Steve Jobs: The Most Important Thing

We can change life into whatever we imagine.  (via Farnam Street and 37 Signals)


When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. 

That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again. 

And the minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. 

I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

Fail, Fail, Fail, Fail... (maybe) Win!

#Life of a #Startup #Entrepreneur

Kiss Your Boss Goodbye. It’s Time to Be An Entrepreneur!

I'm building a mobile app and I'm doing some research about startups and entrepreneurship. 

The market can be defined in one word: Huge!

Here are the references that I used for this slide:

1. Entrepreneurs Now Numbering Near 400 Million In 54 Countries (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor – January 19, 2012)
2. Who's Starting America's New Businesses? And Why? (Forbes.com – July 22, 2012)
3. How many start-ups in the US get seed/VC funding per year? (Gust.com – November 22, 2012)

Its interesting to see that 5.7% of the world's population are entrepreneurs, while in the US. the average is about 3.8%. Every year only 2% of US. startups raise capital from angels and VC's. For every startup that gets money from a VC another 400 were rejected, while the ratio for angels is 1 in 40.  

I'll be posting more as make progress. In the meantime you can signup to be notified when app goes live: http://bigfish.io

Mobile is a One Way Street

I'm back in the US. a few months now and I'm amazed at how crazed everyone is with mobile. For years Europe was far ahead of the US., but the iPhone and apps have changed everything.

Its on everyone's radar, and its not just about creating an app, but making it part of an overall strategy. It feels like the Internet of the mid-late '90s, everyone wants to get on board. But its more mature and the mobile is bigger, a much bigger opportunity.

If you look at some of the numbers, you'll see its a one way street. The world's population is about 7 billion people: 2 billion people are connected to the Internet, 6 billion have cell phone and about 1.2 billion have a smartphone.

• China and India account for 30% of this growth.
• About 800,000 apps are available in IOS and Android app stores.
• Google earns $2.5 billion in mobile ad revenue annually.
• Mobile devices account for 8.5% of global website hits.

The first thing most people do when they wake up in the morning is check their phones. We check our phones about 150 times a day, spending about 2.7 hours per day on our phones. We do so many things with our phones, for example half of all local searches are from mobile devices.

This growth is going to continue to be strong. In the next two years, more people will access the Internet through their cell phones, instead of their desktops.

Mobile is clearly the right thing, but to compete companies will have to redefine how they serve their content and how they offer their services and products. Mobile is not about apps. Its about creating content and commerce opportunities that are relevant and geo-targeted. Its about engaging people in real-time, while they are on the move.

As desktops, smartphones and tablets merge, we'll see a convergence, because of technologies like HTML5, on how we design user experiences. The process of how we think about websites will change, becoming mobile, consistent and coherent across devices.

Mobile Apps missing the Marketing Train

Over the past month I've been in touch with developers at two mobile app teams, and thinking about how to help them build traction and drive more downloads. What I find strange is that they're collecting so much content from their users but they're not doing anything with it, to use it and build an inbound marketing strategy.

Looking at most app sites, you'll see the same thing: very basic, just sending users to their App Store page. It looks like they all believe that its enough to get organic traffic through the App Store. But if you want to build a business, you can’t ignore search, especially when ninety percent of web traffic is driven by search engines. To rely solely on the App Store for discovery is not a strategy, especially now, when hundreds of thousands of apps are competing for visibility in IOS and Andoid stores.

Most app publishers don't realize that if they want to drive downloads, they need to build trust, which will stem from building content and engaging in conversations. They need to take user content and social actions and put them on the web. They need to develop inbound content marketing machine. Best of all, its all measurable allowing them to try different things and focus on what drives conversions.

Never Let go of the Fear of Failure

"Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Tolstoy’s comment applies to failed entrepreneurial ventures. The reasons entrepreneurs fail varies as the entrepreneurs themselves.

Last October on Linkedin Answers someone started a thread: "What is the ONE fear you had to let go of to become successful in your line of business?". Most people answered something about overcoming the fear of failure.

Overcoming the fear of failure is the formula to success?
I never want to let go of the fear of failure, because it drives us to succeed. Its the only thing that will keep you alive in the jungle!

I hate failing, everyone does. I don't think I've ever learned anything from failure.
The important thing about failure is not what we learned, but finding the courage to pick ourselves up and do it again.

If there's a good thing about failure, I guess its that we know which way not to go, what didn't work and what decisions were wrong. Failure is only a process to eliminate the wrong. It certainly cannot teach us what works. Vulcans and computers use the process of elimination to work out solutions :)

Past success cannot guarantee that our future endeavors will be successful. We just have better odds, because we've done it before and we have a sense of moving in the right direction.

Never get too comfortable. Never let go of the fear of failure.

Programmers are the Wizards of the Future

My family always placed a high value on education. I got a good one. In 1984 I didn't know anything about computers, most people in Greece didn't know anything about computers and confused them with calculators. Everyone I knew was telling me to become a chemical engineer, so I was leaning in that direction.

But when I came to the US., Boston University didn't offer a chemical engineering program. In my misfortune I was lucky, because I decided to study computer engineering.

The first real program I wrote was a postfix calculator for a freshman Pascal course. I spent my first summer learning Assembler, while working as a student operator filing output at VPS/VM.

I loved to code, but having my own computer was difficult at the time. I used the university's servers, with limited access, a few hours per week. In 1988 when I graduated, I got my first two computers. I got the best of both worlds: a Mac SE as a gift, and a brand new PC i386 which I found in the hotel parking lot where I worked as an attendant for the summer.

Learning to code changed my life in so many ways. Mostly it taught me how to think, how to organize a thoughts and how approach solutions.

When I read about initiatives like Code.org, TEALS, Codeclub.co.uk I get excited. The digital revolution is only getting started and we need more people that understand how to code. Not just to imagine future innovations in technology, but to come up with solutions to the world's important problems.

WolframAlpha’s New Facebook Graph

WolframAlpha just released its new Facebook graph product. The image is based on word frequency of my status updates: Great, Entrepreneur, Social, Gifting, Startup, Good, Digital, Innovation, Athens, Boston.

There's so much information packed in the report: top posts, top commenters, most liked photo or post, most commented photo etc.

You should check it out here.

Looking for the Social Currency in Search

Linkedin's recent marketing activity got me thinking again about search and social.
In recent headlines you'll read:

• Facebook and Bing’s Plan to Make Search Social
• Search me
• What should Google do about Facebook Graph Search?

Everyone is trying to figure out how to make search more social. I think whats missing is a metric, something similar to "likes" or "follows" that will drive people to share from search, because they get some value in return.

Whether you agree or not, in the mind of users "likes" and "follows" are today's social currency, the more the better. Even though big search engines have already embedded sharing functionality in their SERPs, being able to share doesn't mean that people will share. Why should they, what's in it for them? How does search increase their self-worth? What emotional rewards or visible rewards do they receive?

Most people on social networks  don't produce content, instead they synthesize and curate content. A few years back Bradley Horowitz's posted the content production pyramid. It still holds true today.

In order to make search more social, we need to allow for synthesis to take place on search page. I'm certain that posting to social networks or pulling in data from social networks on SERPs is a not the right way to approach this.

We need a social currency that is native to search.

People's vanity is a great driver for marketing

I just got a message from Linkedin.com thanking me for being part of their community and informing me that I was one of the top 1% most viewed profiles.

Sounds like I just made the dean's list.
What a great piece of marketing!

In today's digital media everyone is interested in likes, follows, pins and any other metrics that measure the reach of their profiles and the content they post. With this marketing activity, Linkedin has recruited 2 million people to spread the word. It will be no surprise, when we hear they grew from 200 million to 1 billion.

People's vanity is a great driver. All these metrics are about vanity combined with direct response, just like the click-though for online ads. Regardless of the audience you're targeting, any new online service needs a "self gratification" metric for what they're doing! A metric that feeds people's need for self promotion and drives service adoption, usage & sales.

I hope Linkedin didn't count the number of times I've viewed my own profile, when putting me on this list :)

Hello Vine! Twitter meets Video

Twitter’s new iOS Vine app is the Instagram of video. Vine records six seconds of video that you can upload to Vine social network and in embedded tweets on Twitter.

For a while you could publish updates to Facebook. But no more, as Mike Isaac reports from All Things D. Looks like Facebook is a disturbed about the new app.

Monetization is changing the user experience on Twitter. With Vine, Twitter is extending what we share and consume. In some ways Twitter is becoming noisier, and some will like it and others won't. I think Twitter's Vine is awesome and opens up so many possibilities for both users and advertisers.

Vine is a beautiful app, great execution. Its so easy to use, its for the brain dead. To start shooting a video all you have to do is to press your thumb on the screen, and to stop you just lift it.

Here is my first Vine vine.co/v/bJaZHuppwa6 

I wish I had some Twitter stock, just a few shares :)

Holding hands at Tilden park vine.co/v/biTaEEwdq2n?1
— James Buckhouse (@buckhouse) January 24, 2013

Its all about execution, not ideas

We all bathe in the same mental fountains, but what differentiates us is how we do it. An excellent post by @joulee.

Ideas are cheap. You can buy thirty for a round of drinks at your neighborhood bar. Unless it is that rare, giant-squid-footage of an idea (which—again—yours probably isn't), don't drag it onto an altar and pray to it every morning.

Save that praise for the product at the end of the road—the thing you built and tweaked and fiddled with your hands. Save that for the story you crafted in its entirety, each word extracted from you like teeth because that's how personal it was. Save the glory—the pride—for the art that comes from the blood and sweat and time and tears. There is no clearer way to say it. 99 times out of 100, it's the execution that counts. It's the idea scrawled and captured and coded and edited and made frightfully real. 

It's your work, and hopefully it's your best work.

Facebook Graph Search: Overdue, Exciting & definitely a Big Deal

I'm really excited about the announcement for Facebook Graph Search.

Facebook Graph Search adds so many more dimensions to search. Just like the photo shows, you can search for restaurants in London your friends have been to, or for restaurants your friends that live in London liked, or for restaurants your friends with a lifestyle similar to yours frequent... endless possibilities. It adds a layer of personal proximity.

When Bing, Yahoo and other search engines (local, travel etc) start integrating it into their search results, things will get really interesting. The real threat for Google will begin, since its own social graph search from Google+ is much shallower.

I wouldn't be surprised to see the Yelp/Google deal happen now. Also Graph Search on mobile in combination with gifting, will be a killer app and a definite threat to Amazon. I would love to see a hybrid that combines Siri, Local &  Facebook Graph Search, all in one.

Facebook Graph Search is a big deal, and will be a game changer for search.
Its going to be very interesting to see how things play out.

"The native ad unit in these platforms has to be the atomic unit of content in these platforms"

A great video with @fredwilson and @davemorgannyc about advertising and monetization.
You've sparked so many ideas in my mind about local search and how to think about it.
Gentlemen ty!

Push yourself to your limits, and go beyond them

This photo from boston.com reminded me of an old plan that's been put off for a while.
The past year was full of changes. I hope in the future I'll able to do this race, but until then I will push myself in different ways.
 
A race that follows in the path of the famous explorer Roald Amundsen brings the contestants to the Hardangervidda Mountainplateu, Norway. 100km across the plateau, the exact same route Amundsen used to prepare for his South Pole expedition in 1911 is still used by explorers today. Amundsen did not manage to cross the plateau and had to turn back because of bad weather. He allegedly said that the attempt to cross Hardangervidda was just as dangerous and hard as the conquering of the South Pole.

Happy Holidays!

Every year I make a jibjab holiday video, I love 'em!

Χρόνια πολλά! Happy Holidays!
I wish everyone a very merry time with their family and loved ones!

2013 Tech Startup Events

A couple of days ago Techcrunch posted a comprehensive list of startup events around the world, so I decided to create a simple mashup using pipes from Yahoo!


Here is a listing of the events: 

All the content has been stored in a gmail calender. Here's the XML feed for it:
https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/kves4qk1apq8v7umh5op4f8hfc%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic

I've added the first 5 months, and soon I'll be adding the rest of the events.
If you know of an event that's not in the techcrunch post, just send me a message and I'll add it to the calendar.

Its wishful thinking, but wouldn't it be great to go to all these :)

Build your future! No more excuses!

I read the recent announcements about all the new VC funds in Greece. It must of been some OpenCoffee yesterday in Athens, with all these presentations. Maybe there's hope after all :)

OpenFund 2 [theopenfund.com]
http://www.slideshare.net/Openfund/introducing-openfund-ii

Odyssey Venture partners [odysseyvp.com]
http://www.slideshare.net/gtzi/odyssey-venture-partners

PJ Tech Catalyst [pjtechcatalyst.com]
http://www.slideshare.net/gtzi/pj-tech-catalyst

When I moved to the US. two months ago, I told myself: "Put your best ideas forward, and move minds. Its time create a movement and lead in ways you never dreamed possible. Its a brand new day in brave new economy. Build your future!".

This is exactly what I say to all the entrepreneurs back home!
Get your ideas moving, seek out the resources you need, work hard and make them a success. No more excuses!

The photo was taken early this morning, when I was walking Jack in the snow.

Digital gifting blog

Even thought the last month was very difficult on a personal level, lots of unexpected curve balls... I've been burning the midnight oil and put in a lot of time on a digital gifting app. Hopefully we'll get it launched soon!

If your interested in this space, I've created a blog with related news articles:
http://digital-gifting.blogspot.com/

You can also download presentation I put together a couple of months:
http://www.slideshare.net/louishatzis/social-gifting

Here is my two cents about digital gifting on MediaPost:
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/184428/this-holiday-will-giving-get-social.html#axzz2JZMFm397

Danger Will Robinson! Stay away from Venture debt!

Being in the US. is a continuous education, especially when it comes to venture capital and how it works.

Today I heard an interesting story from a friend, an entrepreneur that raised a lot of venture capital for one of his past startups. He told me a story about his experience with "VC suggestions" and "Venture debt".

His startup completed a Series B raising over $20m with some major backers. The VC investors suggested to move the company from Boston to NYC and the appointment an "experienced" CEO, sidelining the founder that was successfully running the company for about a year prior to the investment (the track record they decided to invested in).

At some point later in time, the investor appointed CEO decided to take venture debt.

For those that never heard of this term (I never heard of it before today), venture debt is financing vehicle for venture-backed companies, offered by specialized banks or lenders in order to fund working capital or capital expenses of a startup.

The venture debt banks are not loaning the startup based on its success or financial health, but against the credibility of the VC firms backing the startup. Basically these banks are betting the VCs will continue to fund the startup, past the term of the venture debt loan.

This sounds like a recipe for disaster, especially when the startup is in the red and still relies on its VC investors.

I'm learning, but I think the two takeaways from this story are:

• Run your company and don't let VCs suggest an "experienced" CEO, especially if you haven't screwed up.
• Stay away from venture debt, especially if you're still in the red.