Not necessarily... snippets can be usefull for the simple fact of organizing one's mind and week. Whether or not a manager keeps track of them, they allow the employee to personally be accountable.
Another good way is to ask the prospective VC if you can interview him. Interview him (or her) on how they acheived success, and what've they've seen in companies they've invested in. This alone will be a mentoring experience as you can gain some insight into what they invest in, and what made those (or some) companies successful.
At the end of the interview, they will most likely ask what you are up to, which can lead into them offering some advice.
The other point is to test your idea on someone who is not in love with your own idea. It can be easy to be in love with your idea so much that you discount obvious pitfalls. And like the article mentions, this technique would only work with a consumer oriented product.
I ran a bike-flipping business in college... not quite brick & mortar, but definitely not high-tech.
My roommate and I went to all the sorority houses around campus and made a deal with the house moms for old bikes. In exchange for cleaning up the bike-parking area of their house, we would get all of the left-over bikes for free from girls who had just graduated.
We then cleaned them up, ran some ads in Craigslist, and sold them to people near the beach. Best part was the bikes were predominantly beach-cruisers, and were in high demand at the beginning of summer when students had graduated.
Process took 10 days, we made about $2000 between the two of us, and it paid for a plane ticket to Europe with some extra cash to spend!
To anyone who is thinking about doing this, I highly recommend it.
When I was younger, my family sold most of what we owned, rented out our house, and moved onto our sailboat. We sailed from Seattle to San Diego, then down the West Coast of Mexico, and up into the Sea of Cortez. We were only planning on being gone one year, but since it was such an amazing experience, we decided to extend our trip for a second year.
On the second year, we sailed from the Sea of Cortez farther down Mexico, then down to El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, through the Panama Canal, over to Colombia, up to Honduras, Belize, Mexico again, then Florida. This second year was certainly more rushed since we visited so many countries, but we need to get back stateside for me to finish school and go to college.
Many people believe it is unsafe and expensive to do such an extended trip. But if you are friendly to the local people and accept their culture, they are often welcoming and friendly. Never once were we approached by pirates (although the Mexican navy did stop us 100+ miles off the coast before leaving Mexico to enter El Sal, boarded our boat with AK47s and searched for drugs. Obvi nothing was there and they left). In fact, many welcomed us because we helping to boost their economy, and would improve their image as a "tourist" town.
As for expenses, living on a boat is extremely cheap if you are mechanically inclined. Granted, the boat is a big investment, but other than that there aren't too many expenses. We used solar panels for electricity, a mini-desalinazation machine for drinking water, and often fished off the side, catching fresh tuna. The only expenses were diesel fuel and food (which is cheap in 3rd world countries!). Occasionally we docked, but that was also cheap (we stayed at a high-end resort in MX, including 3 pools and a personal zoo with tigers, and we paid $20/ day). Also, since our home was being rented, that provided some monthly income with no work.
The one danger, and it is very serious, is when people have a lack of offshore sailing and boat handling experience. When (not if) you encounter bad weather you've gotta know how to properly manage the boat, be it at anchor or in the middle of the ocean. I've seen boats slam into rocks during storms in port, and heard captain's calling for help because they're boat is sinking far from shore. However, with some training near shore and a few trips to sea with experienced sailors, most anyone can learn what is necessary to take on an extended sailing voyage.
Also, for all you who need a constant internet connection, rig up an amplified wireless router. We bought an industrial antenna, mounted it halfway up the mast, and rigged up a signal amplifier. In our home harbor, this lead to an increase from 3 wifi networks to over 35 wifi networks! Usually had about a dozen free networks from local businesses.
When we returned home to Seattle, we simply moved back into our original home, met up with old friends, and had some great tales to tell.
Question: If I were a "BizDev" guy and wanted to create a website that has similar functionalities as, say, Groupon or PayPal (I understand they're different), what languages would be best to learn?
I would suspect some front-end GUI paired with a back-end database system would be needed, but what languages specifically would be best?
As an entrepreneur with a degree in Mech. Eng. and Entrp., and I have done programming in MATLAB, some VBA, and some HTML. So I understand the logic behind programs, but don't necessarily know all the languages.
You need a templating + biz logic language, and a database. The usual starters for non-purists are PHP and MySQL. Also, most front-ends use JavaScript these days, often with a helper JavaScript library like JQuery.
Myself, I'm more of a Python (language) + PostgreSQL (database) person, but they may take a little longer to get up to speed with.
Another plus for Google... they could sell the customer analytics to their AdWords customers. For example, using Groupon data, they know that the 50% off Pizza deal was more popular in West LA than in the OC. They could sell this data to Dominos who places AdWords in those two areas, and Dominos would then spend more on OC ads.
Although there might be some privacy laws that are in conflict here, Googs could probably sell the overall data (aka 58% of registered users bought this in West LA, 24% in OC), without giving away customer specifics (aka Bill Smith bought this)
I'm sure there are other ways too Google could capitalize on this.
The author points out each company's profits over the last 10-years (RIM $9 Bil, TiVo -$400 Mil), yet as many have commented, this isn't really an apples-to-apples comparison. What would have been more effective would be to give some metrics on how each company did within their own industries. How did RIM do in comparison to the mobile hardware market, as % market share? How did TiVo do within their market industry?
RIM's success can be in part attributed to the explosive growth of the mobile technology industry. Maybe TiVo did great in the DVR/ VCR industry, but that industry just isn't nearly as lucrative.
A better question to answer would have been how did each company do in their industry. Or even better, give an example of a characteristically "hubris" approach of a product in the mobile hardware space, and compare it to RIM's "humility" approach.
