Skåne is not Silicon Valley – yet
Posted: July 23, 2010 Filed under: Sverige Leave a comment
There’s lots of exciting things happening in my town of birth: Malmö, at the moment.
Malmö is located in the Skåne region in the south of Sweden, close to Copenhagen. So close, in fact, that it almost starts to look like a suburb to the much larger danish capital. This is especially true since after the Öresund bridge was built 10 years ago.
There’s a small but vibrant startup community forming in Malmö. The epicenter is a former industrial harbor area not far from the old headquarter of Kockums, the major employer in the city during the previous boom in the 60s and 70s.
As the startup community is taking shape it is at the same time looking for an identity, a soul if you like. It is easy to just look at the startup Mekka of the world, Silicon Valley, and say “we should have it like that here“. But Skåne is not Silicon Valley and Sweden is certainly not California.
The blog Northern Lights has a good summary of some of the challenges facing startups in Skåne. Lack of venture capital is one of them.
Sony Ericsson, one of the biggest employer of technical skills in the area, recently announced the launch of a new organization that will invest in local startups, referring again to Silicon Valley as the role model.
While this is good news I don’t think it’s enough to build a sustainable, vibrant and thriving ecosystem for startups and innovations. Skåne should not try to copy Silicon Valley. Instead it should become Silicon Valley, as much as it can.
What does that mean?
It means, as a first step, deeply ingraining the people of the Skåne startup community in to the community of Silicon Valley.
A good example of what this can lead to is the recent investment by legendary Silicon Valley VC fund Sequoia Capital in Swedish payment providers Klarna. This would not have happened if not Sequoia previously invested in Swedish kids site Stardoll. This is how one successful investment leads to another. Through contacts, referrals and connections.
With that in mind, this is how I think a startup community should grow in Skåne:
- 1. Move as many startups as possible FROM Skåne to Silicon Valley. They have to BE THERE, get to know the people, get connected. This will hurt to begin with as you will feel as if you’re draining the region of talent but it’s crucial for long term success of the region.
- 2. Make sure the entrepreneurs are as successful as they can be over there. Help them as much as you can.
- 3. Make sure they come back after they made their millions.
- 4. NOW it’s possible to grow the community locally.
The key to success is having lots and lots of entrepreneurs who’s made the journey and know what it’s like to work in a startup. These will form the base for the oh-so-lacking angel funding and – more importantly – they will have huge contact networks that can help new startups.
Trying to build a local copy of Silicon Valley, without going this ruote, will fail. Silicon Valley is not a process or an idea you can copy, it is first and foremost a community of people and a culture. The key is not to copy but be part of that community.
Different kinds of money
Posted: June 30, 2010 Filed under: Startup 4 Comments
It’s not apparent at first sight but there are actually different kinds of money. I can think of at least the following.
- F.U. money. The money that makes you quit your day-job.
- Porridge/ramen money. The minimum amount of money you need to survive each month.
- Fat money. Money that drags you down and makes you slower. Like money from that investor that refuses to change.
- Lazy money. Sibling to the fat money. Money that makes you lazy is money that you simply count on and have stopped fighting for. Never stop fighting. Big companies usually have lots of lazy money.
- Sweat money. This is money you’ve worked hard for to earn. This is the best kind. You value sweat money much higher than any other kind of money.
- Easy money. Doesn’t exist. Don’t be distracted by easy money. Move on.
When looking for money, be sure you know of what kind.
What other kinds of money can you think of?
The Cloud or The Ladder – Choosing a Career Strategy
Posted: May 7, 2010 Filed under: Visdomar 2 CommentsBack in the industrial age, a career meant working for the same company and climbing the corporate ladder inside that company. After 50 years you were rewarded with a gold watch and retirement.
Not so any longer.
People jobhop from position to position in different companies. It’s more accurate to say that an individual works for a market or a cluster of companies (like “PR agencys” or “startups” or “the telecom industry”) than one particular organization.
It is still a fairly linear progression between jobs, though. Even for a jobhopper a career has a direction – upwards (in some sense of the word). You can call this the ladder strategy for a career. You stand on one level of the ladder for a while, then you move up to the next level.
But there is a different strategy or at least a different point of view you can use for your career: the opportunity cloud.
Yepp, that’s right. That’s the name of this blog. Let me explain…
Your opportunity cloud is the sum total of all the positive things that can happen to you at one particular moment. It is what happens when you position yourself to be in a spot where good things happen. For example, exposing your skills on a blog, going to a mingle party, connecting with the right people on social networks, moving to a larger city, becoming good at pitching yourself or your product etc.
Call it accumulation of opportunity capital that may or may not be turned in to real money.
If you’re working as a free agent, your opportunity cloud is probably your most valuable asset. You need to nurture and grow it constantly.
As opposed to the career ladder, it is unpredictable, almost chaotic. Some people even call it “luck” but that’s almost never the case. That investor calling you because 6 months earlier you met her husband at a party – that’s not luck. That consultant work that suddenly pops up in your inbox because someone googled for “elite java skills” and found your blog – that’s not luck.
There are tools that help you manage your cloud (contact/CRM systems, todo-lists etc.) but the fact remains that it is a much more chaotic existence than the more linear and stable employment.
On the other hand, it’s slightly more difficult to “move up”. It is, by it’s nature, unpredictable. Some people – no, most people – can’t handle it. They rather have the fixed income and stable environment that comes with an employment. Even if that means killing off most of the opportunities in your cloud. Actually – most people doesn’t even realize they have an opportunity cloud. They simply don’t see it.
It is, as I mentioned, more a different point of view than a strategy.
So, where am I going with this? Only that you should know that you have a choice and that you might even switch between the two mindsets in different phases of your career.
I also want more people to see the cloud they have around them. You can of course start growing it while you’re employed. See the cloud, build it. Don’t get stuck standing on a ladder.
It’s going to take five years
Posted: March 2, 2010 Filed under: Visdomar | Tags: Startup 11 CommentsPeople Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10’000 hours of practice to become an expert in something. That’s roughly ten years.
Knowing that it takes ten years to reach the expert level can be liberating. It makes the size of the effort crystal clear. For example:
- There can be no doubt that you have to love doing the thing you want to become an expert in. 10 years of forcing yourself to do something just won’t happen. You won’t make it.
- There can be no doubt that it will require hard work. Ten years of it.
- There can be no doubt that you will make mistakes. Over a period of ten years, of course there will be many moments when you will fail.
Launching a startup doesn’t have to take that long. Still, many entrepreneurs are too focused on the next milestone. They don’t see the full distance.
“If we can only get this release out the door, we’re safe.”
“If we can only close this round of funding, we’re home.”
“If we can only add this missing feature, we’re OK.”
This makes failures much harder to cope with. “We missed the deadline – we’re DOOMED!” No, you’re not – or, you don’t have to be. Because just like the path to expert-hood is long and filled with obstacles, the road to startup success is paved with failures and misfortunes – and that’s how it’s supposed to be because that is how you learn.
It also makes it much more likely that you burn up all your energy, money, stamina, mojo, whatever it is that you run on, before reaching take-off speed.
Don’t believe me? Ask the experts! Read the interviews in Founders at Work. What are they all saying? The key ingredient in a successful startup is persistence!
So, before you start or whenever you’re in doubt, just take a deep breath and repeat these six words:
It’s going to take five years.
Ah. Feel better already, doesn’t it?
(Thanks for reading. Now follow me on Twitter.)
My latest hack
Posted: February 21, 2010 Filed under: Software Engineeering | Tags: hacks, php, programming Leave a commentI hacked together a little web service called Discuss-a-Tweet. Read about how I did it in less than 8 hours over at my programming blog.
The Art of Profitability
Posted: January 21, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized 1 Comment
This was one of my favorite books 2009. The book was written in 2002 by Adrian Slywotzky. It’s an unusual business book, written in a storytelling style.
It’s a classic teacher-student story where we get to follow a young man being tutored by an experienced entrepreneur. A very light read filled with nuggets of wisdom.
Browsing. Searching. Recommending.
Posted: January 3, 2010 Filed under: Social Media | Tags: future, internet, social 1 CommentYesterday I tweeted a little prediction about the coming decade.
(I also posted it on Hacker News and a good discussion followed.)
This got me thinking about the web and what is the default action taken by most people on the web. The thing people do when they’re on the web. Of course people do many things on the net but there’s one activity that’s sort of the main task and this activity has changed over the lifetime of the web. The company that best provides the platform for this activity is the company that defines the web at the time.
I think you can simplify things a bit by saying that during the first few years of the web the main activity was browsing then it became searching and now we’re moving in to a web where what you do is recommending stuff to other people (or follow other people’s recommendations).
The era of browsing was the era of the portals and the browsers. The start page of the browser was the place to be. Netscape was first out but it was Microsoft (followed by Yahoo!) that ended up the winner by becoming the default platform where people did the browsing.
Then of course Google entered the stage and before you knew it we stopped browsing the web and started googling it – search was king.
I think we’re currently on the brink of the next phase: recommendation. This is the era of retweets, mobile social gaming and reputation systems. That’s why I think Facebook is in the best position to become the defining company on the web the coming decade. The entire web will become a reputation system and at the core of this is the successor to the Google Pagerank – the Peoplerank. To do this well you need the social graph that Facebook controls.
Of course we will still be both browsing and searching but the main activity will be recommending or be recommended stuff. We will walk around in a recommendation cloud bombarding us with information that people we trust think we should know about.
Perhaps I’m wrong about Facebook becoming the web leader this decade but I got a feeling the next phase of the web is recommending. The PeopleRank will come. Be ready.
You can recommend this blog post by tweeting about it.
Stealth Disease and First Mover Paranoia
Posted: December 21, 2009 Filed under: Affärsutveckling | Tags: antipatterns, lean startup, startups 1 CommentLean Startup-guru Eric Ries talks about a common ailment amongst the startups he meets: Stealth Disease:
They are too afraid to show something imperfect to the world or are afraid that a competitor will steal their idea.
I would like to highlight another common sickness that is sort of the flip side to the Stealth Disease: the First Mover Paranoia – the idea that your product has to be absolutely unique or else you will fail. Any sign of a competitor doing the same thing or something similar will immediately kill the startup idea as the founders become morally defused.
You would have thought that examples such as Google (not the first search engine), Facebook (not the first social network) or Amazon (not the first online book store) would eradicate this disease, but no, it is still very much present and viral. I see the symptoms of it all the time – and yes, I have myself also been infected from time to time.
I wonder how many startups or potential startups fall victim to these two diseases. The First Mover Paranoia is extra vicious since it strikes so early. Often long before the execution of the startup idea is even started.
The cure for the First Mover Paranoia is to not view competitors as impassable roadblocks but as a verification that the idea actually works and has a market. That is in fact great news! Now the challenge becomes to find holes in the existing market (geographic, pricing, quality etc.) or to improve on what the competitor is doing.
Tough, but less tough than trying to bring something completely new to the market.
The anatomy of being Hacker Newsed
Posted: December 12, 2009 Filed under: Social Media 1 Comment
Hacker News is one of my favorite news sites. Together with Twitter it has almost replaced by RSS reader as my main source for finding interesting stuff to read.
For those of you not familiar with the site, it’s sort of like Digg but focused on technology startups and, well, “hacker” news. Links can be submitted by anyone and every registered member can vote on a link. The links with the most votes end up on the front page.
That’s what happened to this blog post last weekend. The result can be seen above.
Since my traffic to this blog is modest to say the least (I’m not writing very often), the effect of the Hacker News front page appearance is pretty obvious…
But Hacker News was just the first wave of traffic. The second wave came from Twitter. Derek Sivers was kind enough to tweet my blog post and with roughly 200’000 (!) followers the link was mentioned and retweeted 96 times.
Best of all was all the comments and discussions around the post.
The link “only” got 32 votes on Hacker News but that was enough to stay on the front page for about half a day. I posted it Saturday late after noon, central European time so the timing probably wasn’t perfect if you want to maximize traffic (on the other hand it’s more difficult to get to the front page on a more busy time).
This blog is hosted on wordpress.com so unfortunately I can’t dig deeper into the visitor statistics but at least I can say with certainty that the amount of traffic coming from Twitter by far surpasses the traffic from Google, at least for now.
I’ve been on the Hacker News front page before but that time I “only” got about 800-1000 visits. As a comparision, I once had a Youtube video on the front page of Digg. It got about 35000 views, so Hacker News is still relatively small. On the other hand, it has exactly the kind of readers I want with this blog.
I’m really sorry for not having had the time to reply to everyone and thank everyone who retweeted but believe me, I’ve read it all and my heart is warmed by the response! Thanks everyone!
Btw, here I am studying the visitor stats together with a friend:
Opportunity Cloud 