Petar Petrov's Blog

Author: Petar Petrov

  • Book: Monkey Business

    Monkey Business
    by John Rolfe and Peter Troob

    ISBN: 0446676950

    The legend it is, I had quite high expectations of this book. I hoped I will get a new perspective of the analyst/associate life. It actually is a quite humorous take on the craziness of working for an investment bank. Instead of giving me answers and making things clear, all I got from this book is a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”: Why do people that have experienced this job come back for it?

    What this job is according to the book:
    – Crazy hours of work[100/week?]. No weekends, zero social life;
    – Being treated like s**t, sucking up to the same people that treat you like s**t;
    – It’s a cookie cutter job in most of its parts; Not only repetitive but often meaningless and mindless;

    Then there must be something of incredible magnitude that draws people in. I am probably the most anti-corporate, anti-job person that has come around and yet I felt like diving into this world too. I even went to few interviews to wet my feet. Here is my take on the answer of the riddle, but I would appreciate if anyone gives me a better point of view:
    – Obviously the organic normal enjoyment of the work itself
    – Good money. Sure, starting salary of $50,60,70 thousand out of college is hardly achievable by any other job.
    – Promise for promotion and high class life.
    – Feeling important. Feeling on top of things. Suits, shiny shoes, expensive dinners. Those are so powerful, I know I want them too.
    – [waiting for more suggestions…]

    I am probably missing something out, but it ought to be pointed by people that have experience in that field. Don’t be shy.

    I can’t really say much more so here is the only thing I marked. It gives a pretty good overview of the tone and purpose of the book:
    “When associates finally reach this realization, they no longer waste time during the pitches conjuring visions of greatness. The pitch becomes nothing more than a routine to be suffered through. Since associates have typically been working on the pitch for the entire previous night, their primary activity becomes a struggle to stay awake. Every associate has his own techniques. I used to stick my hands into my pockets and try to pull hairs out of my legs. Rolfe once considered attaching clothespins to his nuts.”

  • Marketing Your Startup

    Investors seem to love to ask this one question, “How are you going to market your startup?” By now, I have a ready answer that I shoot right away. The concept is a little vague and difficult to get, but I will try to make that clear. The answer to life, the universe, and everything is:

    If my product is really damn good, it will market itself. If it is not, I shouldn’t bother marketing it.

    It sounds a little bit like ‘Build it and they will come‘ but it is NOT. Let me tell you why.

    First let’s have a look at Coca Cola’s marketing strategy. Their drink is a product significantly different than your new, innovative (hopefully) idea for startup. Coke is an old product that we all know. It’s been around for years and there is nothing so cool about it. The ads you see around have one purpose – to make you drink Coke when you don’t really care what you drink. This is the type of thing in which you constantly need to be bombarded with messages that will layer up in your subconsciousness and will finally make you drink Coke. For that purpose, ads are targeted to everybody, all the time, and everywhere (even SecondLife! blah). Marketing of Coca Cola looks probably somewhat like that:

    Coca Cola marketing type

    That is perfect and in time covers millions and billions of people. However, it only works if your budget is $2.5billion+. If you are like me, you probably don’t even have billionth of that.

    So what can we do? Something smaller, like Google AdWords? Nah. AdWords is pretty much the Coke strategy on a much smaller scale:

    Online Marketing ONLY

    What is happening there is targeting single users according to their searches. True, more efficient than other online advertising services, but still equivalent to buying your new users. You want better than that – you want them to not only join for free but cajole friends to join for free too!

    At this point you should have already realized that you are just not able to spread the idea on your own. You want USERS to do it for you. The ominous word of mouth. This is the only way it could work, and since it is the only way, that should get you thinking, “How do I get my users to do that?” The answer is: You get them to work for you by creating the most amazing, best-out-there product, so that when people recommend it to their friends they feel proud of themselves. That is, it must be just really good – easy, cool, useful etc. In that case, the scenario of marketing will look like that:

    Word Of Mouth Power

    Now this is a different story. All you did was sent an email to your best friends and relatives [red line], that might be interested in it, and the rest was done by them [blue dotted line] because by recommending that amazing ‘grade A’ product will make them look knowledgeable, generous, and cool (oh that coolness factor!)

    If you really really want to spend money, here is where online advertising makes sense. At this point, when you have crowd working for you, you want to give them many initiation points at random places with random groups of people, in which case your marketing power can be multiplied many times:

    Online Advertising + Word of Mouth

    If you can’t make other people talk of you, you got the wrong idea. Get a new one, improve your current concept, or just give up — you are wasting your time.

    Do you agree with me now?
    “If my product is really damn good, it will market itself. If it is not, I shouldn’t bother marketing it.”

  • Book: The Dip

    The Dip
    by Seth Godin

    ISBN: 1591841666

    From the blogging sphere I came across one of the most popular marketing gurus – Seth Godin. I have read posts online, so when I walked in Barnes and Noble and saw a little cute blue book with his name on it, it immediately drew my attention. I read those 70 pages on the spot, and then bought the book for home. Its one of those treasure books, that if you start underlining you will have to underline half the stuff.

    Every project starts with excitement, energy, and resources. However, as it get progressively difficult, long, and tiresome you experience the dip, where people naturally feel like quitting. The Book is about how you should recognize that pushing a little harder to get to the ultimate returns is what separates the superstars from the rest.

    “Winners never quit and quitters never win” We have all heard that expression. Well, Seth Godin explains that there is nothing worse than this advice, because our success depends on the ability to quit the right things at the right moment, and stick to the ones that payoff.
    One of my favorite examples is the weight lifting example. When you exercise, your muscle gets tired. Only the last few seconds when the muscle starts hurting is when it actually grows. The problem is that most people naturally quit when pain appears, so they do all the work but get none of the benefits.

    One of the best advices that I have heard is the following quotation:
    Decide before the race the conditions that will cause you to stop and drop out [of the marathon]. You don’t want to be out there saying, “Well gee, my leg hurts, I’m a little dehydrated, I’m sleepy, I’m tired, and it’s cold and windy.” And talk yourself into quitting. If you are making a decision based on how you feel at the moment, you will probably make the wrong decision.

    One other thing that loved — Seth says at one point that almost everything we learn in school is wrong, but the wrongest things of all is the notion that we need to be well rounded. You can only be the best if you quit the rest of the things you are doing, simply because you don’t have enough resources to be the best in anything you do.

    So many things in this book can change your life. Buy it. Link to Amazon’s The Dip.

  • Fear Drives Our Lives

    My mom’s favorite joke goes somewhat like that:

    Poor man prays to God, “Please God, let me win the lottery, let me become rich, please…”
    Next day he goes on praying, “Please God, let me win only once the lottery, I only one 1 single million, not more…”
    Next day again, “Let me win, I will be nice to people, I will do good …” It goes on for weeks and weeks. One day God’s mighty voice falls from the sky, “Bro, you have to fill in at least one ticket …”

    Today also, I had the following situation. I found out that one of my $20’s had a ripped corner. The missing piece was not small enough so that it can go unnoticed, but it also wasn’t big enough to be completely unacceptable. So I was getting food at Chipotle (the best fast food you can get) and I faced the following dilemma — should I try to get away with my ripped 20 or should I gave them a regular one. I gave them 2 tens but before the cashier put them away, I pulled my ripped banknote and asked naively, “Would you ever take those ripped 20’s under some circumstances or should I not even try?”, the guy smiled at me, gave me back my tens, took the scarred 20 and joked, “I will get extra 15c for that missing part” I was left in amazement, I got away with it so easy!

    So then I thought, why on Earth would people have that completely irrational fear to avoid chances that come with barely any risk? Why did I not give the banknote at first place? Was I afraid of being denied? [so what?] Was I afraid they are going to laugh at me? [so what, I am never going to see them] Was I just shy? [how does that make me a better person if I am shy?] There is nothing significant that I could possibly lose if I try. But I didn’t in the beginning, and a lot of people don’t at all.

    Those of you that have read any of my previous posts know that I preach that ‘the only person you should be working is yourself’, so here it comes:

    I said last time how luck and risk are almost irrelevant, but Ilian and I calculated chance of not succeeding in any of the ten startups you began under the assumption that on average 1/10 startups succeed: (1-1/10)^10 = 34.9% That pretty much means that from pure statistical calculations in 2/3’s of the scenarios you will make at least 1 startup successful, and as Marc Cuban wrote long time ago – “you only need to be right once”. It is very important to note that this simple statistical measure does not include any of the most important characteristics of startups which include but are not limited to: 1) you gain a lot of experience after each failure, which considerably increases your chances of success 2) you make connections on the way 3) you learn to be critical and firm minded, able to analyze and process information very efficiently [these are things about UNSUCCESSFUL startups, imagine about even half-successful ones] After considering all of those qualities of entrepreneurial thinking, I think chances of not getting where you are going are almost invisible. Assuming that, and the high rewards of success, I wonder again, why would people not start startups? No risk, huge rewards. Nobody wants it!?

    Ilian tried to explain it through an interesting psychological observation of fear and happiness. People seem to be happy when they win something, but if they lose this same object, their happiness decreases twice as much. Naturally, a fear evolves from this, that drives our lives and makes us extremely risk averse. So risk averse that we probably won’t take a free ticket to the lottery simply because chances of winning are too small, in which risk of losing is practically zero, therefore the fear is completely irrational!

    Same goes on for funding. Paul Graham says its a good idea to calculate your pluses and minuses before you do a major move. Why would you not ask your connections to invest in you if all you lose is a rejection, which is equivalent to not asking at all anyway, and what you win (in our case) is to keep the project on track? Just 2 days ago we managed to overcome the fear of asking people to invest in us. The result? Noah pitched to one person and he agreed to spit 5, 10g on the basis of friendship with no official paperwork. A whole new discussion follows on now: ‘should we take that offer and how should we present the official request’

    Fear is powerful…

  • What Luck Really Is…

    I recently read an article about a study that some professor did, but unfortunately I don’t remember his name. The basic idea is the following:

    About 1500 people are split in 2 groups, group A (we will call it so) has very simple task – listen to a bunch of indie songs and rate them accordingly. The more curious and exciting group we will call B, which has a similarly simple task – listen to a bunch of songs and rate them, the one difference is that B has access to B’s ratings and people see the top list of best rated songs before they choose what to listen and how to rate.

    The obvious result is that ratings among A of songs are not much different from each other. That means that rating of the first song is just a little bit higher than the second top rated song, which is just a little bit higher than the third rated song and etc. Group B’s rating however looked different. Song number 1 was far far better rated than song number two and song number three was significantly worse than two etc. From this we can conclude that the exponential results are due to what Alek calls “herd behavior”.

    So far, so good.

    Now comes the real deal. Group B was divided in 8 sections. All of them listened to the same songs, but each group had their own individual rating lists. The result was very very curious – each had a different top 15 list. In each section, different songs became the most listened. The article reasoned that small differences of luck, or unaccounted factors in the beginning can mean a lot for the success of a song. This way a song that got lucky to be played in the beginning becomes big hit for example, although there are plenty of other songs that technically are not worse in musical terms. If you try to give an analogue of real life, the star Madonna is now, could have been someone completely else due to random small occurrences of luck.

    Now that sounds horrible, unfair, and nasty for the people that do believe they have qualities but didn’t make it only because of this luck part of the deal.

    I think we can put a different spin on failure however. If there is about 10 songs, and you think you have the skills to make in in top 3, but you were unlucky up to know, I can tell you one thing: doing it over and over again will statistically force the bad luck to ‘run out’ and you will marry success. Same for startups.

    I have never thought of it like that, but this is a big part of what people call perseverance.

    UPDATE: [ Here is what Marc Andreessen wrote about luck ]

  • Google is buying us…

    Few days ago I was discussing with my partner Noah how the website is coming. I mentioned in a previous post that he is not what you can call a hacker or a very computer savvy person. So while talking about our idea again, he surprised me with a very good question: “So what prevents other people from doing what we are doing, and why should WE be the ones to succeed?” I totally did not expect such a good question from him so it took me a few seconds to run scenarios through my head. Eventually I mumbled something very reasonable that sounded like that: “Well, to our knowledge, we are the first to be doing such a weird and useful idea, so we have the advantage of time. The other thing that plays only after we launch this product is that sometimes some site become very popular and its difficult to take them over because they have solid amount of dedicated users (or maybe not). It’s a little bit like being youtube – nothing technologically very challenging that can’t be done, and also they weren’t the first ones to come up with this either. But they had a lot of users, and even Google couldn’t compete, so they bought them”Once I said that, something very interesting formed in my mind. I saw the online business from a totally different perspective. There are two reasons for acquisitions usually: great technology that takes time to be developed and a great user base. What I never realized is that they bought have the same purpose and it is to own people, pieces of their attention. Internet is like a second world, that has no rules yet and is free for grabs. This is the beauty of it. NO RULES. So the game is the following – you hook up people on your service and you are their owner. You can now be considered landlord. What you can do is use those people (their attention) to make money or capture more free users that have no roots to anything yet. Who is really damn good at this game? Yes, the googles. They hooked up people on their search, made billions, hooked up people on the maps, will make more billions, and what do they do with this money? They buy people that they use to make more money and buy more people… I am saying this because most of the websites can be replicated by Google for a maximum of few weeks. So essentially what happens when there is an acquisition is that G doesn’t really buy a company or technology, they buy YOU, they buy ME and my mom (well, my mom got bought by Ebay when they acquired Skype). But who gets the money? It’s not the end users.

    The bright side: there’s still plenty for everyone. There are plenty of freely roaming browsing users that either don’t know about G or are interested in things that G doesn’t provide yet. So do go and capture land. After all its free – all you have to do is go and claim it.

  • Seed Money Or No Seed Money

    It’s been a constant discussion between me and my partner whether we should look for funding have a beta version first for a pitch. At times we decided that we need but didn’t really do anything about it. Maybe we didn’t know what to do. Emailing random investors doesn’t work. It is pointless, I’ve tried it. At other times, we decided that I need to make version 1.0 first, befoe we ask anyone for $1.

    So I am sure that everybody in the startup universe had those thoughts, “Should I get money, what should I do, do I really need them? Maybe I can work for a little bit and use that money…But where am I going to find it…I will read online and see if I can get some insights from news.yc….” in the end, nothing done. You go and read forever blogs and opinions and they are all the same. And they don’t help. How your project’s problem will get solved will probably have nothing to do with any of those advices, they are often too generic.

    I settled on the solution – I will do v1.0, because I can make it by the end of the summer and then we’ll go and search for money. Nice plan. Worked hard for a month, made 1/2 of what I had planned. Now however, I had emergency and I had to fly home. That means money spent and now I can’t pay my school. What does it mean in regards to our project? Halt. I have to make money to survive. I hate that feeling. So little money – 6 grand per semester. Last 2 semesters, I am so close to completing this project and I have to deal with this crap. 12 thousand dollars not much but enough to make your life miserable, when everything was going well.

    I am currently in Bulgaria, working on it coding when I have time. But once I get back, I have to work for school. I have always believed that I can fool investors and get some money to work on a project that would be fun. Maybe not ‘fool’ but rather convince them that my idea is good (I obviously like it myself). Somewhat I feel that funding was the end goal. This has changed. It’s about me and the project now. If I get money I get to work on it, else I have to stop. That simple but profoundly different from what ‘funding’ has been previously.

  • Mr Critical

    I am always into trying to come up with something entrepreneurial rather than settling down with a 9 to 5 job. An interesting side effect is that people around me feel like they have to share their own inventions and ideas. It’s all good with me. I have trained myself over time to breakdown an idea into components, analyze them and figure out if its doable. The problem is that once I do that, the results I spit back so quickly are usually bad, and people hate it. They like to think they came up with something incredible. Usually I am right for one of the following reason:

    1. These are most often either my brothers, my friends from neighborhood, or college friends. What they all have in common is that they are new to entrepreneurial thinking. I mean, I am new myself, and it’s already been 4 years now solid brainstorming. They don’t know that they are walking in my first steps: they are naive and their ideas are unrealistic.

    2. The second big problem is that their attention span is too short. They share, get encouragement and/or criticism and that’s where it ends. They don’t do anything about it, they just move to another, ‘better idea’…

    3 . Most of them tend to think that getting a product out on the market is easy and can be done on the side of jobs, partying, traveling, and oh yeah, lots of drinking. You can’t start a business and expect to lift it off the ground if you have a full time job. You learn those things when you get to the “doing it” part… which brings us to the most import point:

    4. The difference between IDEA and BUSINESS. One thing is to get idea. Everybody has them. Everybody gets brilliant ideas. However, no one does anything about them. Brainstorming is easy. It’s fun but it also tricks you into thinking that once you make a couple steps, you are close to finishing a 30-mile marathon. Big big difference. Marathon is not something you achieve with 1,2, or 3 tries. You have to run hundreds of times distances much shorter. You have to fail many times before you reach your goal. Only it so happens that sometimes you are in the middle of it and you haveГ‚ to change direction for something else…

    It really is funny. People come, share their ideas and when I tell them why they will not work, they get mad at me. They often call me Mr Critical or say I am pessimist and nothing will work out for me. Its great – I love hearing that. Call me whatever you want but until someone makes even a super small business out of their idea I am always going to be right…

  • Health as a measure of ambition and dedication

    I am one of those people that can starve for a long time if no food that I am in the mood for is around. However, for the last 6 months probably I have been starving for another reason – I am too busy or too tired to get food. The result is that I have long term problems with stomach and need serious treatment. Unfortunately, stomach pains are not the only problems. All kinds of health issues are emerging now (a lot of them probably caused by lack of good nutrition).

    So now I am sitting all in pain and worn out, “Health can definitely be a measure of your ambition and obsession!” Yup. I figured that out. But then if you really want to be successful, you have to take care of yourself too, which means that to maintain GOOD health is an even higher level of ambition and dedication. This doesn’t meant you have to get through the ‘sick’ phase so you can reach the top. On the contrary – you can easily avoid it, which is why I am writing that post: spend extra energy and money to eat good quality food and to eat it regularly. Believe me it’s worth it in the long term.

  • The Drive

    Everybody knows that if you really, really want something you will find a way to get it. Sure, I believe you. As a matter of fact, I am experiencing it now: I want my project to be done so I am more concentrated on it, leaving out other time-consuming tasks I don’t need. I feel like a shuttle that is exiting the Earth orbit and loses the burden of the empty tanks because it has one purpose – to get where its supposed to. Over the last 3,4 years I have observed this phenomenon. In the beginning things can take months to change, but as you grow more obsessed with your ambitions, habits can change overnight. I haven’t missed a bedtime in weeks and breakfast, like never before, is now a firm rule. So yes, if you really want something you will find ways to squeeze more time or get more efficient.

    But now let me ask something, How exactly do we get into that vortex that pulls us to our dreams and feeds us with energy for more? Why are some people just not interested in doing anything? Why do people just never even start pursuing something they will like? There seems to be a threshold that needs to be crossed, and unless you do it, career can have a totally different shape. I’ve heard in US a lot of preaching on the topic: “You have to study what you enjoy” and just now I see what they mean. I live the true meaning of words because I teach myself what I want and then I apply it to my work. The problem here is that this piece of advice won’t get in your brain unless you have crossed that threshold and have had a taste of your dreamjob that fills you up with desire and ambition to continue.

    So lets say Mr X likes architecture. His parents support him in studying what he likes. So Mr X majors in it, and works as an architect for 10 years. But he, just like most people, never really got in the vortex. He sits in an office, drafts buildings, then goes out and finds something he likes doing to make up for the annoying time he had in the office. He is now wondering, “What happened to my passion for architecture, why did it get dulled over time? Maybe I should have become a photographer since I like taking pictures so much these days…” What happened is that there was no force to draw him more into it so that he gets excitement and fun out of it that will empower him to think of forming a company, hire drafters, and take on bigger, more exciting and cool projects.

    I crossed that threshold, but I still don’t get how I did it. So what I am looking for is, “How do you find that exact thing you will enjoy, cross the border and get pulled like gravity in it?”

    …all I have for now is ‘try it’…