(via Robert)

Key thoughts:

• Charge money (WHO would have thought of that!!!)
• Provide great service (if you order shoes at 10pm and they are delivered the next morning, you’ll use this service again –> Zappos)
• Be a decent italian restaurant. You don’t need to be the best freaking restaurant on the planet! –> it’s enough to attract a few thousand customers; you don’t neet to attract 7 billion!
• Forget the billion dollar bullshit. The startup community is being brainwashed through repeated broadcasting of the stories of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc. It’s better to have 1m than -10k on your bank account. Going for the billion is pretty much suicide for first time entrepreneurs. You can worry about the billion once you have the million (and maybe you’ll realize that the million is all you need).
• The B2B market is easier than the B2C market –> Adress Fortune 5.000.000 instead of Fortune 500
• Use the ideas of the 4 Hour Work Week. Forget 14 hour days. It’s impossible to be productive for 14 hours straight. Most people aren’t even really productive for 3 hours a day. Why not only work 4 days a week for 8 hours a day?
• Take it easy! Stop hurrying! You can’t build a company over night. It takes years – and that’s completely okay, because there is ENOUGH time – stop thinking the window of opportunities is open for only a few months! There are ALWAYS enough opportunities, even if you sell SHOES!

(via Zimtkorn)

(via Robert)

(via Kiva.org Newsletter)

(via Morten)

Ready to learn everything you need to know about the economy in the shortest amount of time? The Crash Course seeks to provide you with a baseline understanding of the economy so that you can better appreciate the risks that we all face.

The Crash Course

• Twitter (company profile) just bought Summize (company profile) and now redirected it to Twitter Search. I fell in love with Summize and think this is a VERY good move for Twitter. The deal was most stock and some cash. The Summize-CEO left, the rest of the team relocates to San Francisco. Most of the Summize-Staff are Ex-AOL people.
• Twitter recently raised $15M in a Series C.
• Twitter thinks about Premium-Models for commercial use and about monetization of Twitter Search with Contextual Ads (the latter could turn out to be BIG since search can generate very high CPMs)
• I like Evan Williams very much and would love to meet him. His style is cool. Pyra was cool, Twitter is even cooler :-).
• Conclusion: Twitter seems to become BIG

Important lessons:

1. Get things out of your head into your inbox! Then process your inbox into projects and process every project into actionable items. I’ve done this for 8 months now and it works very well!
2. Focus on one thing. Focus on the next action, i.e. the next actionable step towards completion of your project (e.g. getting the vacuum cleaner out of the closet comes before vacuum cleaning!)
3. Organize your actionable items by context. This is a very important. There are things that you can only do in a certain context. Be it at home, at the office, online, offline, at the grocery store, at amazon.com, at the train station etc. E.g. I have a list in my Treo with items for my next grocery store purchase. Every time something in the fridge is missing I put it into my Treo. Then when I go to the grocery store I have a perfect tobuy list that is going to fill for sure my fridge and freezer. Same thing with amazon.com.
4. Start your work-day with a important task (not email). I don’t do that yet, but I only spend 5-10 min on my email, because I only process my inbox to zero and come back later for my important @action emails.
5. Practice discipline and balance. For me thats 1-2 sports trainings per week.
6. Fight procrastination. Always reflect on yourself. Be aware of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. I you find yourself procrastinating, review the phrasing of your actionable items for the project and check if they are really actionable. E.g. since June 22 I’m fighting with vacuum cleaning. The paper only says “vacuum cleaning”, but it really should say “get vacuum cleaner of of the closet” ;-).
7. Avoid interruptions. Turn off your Skype, IM and maybe even Cell when doing important tasks. Interruptions are a killer. I’m almost never online on Skype or IM. I hate those things since many years! ;-)

(via nicozorn)