Archive: Feb 2011

1. Opening Day

   February 28, 2011 6:14 pm 4 Comments

   I had the privilege to open The Junction this morning for the first day.  When I arrived, there were already 4 people waiting for me to open up, so I guess a few others shared the excitement.  Slowly but surely people trickled in, and by 10am we had about 15 entrepreneurs at work building things.  Awesome.

   Vibe is great.  People are talking, sharing, and you can really feel the cross-pollination happening.  I think it’s an inspirational space, and I personally intend to spend a day a week there.  Can’t think of a better atmosphere to help drive innovation…  but that’s for a different blog post.

   I shared a few pics on The Junction’s Facebook page.  Here’s one (courtesy of @liorsion) – for more, take a look here - http://bit.ly/fGnvFb

   

   A few lessons learned:

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2. What is failure?

   February 22, 2011 3:24 pm 4 Comments

   “I’ve missed over 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’v ebeen trusted to take the game winning shot…and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Michael Jordan.

   I am fortunate to be sometimes asked to give talks about entrepreneurship, venture captial, start-up finance and other related topics at universities and other forums. Frequently I will start my talk by asking the audience “what is success”? As you can probably guess there is no one true answer. Each person has a different definition of success and indeed each entrepreneur has a different perspective on what he or she views as success. Usually the answer is one of market cap, amount of profits, personal wealth that one generates and some other monetary figure. But even then, the exact figure varies pretty signifiacntly. For example for one achieving a net worth of $5 M is a huge success while for another this figure could be a mediocre or very moderate success.
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3. Adaptive Development and Ruby on Rails

   February 21, 2011 10:41 am 4 Comments

   I had a lot of things to do last Thursday, Feb-17. I met a friend from abroad 3am at Ben Gurion Airport and spent several hours talking before we went sleep, signed a contract for developing killer web app at 1:30am, and finally gave a presentation at The Junction at 4:30pm.

   Late evening I found myself thinking (again) about having at least 32 hours days to have enough time to accomplish all the planned tasks. As a developer I always kept a lot of todo tasks in a queue: some ideas about adding new cool features, some ideas about improving existing ones, some thoughts about refactoring. Unfortunately the queue tends to overflow and todo tasks get lost.

   There are two ways to solve that. 1. Have a large manageable queue by using modern project management tools and write everything down naively thinking you would get back to these task later. 2. Adopt adaptive development approaches and use the right tools to develop web applications like Ruby on Rails, stay productive and happy.

   Back to the presentation at The Junction. It has 2.5 parts:
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4. Welcoming all TechAviv Members

   February 15, 2011 5:03 pm Leave a Comment

   We are happy to announce a collaboration between TechAviv & The Junction, our home for entrepreneurs. In case you have been living under a rock and don’t know what TechAviv is, here is a quick intro:

   TechAviv is a global Israeli startup founders club with over 2,000 members worldwide, by invitation only. We meet monthly in Israel, New York, Silicon Valley and Boston to showcase, discuss and help fellow Israeli founders and startups succeed. Each month, in each of our four locations, founders demo their products in front of hundreds of local peers. Serial entrepreneurs and first timers inspire and learn from eachother. Together we’re harnessing our extensive collective experience to build a global support system for Israeli founders. We’re primarily Internet and Mobile startup founders but our membership includes investors and Israeli executives from leading tech companies in the US.

   The Junction is all about getting founders together, no strings attached. So, Yaron & us have been brainstorming how can we do this, and the answer is pretty simple:
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5. The 10 Rules of The Junction

   February 9, 2011 4:34 pm 15 Comments

   When we envisioned The Junction, one of our most lofty goals was to build a community.  A community of entrepreneurs – one that fosters innovation, creativity, camaraderie and a sense of togetherness.  A community with a unique social etiquette that is built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs.  As hosts, we do not see our role in creating boundaries, but in bringing value through events & mentorship.

   
   Therefore, we’ve built only a minimal set of guiding principals that are the only Rules of The Junction (and no, “you do not talk about The Junction” isn’t one of them). Talkback with your feedback! These aren’t final in any way.

   
   

   The 10 Rules of The Junction
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6. It’s all about the people

   February 7, 2011 4:22 pm 1 Comment

   This is my first (ever) blog post. Not only is this exciting for me because I am still a virgin but it is also probably a junction in my professional career.

   Why a junction? For several reasons.

   One of my favorite quotes is by Mark Twain “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” This is a quote that I find so absolutely correct that I try and implement it in my everyday life…think before you act, concentrate and focus on the important stuff and know how to differentiate between the more important and less important.
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