Good point. I have certainly used this approach with words that seemed similar but had radically different degrees of frequency. Having said that, it's also a 'psychological hack' in that it helps me make a decision over which word to use. Somehow, knowing that one word is used even slightly more often than another seems to give me more confidence in using that particular word than if I simply flipped a coin... unless, of course, the number of searches is the same for each word! (Uh-oh, gotta think for myself again...)
Not this woman. Ever since I was young I wanted to build a big business (i.e. NOT a 'lifestyle' business) and also raise a family. I never, ever saw it as an 'either/or' decision and maybe that's why I'm doing both.
Facebook's funding timeline: "Round one: $500,000 from Peter Thiel, Summer 2004; Round two: $12.7 million from Accel Partners, April 2005; Round three: $27.5 million from Greylock Partners leading the round, Meritech Capital Partners participating, and Accel Partners and Peter Thiel increasing their investment in the company." Source: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?factsheet
Tim certainly knows a thing or two about marketing. After reading all the claims I'm definitely intrigued. But, I'm also skeptical, since the claims seem so outlandish. So... I think I'll wait until the book comes out and flick through it in the bookstore.
Great article that provides invaluable insights into Mailchimp's experience with the freemium business model. We are using a freemium model with Domainer Income (http://www.domainerincome.com). Now, we are still in the throes of improving many aspects of the site and conversion funnel, etc but with regard to the freemium model itself, it occurs to me that we have - and anyone deploying a freemium model has - quite a few variables to play around with that will impact the 10:1 ratio as well as overall conversions, sales, profits, renewals, etc. For example, my experience and observations suggest that you really need to provide overwhelming value in the paid version to get people to upgrade. 'A little bit better' won't cut it. Also, you can experiment with the actual free/paid service you provide. One thing we're about to do is give everyone who signs up for a free membership a trial of the premium service before they are 'dropped' back to the free account. These are just two examples. On the other hand, having said this, I am also developing a theory that you really have three target markets: freebie users who will never upgrade, paid users who want the value-added services of the paid version, and a group in between that will upgrade if they perceive enough value in doing so. How big is the middle group, what will it take to convince them to upgrade, is it cost-effective to try to persuade them? These are all fascinating questions!
As others have noted, the point was not that university graduates are, by definition, smart or morally virtuous - merely that university courses require you to submit papers, do written exams, etc where it's made very clear that copying someone else's work is not acceptable.
Is the question really: am I better off completing college, spending a few years with a big company (or a startup) and then starting my own company... or is it: what do I want to achieve - e.g. build my own company in the xyz industry - and what is the best way for me to achieve that? If you know that you want to start 'a' company but don't know exactly what kind of company or what industry, etc the question may then become: what would I like to learn about and what will enable me to learn about that? The answer may well be to go to / stay in college and then work for a company or two in order to develop business skills and work out what kind of business you'd like to build. On the other hand, if you know exactly what you want to start, and have the skills and resources to 'just do it', maybe you are better off dropping out of college. Personally, I am almost a textbook example of Vivek's advice precisely because I wasn't sure what kind of business I wanted to start back in my high school and university days. I will say this, though, even if you stay in college or work for another company, I recommend starting some kind of business on the side. Not only will you learn skills you won't learn at college or in a big company - and you may stumble on the business you really want to commit to - but it will also help off-set the socialization (i.e. to keep that nice, high paying job with benefits) that can arise in a big corporate environment and that may stop you from ever taking the entrepreneurial plunge.
I don't think there's anything suspect about Ron Conway's misspelling of 'entrepreneur'. He probably just banged out the email without doing a spell-check. Let's remember it was a private email. Had he intended to have it published he probably would have taken more care. I can't speak for Ron, of course, but I will say that I frequently write the word "entrepreneur" (i.e. in blog posts, emails, etc). I'm not sure why - maybe it's the way I touch-type - but I often miss the second 'r'. I typically don't even notice until I do a spell-check. All in all, I think it was just an innocent mistake.
Good question. To go from a purely conceptual model such as this to one with real empirical substance you would have to be precise about such concepts as confidence and success and how they are quantitatively measured. I think a group of smart psychologists could pull it off, as long as they were open about their definitions and quantitative scales, so people could accept or reject their thesis accordingly.
Good point. There are founders that have valuable inside knowledge of their industry (domain expertise, etc) who can be more reasonably sure of their success in some B2B venture than a YCombinator project that wants to be the next Twitter. Can we say that if both examples are equally confident of their success, that the former is less deluded than the latter?
