startups

What does it feel like to lose a lot of money (quickly)?

Here is a Quora question that I got in the personalized weekly newsletter. I never had anything close to a lot of money, but I’m pretty sure that if a miracle happens and one day I do, I’ll lose them all pretty quickly. Thus, I was vaguely interested in the answers. However, the answer by James Altucher (most voted) was way more than I expected.

Then Internet stocks started to go down. This is ridiculous, I thought. The Internet is here to stay. I knew nothing about stocks or valuations or anything resembling rational thought. I doubled down. Then quadrupled down. Then 8-upled down.

From June 2000 until September, 2001 I probably lost $1 million a month. When anyone says, “this is ridiculous”, that’s code for, “I’m about to lose a lot of money”.

I couldn’t stop. I was an addict. I wanted to get back up to the peak.

I wanted to be loved. I wanted to have $100 million so people would love me.

I was the worst idiot. Writing this now I feel like slitting my wrists and stomach. I had 2 kids.

I felt like I was going to die. That zero equals death. I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been. I had lost all my friends. Nobody returned calls. I would go to the ATM machine and feel my blood going through my whole body when I saw how much was left. I was going to zero and nothing could stop it. There were no jobs, there was nothing.

Read the whole thing. It’s fascinating and impressive.

British Airways to hold a hackathon on a plane above the Atlantic ocean

Isn’t that awesome?

As plane journeys are starting to get increasingly more entertaining with Wi-Fi onboard, Harlem Shakes, and cellphone service, British Airways is taking things a step further. On a transatlantic flight from San Francisco to London, the airline plans to invite 100 innovators to an 11-hour “UnGrounded” hackathon. A number of high-profile founders, CEOs, and venture capitalists will all participate, with the aim of collaborating to create some solutions to global problems.

The group will be tasked with presenting their findings at the DNA Summit workshop after they land in London. UnGrounded is part of a larger push by British Airways to participate in the start-up community. The airline joined up with RocketSpace recently, a startup accelerator based in San Francisco, to gain access to startups and RocketSpace founder Duncan Logan will be onboard. The plane departs on June 12th, with no tablet use during takeoff of course, and we’ll be watching closely to see what 11 hours in the skies above the Atlantic ocean brings to the table.

Telling people to leave finance

First, I want to say it’s frustrating how risk-averse the culture in finance is. I know, it’s strange to hear that, but compared to working in a start-up, I found the culture and people in finance to be way more risk-averse in the sense of personal risk, not in the sense of “putting other people’s money at risk”.

People in start-ups are optimistic about the future, ready for the big pay-out that may never come, whereas the people in finance are ready for the world to melt down and are trying to collect enough food before it happens. I don’t know which is more accurate but it’s definitely more fun to be around optimists. Young people get old quickly in finance.

Spending the last few years in a variety of forex companies, I have to agree.

Startup = Growth

A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of “exit.” The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.

If you want to start one it’s important to understand that. Startups are so hard that you can’t be pointed off to the side and hope to succeed. You have to know that growth is what you’re after. The good news is, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place. Which means you can use growth like a compass to make almost every decision you face.

First Cyprus hackaton

The guys from The Cypriot Enterprise Link are organizing the first ever hackaton in Cyprus. In case you don’t know what a hackaton is:

hackathon, noun : An event where engineers, designers & ideators come together to intensively and collaboratively build awesome things over a short amount of time.

Neither the venue, nor the exact date and time are announced, but it’s going to take place some time in September. But if you are a programmer, designer, and/or entrepreneur, you should probably follow the news on this one and attend. Even if you don’t want to do anything with coding right now, an event like this will probably be brilliant for networking.