Back in November I decided to delete all the feeds in Google Reader besides friends’ blogs, in order to eliminate noise and potentially decrease the time I spend reading news. Back then, I was spending about five hours per month reading random news and even though that’s just 15 minutes per day, I decided it was too much of a distraction.
Fast forward almost three months later, I now spend about two hours every month on news when I’m at my laptop. I also spend, probably, another hour or so on my iPad, but I can’t really track that without RescueTime. I haven’t saved a lot of time (and that wasn’t the point, anyway), but I find that my days are much more productive because there’s less noise, less news, less procrastination going on.
I’ve also discovered Flipboard (I know, I’m kinda late to the party), a brilliant iPad app that makes it incredibly easy to go through my only news sources at the moment: The Economist, The New Yorker, Hacker News and TechMeme. Each morning, while I have breakfast, I flip through the sources and click on the articles that seem of interest. The whole process usually takes about five minutes and I’ve realised that the most important bits of news usually surface to the top.
Now, there’s another thing that’s been bugging me lately and I even blogged about it awhile ago. I think Facebook is, mostly, a waste of time. So in February, I’m going to try another little experiment: only visit Facebook on weekends. I wonder how that’s gonna go.
This weekend, Forbes Romania’s first ever Top 30 Under 30 issue came out. I’m humbled and fortunate to have been selected as one of the 30, and I am happy to see many of my friends in it as well. While going through the list, though, something really surprised me. There are people on it I didn’t even know exist, but who make me feel incredibly proud I am Romanian.
People like 16-year-old Crina Coco Popescu, who holds the world record for the youngest mountaineer. Or Mihai Duduta, one of the MIT geniuses who’s inventing a new type of electrical battery for cars. Or, people I would never want to get into a debate with like Dan Cristea, one of the world’s best debaters (who, obviously, is also a successful lawyer). And the list goes on. We have award-winning architects like Max and Daniel Zielinski, people trying to reinvent education like Traian Bruma and, as it’s Romania we’re talking about here after all, computer geniuses like Ionut Budisteanu.
I feel incredibly fortunate to be in such fantastic company. If you’re Romanian or in Romania, I encourage you to get your hands on a copy. If you’re not, I strongly recommend you to consider sourcing your talent in Romania. We may have our problems, but when it comes to talented people there’s no shortage of supply.
Emi Gal Forbes Romania
A couple of months ago, I was trying to convince a friend that going to art galeries, museums and the opera can help him become a better entrepreneur. He argued that there’s absolutely no ROI for spending time in such places, that they bore him to death and he’d rather spend the little free time he has in some other way. Ars gratia artis (latin for “Art is the reward of art”) didn’t convince him, so I tried selling the fact that “such places” train one’s eye to appreciate beauty in a way that can influence their company’s design aesthetics.
But there’s much more to art than meets the eye. Many of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world have an almost innate ability to make parallels between seemingly incomparable subjects. Take, for example, Ben Horowitz’s parallel between Freaky Friday and the problems the Sales Engineering and Customer Support teams had in one of his companies, or Jack Dorsey’s legendary analogy between the traffic on Golden Gate Bridge and Square’s money flow. They both learned something by watching a movie or gazing at the Golden Gate Bridge and made a brilliant parallel that massively impacted their businesses.
On that same note, one of the things we pride ourselves with at Brainient is our reports. They are gorgeous, undoubtedly influenced by our admiration for all things pretty. I hate to be blowing our own horn, but they’re so beautiful that clients talk about them with other people in the industry, which brings more business our way. Who would have ever thought a beautiful .pdf can generate sales?
I think there’s a lot we can learn from art that can directly impact our businesses. It’s all about training the eye to observe and educating the brain to make unexpected associations between subjects and areas with no apparent connection. It doesn’t come easy if you’re not Ben Horowitz or Jack Dorsey, but it’s an invaluable skill once you get the hang of it.
As you may have seen, we’ve raised $1.8M from a few fantastic investors, backers of companies like DataXu, AdSafe Media and RevenueMax. I’m thrilled and very excited, because I think 2012 will be the year advertisers start using video for more than just reach and eyeballs.
My thesis around video is quite simple: all online advertising mediums besides video (search, social, display) are highly targeted, personalised and interactive. Even more, they’re all paid on performance (most often on a CPC). Video is still in the only advertising medium still paid on a CPM, very often poorly targeted, with no personalisation and no interactivity. That’s why we created Brainient. Video should be highly targeted, personalised, interactive and paid on performance – and we want to be the company to do it.
In order to deliver on this thesis, we created two products:
BrainRolls – an interactive video platform aimed at brand advertisers looking for viewer engagement rather than sales. It makes pre-rolls interactive enabling advertisers to engage their viewers. For example, BMW can enable viewers to book a test-drive, download a brochure or find near-by branches, right within the video ad. Engagement rates go up to 15%, which makes our advertisers really happy.
BrainAds – the first personalised video retargeting platform in the world, aimed at Direct Response advertisers looking to generate sales. Historically, video advertising has been all about reach and brand awareness. However, thanks to retargeting technology, RTB (real-time bidding) platforms and dynamic video processing algorithms, advertisers can now generate sales and build brand awareness at the same time. For example, an advertiser like ASOS.com can now retarget people with a pre-roll showing them the products they looked at on the site, right within the actual pre-roll.
We’ll be using the new financing to expand our client services and technology teams in London and Bucharest, and open a new office in New York. I’m looking forward to working together with the new investors to make Brainient the leading company in its space.
“Does anyone want to come and speak at an event in Astana, Kazakhstan?” said an email in my inbox yesterday. Now that’s an offer you don’t get every day. What are the chances, really? But much to my amazement, someone who IS actually organising an event in Kazakhstan emailed Milo Yiannopoulos to come and speak. Milo forwarded the email to one of the mailing lists I’m on and that’s how I got to commit to a trip to Kazakhstan.
On a slightly different note, a few months ago I scored $24,000 in free Rackspace credit over 12 months because a member of another mailing list I’m on got us a group deal. And I can’t even remember how many discounts I’ve gotten for various web apps and services, just by being active on a handful of mailing lists.
It’s not just freebies and unique event invites, though. Mailing lists have this inherent attribute that makes them really unique in today’s world: they’re closed and selective, which means that people on the list feel comfortable with sharing information and thoughts they otherwise wouldn’t. I’ve seen discussions ranging from which VCs one should never deal with to who’s dating who in the tech world. They’re tons of fun, too.
Usually revolving around one or a handful of individuals and having under 150 members, they resemble the 19th century’s fraternities in the digital age. I can’t think of a better way to keep a group of people communicating actively and give them an environment where they can share information they otherwise wouldn’t. So next time someone mentions a mailing list, find a way to get on because you’re missing out. Big time.
Those of you who’ve read Steve Jobs’ biography may remember the stories about his annual “company retreats” – trips organised in a remote location where his entire (management) team could focus on product, strategy and stay away from the day-to-day operations. While reading the stories when the biography came out, it seemed an amazing way to align the whole team to one unified vision, brainstorm, and prepare the product roadmap and company strategy. So this year I decided to organise a company retreat for the entire Brainient team.
The outcome of the trip has exceeded all my expectations. After spending four days with the team deep in the Carpathian mountains, not only is everyone aware of and aligned to one big objective, but we’ve set goals for each member of the team and prepared a detailed product roadmap. In other words, we know where we’re going and how to get there. And we also had lots of fun along the way. I strongly recommend that you try it for your startup, regardless of whether you’re five people or fifty. And here are a few tips to help you get started:
Go somewhere remote. It will help the team mentally disconnect from the day-to-day stuff. We chose to rent an entire cottage up in the Carpathian mountains in Romania. All we had was an internet connection, our laptops and a whiteboard. Living and working under the same roof for a few days can create incredibly tight bonds within the team.
Set a clear outcome and keep a tight schedule. Each day, we had at least 4 hours of discussions on a predefined agenda. We had a different theme each day: strategy, BrainRolls, BrainAds and objective planning / product roadmap. Our plan was to align the whole team to the same objective and make sure everyone has defined their goals for the year and for the first quarter of 2012.
Use a planning methodology. It makes it a lot easier to plan things out and align everyone to one objective. At Brainient, we use OKRP (Objectives and Key Results Planning), a methodology used by the likes of Zynga, Facebook and Google. Here’s how Google does OKRs, for example.
Have fun. Product planning and brainstorming can be tiring, so we made sure we had lots of fun prepared. From trips to the mountains to barbecues, Texas Hold ‘em, four on the couch or pushing our cars out of the snow upon departure, it felt more like a fun camp in the mountains than an intense company planning trip.
It’s a very comforting thought for a founder / CEO to know that every single member of the team knows what they have to achieve, and I can’t thing of a better and faster way to do it than the Steve Jobs way.
As many of you may already know, December saw the launch of The Kernel, a new technology-centric publication founded by one of London’s most vocal technology journalists, Milo Yiannopoulos (who’s name I still have to google whenever I write it but hey, nobody’s perfect – right?).
The Kernel’s mission is nothing if not incredibly ambitious, aiming to fix technology journalism by avoiding link-bait articles, SEO titles and boring tech news reporting. They promise to be rigorous in their enquiry, transparent about their methods and aggressive in defending entrepreneurs. It’s a laudable initiative in a world burdened by an unbearable amount of crappy “publications” driven by page impressions and ad budgets, and it seems they’ve been doing a great job keeping to their promise, so far.
I may be biased as Milo is one of my best friends, but over the past few days I’ve been reading The Kernel and I’m impressed with the quality and wit of most articles, all written with a twist of humour or sarcasm, in typical fashion of the Editor-in-Chief himself. I wish Milo and the team good luck in 2012, and I’m looking forward to seeing The Kernel become as influential and respected in technology journalism as The Economist is in the business world.
A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak about my experience as an entrepreneur at Venture Connect, one of the few initiatives encouraging entrepreneurship in Romania. Inspired by the British Government’s 1939 “Keep Calm and Carry On” campaign, I put together the short presentation below (and I hope my Polish friends will not be too pissed off at me when they see it):
Back in July, I wrote about my discontent in regards to how much time I was spending on social media sites (approximately 15 hours / month, according to RescueTime). Just a little over three months later, through sheer will and brutal (self) finger slapping, I now only spend a little over four hours per month on what seems to me to be the greatest distraction since the invention of TV.
This little experiment has given me a great deal of time to work on more interesting stuff, spend more face to face time with friends and read more. It’s been great, but I have a new challenge.
It seems I spend about five hours each month reading blogs and (mostly technology-related) news. It’s not that bad if you think about it as it’s only fifteen minutes per day, so it’s not about the time. It’s about the noise; this morning, while zapping through my Google Reader feeds, I realised that I couldn’t care less about TechCrunch’s reports on the fact that Zingly, Munglu, Dunglu, Vingli just launched. I’m aware that I might sound like an arrogant prick for saying this, but I just don’t care.
So I’m taking on another experiment in November: delete all my news sources from Google Reader and only keep friends’ blogs, hoping that the great news will somehow make it’s way up. In order to keep up with the world, I’ll continue reading two of my favourite magazines: The New Yorker and The Economist. I’ll also be adding a trade magazine, NMA, and a technology source to the list. But as I can’t think of a technology source that’s brief, relevant and pertinent, I’m wondering if I could get some suggestions from you guys?
That being said, I’ll let you all know in January how things went.
It was 3:30AM and I had just gotten back from a few drinks with Mike Butcher, Tarik Krim and a few other friends. I was having a glass of water and checking emails on my iPhone. No email caught my eye, so I opened Twitter to see what’s going on in the world. In a matter of seconds tears started dropping into the glass of water after seeing my Twitter stream flooded with the news that Steve Jobs died. A few seconds later, Tarik called me. The only thing I could tell him on the phone was “wow”. The only thing he was able to say was “yeah”, and we spent the next couple of minutes in silence.
Never in my life have I cried for someone I have never met, before yesterday. There’s no consumer brand I love more than Apple, and there’s no person that has inspired me as much as Steve Jobs.
Rest in peace, mr. Jobs.
