team, not the exact product".

    Your insights are exactly right. :-) You're doing well on your growth. Keep it up. :-P

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Shao28 October 2013 at 22:59

      Thanks a lot! It's hard to tell whether I'm drawing a masterpiece or a doodle until it finally takes off or I give it up:-）

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Time Goes By, So Fast

It's been a week since the last blog entry, time goes by so fast. This week's highlights: 1. Rethought about career development. http://www.douban.com/note/276145923/ 2. Treated my friends a traditional Shaoxing meal. 3. Started to learn Ruby on Rails. http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html 4. Started to read the book "Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design" by Giles Colborne. 5. Recorded some vocals. http://site.douban.com/shaohuan 6. Watched this Ted speech:  http://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_the_key_to_success_grit.html 7. Followed Ahbei(founder of Douban) on Zhihu(Chinese version of Quora). 8. " 我认为世界上不存在一流的人才，世界上只有存在一流的人才一定是学习能力，谦虚，把自己当平凡的人" --马云（Jack Ma）
Post a Comment
Read more

InnovFest 2015

I attended the innovFest 2015 event. It was quite eye opening. Besides the booth, some topics in the forums also interested me. The first topic I joined was the Kopi Chat with Yossi Vardi, a famous Israeli entrepreneur and investor. He is straightforward and humorous. When talking about the most important reason why people wake up with a great idea but ended up sleeping without executing anything, he collected answers from the audiences. One answer pretty much fitted his appetite-- "People fear about losing faces". He shared his opinion with the quotes from Theodore Roosevelt, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually st...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pause and Retrospect

I recently enjoyed a swift lunch with an old friend, who was once my roommate during our school years. We had an in-depth conversation about life and career. To my mind, his thought process is far more mature than mine, and his decisions seem more future-oriented. Although our conversation was private, I believe certain insights should be shared with a broader audience. 1. The Role of Luck in Life.  His life experiences have significantly highlighted the impact of luck. While I'm not ready to accept this fully, similar sentiments have been echoed by other successful and wise individuals I've interacted with. I also recently watched an informative video that lucidly explains the 80/20 rule and the principle of luck. The video demonstrates through "agent-based modelling" how the wealthiest person isn't necessarily the most talented but is usually someone of average talent who encounters multiple lucky events in life.  I agreed that luck indeed plays a vital role and...
Post a Comment
Read more