The public death of CrunchPad

Sometimes product fail just at the doors of success, reminding us that products can only be as good as the people who put their heart behind it. The failure of CrunchPad just weeks before it was to be showcased publicly, just left a tiny tear roll down my cheeks. But that could be because I am not so used to the concept of failure so close to success, failure after handwork. My wishes go out to he CrunchPad team and i sincerely hope that the product sees the light of the day soon enough.

Here is the original post on Tech Crunch

Some nice questions VCs ask

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/good-question-the-eight-best-questions-we-got-while-raising-venture-capital/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

5 Entrepreneurship Basics B-Schools Don’t Teach

http://timberry.bplans.com/2009/11/5-entrepreneurship-basics-b-schools-dont-teach.html

Some people i'd like to thank

• Those who have written tutorials on the web for others to follow. Those who have put up articles for free so that other not go through the errors/pains they have gone through.
• All those who have contributed to open source development
• To all those who have helped keep the internet a democratic free phenomena
• All those who worked towards the vision of a world of equal opportunities
• 
  
• (And the list shall continue)

Entrepreneurship

Having worked with a few entrepreneurs over the past 4 years, i think i have some insights to share with the world, some of that things that i think constitute a winning formula.

• Firstly immense belief. You need to be ready to go an extra mile to get stuff done.
• Be ready to expand and grow.
• Don't have managers in your team initially, the do-ers are the people you need to build a product.
• Marketing is something you will learn slowly
• Be ready to forget your life for a while
• Network, network, network - The importance of the right idea to reach the right investors and the right user group is immense
• Make sure your group has people with energy, and those who can have (as Stanford MBA puts it) suspended disbelief ie. be ready to do things that dont show an immediate result
• Focus on execution. You dont know how much confidence it gives to get a version 1 out. You can fine tune eventually.

Lets JAM to create it

We get together,

bang our heads,

get the IDEA shaped up,

write bits of code,

do some prototypes,

feel the beat and

get moving ahead.

Meet in one of the houses,

lock ourselves up in a room and

decide that when we come out after 2 days we will be THERE, the point of no return.

Lets think agile and write stuff iteratively, quick n dirty to start with and polished as we go on. But at the end of each session there needs to be solid deliverables, something more than a set of ideas in air.

Rwandan entrepreneurs

Most of Africa apart from South Africa, Zimbabwe and Egypt for me constitute the Dark continent. I know there could be other countries that are not actually underdeveloped and this be my ignorance to the world at large, but this article about Rwanda and its capital Kigali has got me excited.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/16/memo-from-rwanda-eat-your-heart-out-al-gore/