A few months ago I wrote about my 9 business selection criteria for evaluating business ideas. After some deliberation, I have decided to relax the selection process. Specifically, as long as the idea has massive mass market appeal, I am now willing to start businesses where the business model may not be clear and understood from the get go.

While relaxing the criteria, makes the project riskier, strict adherence to the philosophy would mean that I would have passed on Google, Facebook and MySpace. Again, this conclusion is highly personal. To some extent I have already succeeded and as a result am willing to take more risks in order to increase the probability of a home run even if it decreases my batting average.

My willingness to take more risk is clearly demonstrated in running OLX and funding Allmydata – the former is in an extremely competitive market with entrenched incumbents, the later is also in a competitive market whose size and viability is yet to be proven – even though both of them, a priori, have clear business models.

A first time entrepreneur may want to keep the selection criteria to increase his probability of success and set the stage for future successes.

This is a must read for all dog lovers and owners – especially, if like me, you have a large crazy yellow lab retriever who might very well take over Marley’s title as the world’s worst dog 🙂

Every dog owner will recognize and laugh out loud at Marley’s antics! The book is also very good at depicting the simple joys and lessons of life learned through the chaos and destruction of dog ownership.

In the end, I cried like I had not in a very long time. I was touched on a personal level like I have rarely been before. When it was all over I felt I had experienced a condensed form of dog ownership with all the highs and the lows. I was left very satisfied despite the sad ending because, all in all, Marley had an amazing happy life and was such a source of joy for his family for so many years!

I recently came across an amazing article on happiness. It is well researched, written and presented. Interestingly, maybe even ironically, it is written by analysts at an investment bank!

They find that most people have a mean level of happiness that is largely genetic and hard to deviate from as people quickly assimilate any changes in their life circumstances – a process called “hedonic adaptation.”

However, they do find 9 ways to systematically improve happiness (in no particular order):

1. Don’t equate happiness with money.
2. Exercise regularly.
3. Have sex.
4. Devote time and effort to close relationships.
5. Pause for reflection, meditate on the good things in life.
6. Seek work that engages your skills, look to enjoy your job.
7. Give your body the sleep it needs.
8. Don’t pursue happiness for its own sake, enjoy the moment.
9. Take control of your life, set yourself achievable goals.

Allmydata is an online virtual drive with backup, storage and sharing services.

Progress has been slower than expected, mostly because of the product choices we made early on in the design stage. To decrease costs, increase scalability and security, we chose to implement a peer to peer network as the underlying grid to backup and store users’ files on. This meant we had to build the grid prior to launching premium services. As a result the first version of Allmydata we launched required a downloadable PC client and for people to share local storage on their drive in order to get storage on the network.

That client does a lot of work – it breaks up the files in millions of little pieces, uploads them 4 times to thousands of computers on the grid and keeps the local files in sync with the grid. As a result, the early implementations of the client have been slower and more resource hungry than we would like. Things are moving in the right direction though. Allmydata beta 1.5 which was released on June 1 is faster and less resource intensive than the previous versions and has nice new features such as an icon overlay that tells you when your local files are being automatically backed up to Allmydata.

Just as interestingly now that we have thousands of customers on the network we are now in a position to launch our premium versions without requiring people to share local files. The next version of Allmydata coming in a few months will have:
• Web client
• Optional PC client with much lower memory footprint and Outlook support
• Premium versions that don’t require partaking in the grid

The space is competitive, but I have faith that if we build the easiest to use product with the lowest cost structure, we will find a way to create a nice business for ourselves.

In a recent interesting book “The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (a Lot of) Success in America” author John D. Gartner, an assistant professor of psychiatry at John Hopkins, argues that America’s success is because American entrepreneurs are largely hypomanic.

“Hypomania is a mild form of mania, often found in the relatives of manic depressives. Hypomanics are brimming with infectious energy, irrational confidence and really big ideas. They think, talk, move and make decisions quickly. Anyone who slows them down with questions “just doesn’t get it.” Hypomanics are not crazy, but “normal” is not the first word that comes to mind when describing them. Hypomanics live on the edge, between normal and abnormal.”

So why are Americans hypomanic? “Energy, drive, cockeyed optimism, entrepreneurial and religious zeal, Yankee ingenuity, messianism and arrogance – the traits have long been attributed to an “American character.” If a scientist wanted to design a giant Petri dish with all the right nutrients to make hypomanic genius flourish, he would be hard-pressed to imagine a better natural experiment than America. A “nation of immigrants” represents a highly skewered and unusual “self-selected” population. Do men and women who risk everything to leap into a new world differ temperamentally from those who stay home? It would be surprising if they didn’t.”

How do you identify a hypomanic? Gartner lists these traits: “He is filled with energy; flooded with ideas; driven, restless and unable to keep still; channels his energy into the achievement of wildly grand ambitions; often works on little sleep; feels brilliant, special, chosen, perhaps even destined to change the world; can be euphoric; becomes easily irritated by minor obstacles; is a risk taker; overspends in both his business and personal life; acts our sexually; sometimes acts impulsively, with poor judgment, in ways that have painful consequences; is fast-talking; witty and gregarious; charismatic and persuasive; prone to making enemies and feels he is persecuted by those who do not accept his vision and mission.” Sounds like an entrepreneur to me 🙂

I think many people don’t realize how funny it actually is. Their closing sentences for most articles are usually very sarcastic and they use a very ironic tone in many articles.

Some entire articles are hilarious. A few years ago, to criticize how far the negative externality argument had been taken in banning smoking, they wrote a very funny article on how babies should be banned from airplanes as they impose a negative externality on others – screams, noise and smells.

I suppose that was only trumped by the angry letters they received from parents who had taken the article literally 🙂

In a world overrun by political correctness and where random local events pass as news for most people, it’s refreshing to read such an opiniated, analytical magazine covering world events.

Economist readers are easily recognized as they often talk about events happening in Eritrea, Uganda and other locales largely ignored by the traditional press. It’s actually somewhat amusing to see two people talking about a topic for which their only source material was the same magazine 🙂

I suppose I appreciate having a week to take a step back to analyze current world events. The quality seems to have slipped a bit in the past few years, but it remains by far the best magazine to read. If you can only read one magazine per week, this is it!

(If you are curious, I read The Economist, New Scientist, Forbes, Fortune, Business Week, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Premiere, PC Magazine, news.com, cnn.com, espn.com, journaldunet.com and gamespot.com).