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I’m thankful my friend Josh Wilson recently referred me the highly regarded book: How Will You Measure Your Life?. If you’re looking for the short version, it’s based off a speech at the commencement of Harvard Business School Class of 2010.

But you might not even need to skip over to each of those links just yet. Instead, just think of the question right now:

How will you measure your life?

It’s simple yet profound. Will it be…

• dollars earned?
• lifelong friends?
• lives touched?
• college degrees?
• fancy cars owned?
• gold medals?
• mountains conquered?
• countries visited?
• children raised?
• languages learned?
• words written?
• grade-point-average?
• products built?
• jobs created?
• houses owned?
• dreams chased?
• celebrities met?
• twitter followers?
• facebook photos?
• YOLO moments?

This list could go on and on. My point is that it’s helpful to think about the questions author Clayton Christensen suggests:

• How can you be sure you will be happy in your career?
• How can you be sure your relationship with your family will be an enduring source of happiness?
• How can you be sure you will stay out of jail?

Only you can answer these questions, and there isn’t a right or wrong answer. My answer resonates closely with Christensen, “focused on family and others”. This blog is an example of my effort to positively touch as many people as possible. Read more…

As an American entrepreneur it’s really easy to develop tunnel vision and ignore economies around the globe. This insular thinking can potentially place a bottle neck on your growth, especially since the fastest growing economies are far from the U.S. border. But thankfully if you’re developing products on the web, it is now easier than ever to take advantage of the fastest growing economies.

A Goldman Sach’s economist, Jim O’Neil, coined the term BRIC in a 2001 research paper, claiming that the combined economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China will eclipse the G7 economies by 2027.

In a more recent 2005 report by O’Neil and Goldman Sach’s, they noted a new group of countries, Next 11, that have high-potential for becoming world economic powers in the 21st century:

Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Turkey, S. Korea, and Vietnam.

There are three main reasons to look at these countries for growth:

People – Young and expanding populations. They will raise the level of wealth (rise of the middle class) and drive demand for discretionary spending.

Potential – The BRIC countries will eclipse the G7 growth within 15 years and the N-11 may rival the G7 by 2050.

Possibility – The BRIC and N-11 countries will likely outperform the traditionally strong economies of the 20th century.

If you’re thinking about ways to expand growth then I would recommend you focus on the untapped markets that include BRIC and Next 11 countries. Learn more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRIC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Eleven

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIKT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerging_markets

http://www.goldmansachs.com/gsam/individuals/products/growth_markets/n11/beyond-bric/index.html

One reason why I visit the Bay Area frequently is because of the many critical eyes here. Questioning absolutely everything your about your product is absolutely necessary.

It bugs me when I show someone my product, and they end their commentary with “Wow, great job, keep up the awesome work.” This type of observation doesn’t build great products. And unfortunately I get this type of feedback frequently outside of the Bay Area because most people are exclusively consumers.

On the contrary, most of the best builders I know live in the Bay Area and they’re open to challenging everything they observe. It’s this type of thinking that eventually allows you to iterate and improve. Questions such as: “Why is the installation button on the right instead of left?”, “Why did you choose this headline?”, “What is the purpose of this page?”, “This section is confusing, it needs to be eliminated.”, “Why would you charge x dollars when your competitor is y dollars?”, “This element is not helping you achieve the goal of this page.”, “This is nice, but it would be even better if…”.

Eventually after enough iteration, you end up with a dead-simple product that is clear to your target user. The critical eye brings simplicity to your product.

Peter Cooper, founder of Cooper Union, once wrote: “The production of wealth is not the work of any one man, and the acquisition of great fortunes is not possible without the co-operation of multitudes of men.”

I’ve observed the truth to this statement many times in the past eight months. Everything that matters is about people. Regardless of your activities and goals, the most important issues for any organization are always related to the people we work and interact with, or seek to attract. The easiest example to relate to is a varsity sports team.

As the coach of a varsity team your job is to recruit and develop the best talent that’s available. This involves identifying the best people for the critical positions and helping your people become even better.

Recruiting the absolute best people in terms of talent and personality for each position is the first step to competing with the best, and ultimately winning against the best. My good friend Paul Dejoe recently commented the following on Quora:

Your job is to create a vision, a culture, to get the right people on the bus and to inspire.  When you look around at a team that believes in the vision as much as you do and trusts you will do the right thing all the time, it’s a feeling that can’t be explained.  The exponential productivity from great people will always amaze you.  It’s why finding the right team is the most difficult thing you will do but the most important.  This learning will affect your life significantly.  You will not settle for things anymore because you will see what is possible when you hold out for the best and push to find people that are the best.  You don’t have a problem anymore being honest with people about not cutting it.

I know this may sound cliche but all cliche’s hold some truth. It’s absolutely fascinating to work with a small team of people when each team member is doing what they do best.

Going back to high school rowing, I remember that our coach had one top goal in mind: Prepare the fastest possible boat for race day. For my team this involved determining who was the best stroke seat, the best stroke pair, the best bow pair, and the best coxswain. Each position is unique and each individual rower committed to being the best at their respective position. When we all did our job individually better than anyone else, the sum of our collective efforts was a really fast boat.

An entrepreneur must follow a very similar pattern. My greatest challenge will always be finding the absolute very best programmers, web designers, and any other position critical to my success against competition. And you see it over and over again. Schools, law-enforcement agencies, movie sets, museums, musical concerts, and virtually all other organizations all seek to attract the very best people who can contribute to their collective success.

Steve Jobs simply named these people the “A players” and commented on the risks of not holing out for them:

It’s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players.  The Microsoft experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can’t indulge B players.  –Jobs

The general test for evaluating an A player is to ask yourself the question: Would I fight hard to keep this person on board? If not, then you should certainly pass. Always hold out for the A players on your team.

Recently while attending an event for founders in New York City I pitched my product just like any entrepreneur would do when they are asked the question: “What do you do?”

I happened to meet Jeremy Mims, founder of OwnLocal and FrogMetrics. As we were talking about Glider, I had briefly mentioned that I have always been fascinated by company’s such as Mint.com and Chartbeat because they solved problems by building a sleek and easy to use dashboard. Their formula for a successful product seemed so simple: Take a bunch of unorganized data and present it nicely. I wanted follow the same steps with email data and Glider.

Jeremy immediately said to avoid building a complex dashboard. And I asked with confusion: “Buy why?” He responded: “Dashboards are only useful when things go wrong.”

Now think about one of the dashboards you encounter most frequently… Your car dashboard. It’s useful to make sure that you are not speeding and that you are not running out of gas. You check the clock to make sure you’re not running late, change the radio station when you hear a song that you don’t like, etc.. The same reasoning can be applied to just about any dashboard that you interact with on a routine basis. If things aren’t going wrong, or if the data doesn’t change, then users will not return on a routine basis.

Here’s an excellent example: Companies such as Klout do an awesome job of making you feel like your influence is constantly going down, and this forces users to routinely check the score and look for improvements.

Using this reasoning, I went back to the drawing board for a Glider dashboard with two key items in mind for creating a dashboard:

1. Needs to show only the most important metrics. (They tend to be the metrics related to your time or money.)
2. Needs to convey specific action items in order to change the data.

In other words, the dashboard in itself is not useful unless users can take action based on the data. Keep an eye out for the new Glider dashboard by submitting your email here: glider.io.

In the past couple of months since moving to New York City I’ve found myself reconnecting with some of the entrepreneurs who I had known since the beginning of my journey. Many of my closest friends come to me with their ideas, seeking feedback like any hustling entrepreneur. And then last weekend in San Francisco one of my tech friends asked for ideas to work on. I almost cringed. Again and again, I have retold one of my greatest lessons learned in the past year:

Stop building your idea. Start solving a problem.

Startup ideas are bound to fail. This is not something that I realized until I tried to build one myself. Throughout last summer and the fall I had pitched an idea for a bookmark curation site. As it turns out, it’s not a compelling problem for many people. To cut to the chase, the average consumer can live without an improvement to their current bookmarking tool. And the business for bookmarking isn’t highly sustainable. I tried to build a business from a startup idea, and I failed.

I admit it wasn’t my natural inclination to drop an idea all of the sudden and begin exploring problems. I had the support of one of the godfathers in Silicon Valley (confidential for now), and I will never forget his advice. He said to stop thinking of startup ideas to build and instead think of problems to solve. Young founders such as myself are notoriously challenged with discovering ripe problems in the world because we don’t have much real world experience. To give you context, consider this example: ZenPayroll makes the process of setting up payroll for your company very easy. I would have never understood the painful payroll process until I started a company. Luckily the guys at ZenPayroll previously discovered this, and so they’re solving a huge problem for small business owners.

I immediately began to list the problems in my life. From the moment I woke up until I went to sleep, I wrote down all of the problems I noticed all day long for a week. Eventually I narrowed down the list to one of my most significant problems: email overload. Up to that point I had been okay with simply dealing with the problem. Passively dealing with a problem is the exact opposite mentality of an entrepreneur.

I did not consciously think of the email overload problem or solutions until I shifted that mindset from idea building to problem solving. I caution you to not over think your subconscious. Instead you should closely observe the painful or inefficient processes in your life.

You can toss nearly every successful company into the problem solving equation. Mark Zuckerberg is introverted and he needed a way to find more cute girls at Harvard. He built Facebook to solve his problem. The guys at Google did the same for finding and organizing information. Glider aims to solve problems related to email overload.

So, where do you begin to look for problems? Ask yourself the questions: What do I want to make absurd two years from now?  What products can I not live without? As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I believe the next big technology companies will be lifestyle automation companies.

Next, take your problem and follow the startup process:

1. Validate your problem.

• Who needs this solution to the problem? Is there a market for the solution?
• Setup a landing page in this format to be sure the solution to your problem is clear and concise.
• The problem is in the headline and the three bullets highlight the minimum features.

2. Relentlessly pursue product/market fit.

• Have you made a product that satisfies the needs of the market?
• Caution: Sometimes you might build a product that has no market. Also known as a startup idea.

“Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to.”

3. Scale.

• Repeat what worked in step two.

And it’s as simple as that! Let me know if you need any help.

I’ve finally moved my domain to a different host! Now I will be using this site as a blog to post about anything internet/tech related.