The Secret of Silicon Valley: Rational Karma.

I believe in the concept of rational karma. In other words - without being spiritual I believe that helping people creates karmic tension that sooner or later results in something good for myself or people close to me. While it sounds esoteric (and unfortunately selfish, but well… I chose honesty as my path through life) it’s all math and sociobiology. Helping others increases probability that somebody will help you and your tribe.

Silicon Valley taught me that. It’s one of the rocket fuels that this place runs on. It’s one of the secrets of the Valley.

Number of people who helped UXPin in past 3 years is just overwhelming. Each and every day I’m trying to repay my debt. I guess they were doing the exact same thing.

ps. As you could read all over the media - we’ve announced our $1.6M seed round today.

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4 Traits That Predict Fundraising Success. Do You Have What It Takes?

We like to think about ourselves as rational beings. We claim that we usually think before we act. And we take a pride in our powerful analytical skills that let us throughly analyze pros and cons before making any decision.

Yeah, right. 

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Founders Personal infrastructure

"What’s your personal infrastructure? You’re your infrastructure! This means staying physically and emotionally healthy through the stress of life on the road. It means staying connected to the people you love and making sure you are eating well and getting enough sleep. Pack gym clothes and work out. No matter what happens, we both make time to catch up with our wives and kids on Skype when we are traveling. Stay connected to what matters - it’s how you remember why you’re doing this in the first place."

/Leffler, I., Kalish, L., Get Big Fast and Do More Good.

Entrepreneurship is not a job. It’s rather a parasite and a drug that takes advantage of your life in a way uncomparable to anything else. Only physically and emotionally healthy people can survive without life threatening injuries. 

Do you want your company to win? Take care of yourself. Take care of people you love.

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"Half as many children died in 2012 as in 1990..." →

Bill Gates is a remarkable human being. 

parislemon:

Bill Gates:

Child mortality went down—again. One of the yearly reports I keep an eye out for is “Levels and Trends in Child Mortality.” The title doesn’t sound especially uplifting, but the 2013 report shows amazing progress—for example, half as many children died in 2012 as in 1990. That’s the biggest decline ever recorded. And hardly anyone knows about it!

Any way you slice it, that’s insanely good news. The poverty rate numbers are pretty striking as well.

Startup - Your House Is on Fire. Get to Profits or Die.

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“Until you’re profitable, you’re on fire. And when your house is on fire you don’t waste time on tying your shoes.”

This is the lesson one of UXPin investors recently gave me. I admire the sense of urgency, the need for constant relentless and the great come back to the healthy business approach. 

Yep. Healthy business approach.

Running a startup isn’t that different from running a corner shop, beauty salon or an auto repair service. You get to profits quickly or die. And if you’re planning to use the Twitter argument - forget about it. The argument is invalid unless you have 232 million users and you’re changing the way people communicate.

Don’t take any breaks. Don’t waste your energy on things that don’t build growth. Fight for profits.

Your house is on fire.

European Startups Can Raise Capital in Silicon Valley BUT It’s Not Easy

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May 4, 2013. Third month of fund raising for UXPin - The UX Design App. Fourth consecutive month in the Valley. Sixth month in the last twelve months spent in the US. I already know that it will be easier for me to become a professional dancer (and hell…I cannot dance) than impress Kings of Silicon Valley.

Beginners enthusiasm is all gone. Conviction that our impressive growth rate and lovely revenue will make VCs throw checks at us - once heart of our strategy, seems now to be a surreal joke. We’re starting to question the point of fund raising, the point of moving UXPin to the US from Poland, but we never question our business - that’s a constant. We feel trapped. In the evenings you could probably see a little bit of a desperation in our tired eyes.

And suddenly - this happens:

"Here’s the hard cold truth: Your chances of raising money from US investors are extremely low. It’s almost impossible.”

I was intrigued. Somebody is telling me openly that my chances are low and I cannot do something. 

I’ve heard that from my parents when they told me that I won’t be able to teach myself to play guitar (I’ve started a band), from many friends when they were convincing me that I won’t have any job after graduation in Philosophy (I got job immediately and I was a manager two years after the graduation) or from many colleagues when people assured me that it’s impossible to run a company and study Psychology in the same time (I’ve got a diploma with the honorable distinction).

There’s nothing more motivating than realisation that the challenge you’re facing is of an extreme kind. 

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Prophecy for the Polish Startup Scene or Why Poland Is the New Important Source of Tech Innovation?

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I was thinking about writing this post for a long, long time. I couldn’t decide whether it should be apologetic, didactic, or simply full of my questionably unique insights about Polish entrepreneurial scene. And then, all of a sudden, I just said to myself “screw it, let’s just write it short and up to the point, people should know about some interesting things going on”. And here we are at the beginning of a post that you’ll be discussing for next couple of days on Twitter and Facebook.

First Prophecy: By the end of this year 3 Polish startups will close their funding rounds in Silicon Valley with participation of the most important investors in the world.

Second Prophecy: In next 12 months another 5, excellently prepared, Polish startups will raise capital in the Valley. 4 of them will come from just 2 sources of Polish capital, which were backing up 2 of the startups that  will raise capital this year. Hear, hear american investors - there are just two investment powers in Poland that you should work with! Ping me for details.

Third Prophecy: In next 3 years two Polish startups will become leaders of their large and juicy markets.

Fourth Prophecy: In 5 years we’ll see 3 exits of Polish companies, each for +$100M. Polish entrepreneurs will reinvest money from their exits into other polish companies creating a mind blowing network effect.

Fifth Prophecy: Poland will be among 5 most important european sources of innovative tech startups in next 10 years.

Now…why should you listen to me again? Well, I know all three companies from the first prophecy. One of them is closing today. The rest is easy to deduce.

Silicon Valley brace yourself. 

ps. Fun fact - until today no company of exclusively Polish roots managed to raise capital in Silicon Valley. The precedence is happening today!

pps. The only Polish company that was acquired by an important global tech company was Ivona - bought by Amazon this year.

Why Startups Die? Exclusive Game for Madcaps.

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Startups die. Most of them die before the product is ready to be launched. Many die during bootstrapping phase. A lot die in the first year after the seed round. Some die after round A, B, C…

Startups die, because the market has no mercy. Customers demand greatness. Great product, great founders, great team, great marketing. Everything else is a sub-standard doomed to fail.

I’ve heard once that startups die because of lack of customers, not lack of features. Taking this statement seriously, I’d say that those who die due to lack of customers were already dead right on the beginning. Startup zombies. 

Startup Zombies. They’re dead before they start. Photo Credit.

Why? Because unmerciful market welcomes only one kind of entrepreneur - the fighter. The crazy moron who never knows when to stop. The one who’s always tormenting himself/herself with constant challenges. The one who, facing the problem of lack of customers, will chase them and do everything to seduce them.

Lack of customers is not an excuse for the real fighter. Neither lack of features. 

Believe me this is the game exclusively for madcaps. 

Customers Love - Energy Drink for Entrepreneurs

Three tweets that gave me energy for at least a week. Feeling super proud of UXPin team.

@darshilv @uxpin UXpin is awesome. At @mStonerinc we are using it for nearly every new project now.

— Doug Gapinski (@DougGapinski)

August 20, 2013

Surely you mean to say awesome :) “@darshilv: A promising wireframing tool http://t.co/G1W9JUWanK #wireframes #ux #ui”

— Marilyn Zakhour (@Marilynzakhour)

August 20, 2013

"Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind: astronomy has its caricaturist in astrology, chemistry used to have alchemy."

S. Lem, Solaris /ps. Doesn’t it happen to design and entrepreneurship as well?

The Team Needs The History. Give Efficiency a Chance.

Photo Credit: PeterOle 

The further you are on the startup road to success the more two factors matters: communication & efficiency. 

At the beginning of almost every venture group of founders work their assess off to build a product and validate the hypothesis that the product is desirable by the target group. (Un)lucky bastards who manage to go through this phase with just a few scratches and only couple of causalities, go to the next stage: company building. Some outside money might be involved, new people are joining the team and the tension starts to be extreme. Product and growth are the main concerns.

The luckiest of the lucky get obese, addicted to couple of unhealthy substances and after several nervous breakdowns, reach the phase of steady growth and predictable revenue. That’s the business stage. Your company actually gives people jobs, generate money and is not wasting investors precious capital. That’s also the time when your family starts to believe that your little startup thingy is more than a result of a god syndrome and lack of parental love.

I feel as the luckiest of the lucky. UXPin grows, people who are working on web&mobile apps love the tool and express that by regularly subscribing to the service (equals sweet stream of revenue). We become predictable and…literally healthier. I even managed to get rid of the obesity caused by the previous stage. 

Now is the time to set foundations for the future. Building a team of people in which founders will be the weakest links (not that we’re bad, we just want to hire people better than us) and the atmosphere will be a rocket fuel. This is exactly the moment in which you will be either hungry of success and crazy efficient or cold dead.

Efficiency of a team in a tech startup is a highly complex problem. Meanders of individual mindsets and interactions between them create hard to understand environment. I wouldn’t dare to theorize on that. Instead, let’s focus on a big picture. We need something general and actionable. Something that will help us on the way. A principle.

A guiding principle of efficiency that helps me is as follows:

There is no team efficiency without good communication. There is no communication between people without common language. There is no common language without common history.

Think about your friends. How long do you know them? How many stories do you share? How many groundbreaking experiences did you have together? Amazing, huh? Common history is a crucial part of a friendship. I bet you and your friends are spending quite some time on telling yourself stories from the past. Your stories.

Now take a look at your team. Do they have common history? Do they have things to talk about?

Demanding 100% focus from people tied to their chairs, banning conversations, treating people as working machines are NOT methods of achieving high level of efficiency. There are efficiency-prevention. You’re punishing people with work and you’re expecting people to work harder? That’s twisted psychology.

Instead of managing through enforced power try to facilitate the making of history.

There’s a reason we’re staying after hours to play video games together. There’s a reason we often eat together. And there’s a reason we like to go for a drink.

To make a history your team needs to have a history. 

Simple right? Give efficiency a chance, be a tribe.

No Calls, Thanks. The Road to Efficiency.

Photo Credit: Gamma Man

Running a company is like playing Tetris. You watch those twisted bricks fall on your head and you’re desperately trying to make sense out of them. 

UXPin is growing (customers, revenue, team, caused headache…) and requires more drastically focused attention than ever. Believe me or not, staying focused is all about setting limits. You want to have beautiful garden - focus on one square meter at the time and make those little plants shine in the sun. You want to have beautiful company - limit your focus to the most important things and distribute the rest.

Paradoxically enough staying focused in a startup environment works exactly like human attention. D.E. Broadbent (in a little bit non-elegant way polished later by Anne Treisman) noticed that our attention mechanism filters and limits signals that are reaching our brain. Our attention is constantly trying to pick up most important things and give them speed through our busy neurons. 

 

Photo: D.E. Broadbent

Nature apparently likes things to stay limited in order to be efficient.

I get 10-40 e-mails per day that I need to reply to (spam not included). Let say I’m spending 5 minutes on each e-mail on average (I sense in reality it might be even more). It means that on a good day I need to spend at least 50 minutes replying to e-mails, on a bad day almost 3.5 hour. Ouch. 

Now imagine (or remind yourself as I bet you go through the same crap) that every hour somebody calls you for “a quick 10 minutes talk”. Bang bang and you get additional 35 minutes in your 3.5 hour e-mail workflow. It doesn’t sound that bad? Think about stuff that you’re doing after each call. You’re probably going to make yourself a tea, you’re thinking about things that you’ve just heard and you’re trying to remember what you were doing before the call. You’ll need at least 15 minutes to get back to focus. Crap, that’s another 45 minutes. So now your e-mail workflow will take you almost 5 hours. Do you see where I’m going? If you take calls during your work everything will take you at least 40% more time.

I’ve learnt how to deal with large amount of e-mails. Inbox 0 philosophy (all e-mails taken care of in 24 hours max), Mailbox on iPhone, Mail App on Macbook, super focused, efficient, workflow. But I’ve never learnt how to deal with calls.

Phone calls are efficiency destroyers. Dynamic, unpredictable, communication channel that takes you away from your job, devastates your focus and doesn’t give you any chance to think about the way you should go with the conversation. That’s like a headshot from behind. Bloody surprise.

Photo Credit: Furryscaly

Now, the big question is how to set yourself free, limit calls and re-focus? Easy!

1. Whenever you’re busy set your smartphone to “do not disturb” mode (available in iOS, some versions of Android [there’re also apps for the task). All your calls will be automatically canceled, you won’t get any text message notifications etc.
2. Set yourself a voicemail message that will clearly state that you’re busy and if it’s important “please send me an e-mail”.
3. If you’re expecting somebody to call you, or have people that might call you in an emergency - add their numbers to the favorite list (at least this is how it works on iOS) and set the “do not disturb” mode to “allow calls from favorites”.

This little tactic saved me quite a lot of time and headache. 

Marcin

ps. If you want to save some time while working on a new design of your website, mobile app, or Google Glass app - you know what to do: use UXPin - the UX Design App.

Raising the Seed Round in Silicon Valley: The Game.

"[If you’re European founder] Your chances of raising money from US investors are extremely low. It’s almost impossible.” - said Stefano Bernardi from Betable. Even our advisors discouraged us to fundraise. "Since UXPin is on the verge of profits we should rather focus on the organic growth of the company.” - they were saying, but we didn’t want to listen. 

Why?

First of all: how many great companies do you know that didn’t raise funds, in comparison to great companies that did? Business is a game of probability and it seems that companies with good investors are wining far more often than all the others.

Secondly: creating a mid-size, nice, cozy business is far from our nature. We didn’t start UXPin to be number three on the market of wireframing and prototyping solutions (even if it means to have $10M MRR). We’ve started UXPin to be an unquestionable number one on the market of digital design solutions. Nothing else matters. Design deserves change and we’re going to make it.

Finally,I always had problem with “impossible” situations. When somebody says that something is impossible, I tend to focus on proving him wrong.

And here I am: after countless sleepless nights, almost 500 km of running, more than 60 meetings in the Valley, 7 kg weight-loss and all together 5 nerve-wracking months - we’re closing a small seed round.

And we have one of the most important VCs in the world on board.

How, why, when, whether… to raise funds - I’ll try to answer this questions in the near future. Let’s start with a game though. You know…all the work and no fun makes Jack a dull boy. 

Check if you have any chances of raising the funds in Silicon Valley:

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The whole model is vastly simplified, but based on my own experience. That’s your entry point to fund-raising. When you’ll manage to reach the sweet green ‘Yes, you have a chance’ - that’s just the beginning.

Don’t forget though: raising funds is just one, often not necessary, stop on the road to greatness, not the final destination.

Good luck!

ps. Try our product - UXPin - user experience design app that will help you and your team design amazing digital applications.

3 Simple Truths about Fund Raising Game for Desperate Startups

Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures apart from beautiful wooden tables*, have a peculiar cabinet with even more peculiar board game. Monopoly for fund-raising startups.

It’s a prank and a mindful suggestion at the same time. Raising funds is a game. Game with high bets, lots of stress and important lesson to be learnt every couple of turns. Better learn those lessons. That’s your only certain prize in the game.

I want to think that, all in all, it’s more of a strategic game than a random play where you need to bet on your luck. Can’t be sure though. This game is a living thing, transforming itself all the time.

Is there anything universal that you can learn from others? I sincerely hope that 3 Simple Truths below are universal:

1. You’re learning rules of the game while you play

Rules of the game are case dependent. What works for me could never work for you. There’s not an ideal pitch, investor deck, or a scenario of a meeting with investor. Don’t believe in codes of conduct on Quora. You’ll learn rules while you start playing. Open your mind, eyes, ears and iterate.

2. Master contradiction: being flexible & being consistent

Let me put it straight: you know the most about your business, not investors. If every VC that you encounter knows better what you should or shouldn’t do - you’re doing it all wrong.

The best VCs are amazingly experienced people. They can help you polish your business, get rid of rough edges and move it to the next level. But they won’t do the job for you. Learn from them but let them also learn something from you. Consider their ideas, constantly think about your strategy (try to criticize it on your own!), but don’t nod all the time. I bet it doesn’t improve your chances of getting any money.

3. Never be desperate

Never fund-raise to fund-raise. That’s not the goal of the game. If you think that’s it, you got it all wrong again. You don’t want to be desperate about grabbing couple of checks, you want to be desperate about solving problems of your customers and growing your business till the moment when people will use the name of your company as a freakin’ verb (‘to uxpin' as a synonym of 'to design' that would be a good start).

Fund raising supposed to improve your odds on the way to success. It won’t do the job for you.

Good luck!

* There are just two VCs in the Valley that can compete with TV when it comes to office design. Post your guesses in comments.

ps. additional 4th truth: bad ass hard rock & metal really helps to get through this annoying chapter of your entrepreneurial life. 

(Photo Credit: GSAndré via Compfight cc)

How I Pitched Dave McClure In The Wrong Place At The Wrong Time