$3 million a year Tuesday, April 25, 2006

whenever i get stuck with my aspirations & dont see things mvoing, there are few things i do. One of them is to read Paul Grahams essays. heres a small piece of his writing:

Here is a brief sketch of the economic proposition. If you're a good hacker in your mid twenties, you can get a job paying about $80,000 per year. So on average such a hacker must be able to do at least $80,000 worth of work per year for the company just to break even. You could probably work twice as many hours as a corporate employee, and if you focus you can probably get three times as much done in an hour. You should get another multiple of two, at least, by eliminating the drag of the pointy-haired middle manager who would be your boss in a big company. Then there is one more multiple: how much smarter are you than your job description expects you to be? Suppose another multiple of three. Combine all these multipliers, and I'm claiming you could be 36 times more productive than you're expected to be in a random corporate job. If a fairly good hacker is worth $80,000 a year at a big company, then a smart hacker working very hard without any corporate bullshit to slow him down should be able to do work worth about $3 million a year.

posted by Nitin @ 8:14 AM, ,

Business Model Tips Tuesday, April 18, 2006

The executives shared the trials and tribulations of getting the business model right along with tips on what they have learned through experience.

-Innovate in one or two areas
When you start a business, look at what you do the same and what you do differently. In order to be successful, you want to do a lot of things the same way. You only want to innovate in a few key areas.

-Focus on the business basics
Ultimately businesses are simple: who will buy, what is the margin, can you protect the business from competitors. The CEO must identify the key successful factor - in social networking the key question was 'Will people invite others to join?'.

-Make the tough call
Different times call for different actions. A CEO must recognize points of inflection and morph, though it is difficult to make the call to leave a business and start something new.

-Change is normal
There are relatively few tech companies that still have business models that are the same as when the VCs were pitched.

-Test the model
The best way to test the business model is spending time with customers. They have the answers and it is much better than spending time in front of a white board.

posted by Nitin @ 6:36 AM, ,