By: Henry Blodget

Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004.  Five years later, it has 300 million users and $500 million in revenue, and it’s worth something north of $6 billion.

Now 25, Mark still runs the place. 

He was kind enough to sit down with me recently to talk about how the heck he did it.

“Move fast and break things” is Mark’s prime directive to his developers and team. “Unless you are breaking stuff,” he says, “you are not moving fast enough.”

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

By: Philip Delves Broughton

If you have ever watched Tiger Woods play golf, you know the look. Brim pulled down over the eyes, which are locked on some point far down the fairway.

Despite all the hubbub, he is locked into the moment.

His opponent stands off to one side gnawing his knuckles, knowing another defeat is just a few holes away. Credit meditation for Woods’ extraordinary focus.

An essential part of Tiger Woods’ success is what he calls “staying in the present” and not letting his mind wander off to hoisting a trophy or depositing another million-dollar cheque.

While other golfers may live in the future, at the moment Woods plays his shots, he is apparently free of the conscious worry which plagues the weekend duffer.

And he puts much of this down to meditation and the Eastern philosophy, mostly Buddhist, he learned from his Thai mother.

In addition to his early morning workouts and hours on the driving range, he also meditates daily.

The value of meditation has long been known to those who practise it. David Lynch, the director of Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, established a foundation for “consciousness-based education and world peace” inspired by his 30 years’ practising transcendental meditation.

Lynch’s ambition is for children to spend one class a day “diving within”, so they can better deal with stress and be more creative throughout their lives.

In the United Kingdom, William Hague has credited his meditative practice with helping him ride the roller coaster of politics.

With so much stress in the economy, meditation is also gaining popularity with business executives.

After the past couple of years, who couldn’t use half an hour a day to tame what Buddhists call “the wild horses” of the mind?

One of the most prominent advocates of meditation is William George, a Harvard Business School professor and board member at Goldman Sachs. George started to meditate 35 years ago while running the medical devices firm Medtronic.

He calls meditation “the single best thing that happened to me in terms of my leadership”. He says that it “enables one to focus on what is really important; and I haven’t had high blood pressure since the Seventies”.

Pointing to the recent financial crisis, George told Bloomberg News: “I think meditation in these times has an important role to play.

“If you take Wall Street versus Warren Buffett, he has made much wiser decisions than Wall Street has.

Now, I don’t know if he’s a meditator, but he’s calm, thoughtful and he stays clear. Wall Street’s trading floor is exactly the opposite.”

Firms ranging from Apple to Google and organisations such as Nasa offer free meditation classes to their employees these days.

It is regarded by these firms as far more than Eastern quackery or a luxury like free cappuccinos.

Meditation not only helps focus but it is also an effective preventative treatment of stress-related illnesses that cost businesses billions every year.

Google has held regular meditation sessions at its offices around the world for the past two years.

The firm believes that it helps employees develop their “emotional intelligence”, which in turn benefits the company.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the head of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts and one of meditation’s greatest champions, calls meditation an act of love, towards oneself and others.

He is a particular favourite at technology firms.

During his talks, he often brings a tennis ball and drops it to signify the act of dropping into the moment.

He argues that greater knowledge of the mind, attained through meditation, helps business people sweep away the tacit assumptions which so often lead to problems.

In a modern society where so many people suffer from attention deficit disorders, he says, it is all about doing, with little recognition of being. The consequence is that people struggle to rest their minds.

Three years ago, the Dalai Lama supplied 12 Buddhist monks to a team of American neuroscientists so they could study the neurological effect of meditation.

The scientists found that by meditating for tens of thousands of hours, the monks had altered the structure and function of their brains.

It appeared that the monks’ brain waves oscillated at a different rate from those in people who never meditated. They were capable of much more focused thought.

The research was called into question by other scientists but it did prompt a wave of interest in how humans might be able to use meditation to change the function of their brains for the better.

One of the most popular forms of meditation for corporate types is Vipassana, which translates as “insight”.

There are Vipassana centres all over the world, founded by SN Goenka, a Burmese entrepreneur. An introductory retreat involves 10 days of “noble silence”.

Days begin at 4am followed by 11 hours of private and group meditation interspersed with meals and lectures. Once they leave, students are advised to meditate twice a day.

Keith Ferrazzi, an expert on networking and author of the best-selling book Never Eat Lunch Alone, says that the 10-day Vipassana meditation is the one time of year when he stops networking and clears his mind.

The key to networking, after all, he says, is “not being an asshole”.

People are more likely to want to know you if you exude the calm and confidence of the seasoned meditator.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

By: Lisa Barone

ICanHasCheezburger.com ^[1] is a site based solely off user-generated content (i.e.,  content they didn’t create) and has achieved 1 Billion pageviews in its two years of existence. The book ^[2] based off the concept was an instant New York Times bestseller and the second in the series is due out soon.

Oh, and if you’ve never seen it, icanhascheezburger.com is a site dedicated to displaying silly cat pictures that users can adorn with even sillier nonsensical captions. Yes, that was someone’s  BIG dollar idea.

Ben Huh, the guy behind the site, spoke at Search Marketing Expo ^[3] yesterday and shared with the audience ^[4] the two reasons why the site is a success.

1. It’s simple.
2. It makes people happy.

It’s genius.

I think a lot of small business owners forget to be simple. They think that in order to compete with the guy down the street that they have to be bigger and more impressive. That to be taken as seriously as the Best Buys or the Staples they need to offer a full line of products and amaze people with their sheer size. Somehow in the business world we’ve decided that size = credibility and authority. But that’s not true.

Your idea doesn’t have to be big. It has to be simple.

During yesterday’s keynote at SMX, Ben noted some other companies that have leveraged this idea of “simplicity”:

• Starbucks is the simple place between your home and your office.
• Google gave us a simple way to find information.
• Facebook make it simple to connect with our friends online.
• The Cheezburger network (which ICanHasCheezburger.com is part of) made it simple for people to be happy for a few moments of the day.

That’s what people are looking for. The Internet gave us the ability to reach millions in one shot. It changed the way a lot of businesses operated. It dared them to come up with the biggest idea they could and then market it to everyone ^[5]. That’s rarely where success is found.

Instead, find the simplest idea you can and then market it only to those people who would be interested in the service. That’s how you find a loyal community, one that will grow and become viral. It’s also how you put yourself in the position to be able to make complicated products down the road. Ben asserted in his keynote that the reason Google can stick its hand into everything and release a slew of different products today is because, for awhile, they only did one thing well. They did search. That bought them the freedom to be where they are now.

You’re not Google and you don’t have to be. Instead of trying to do more than your competitors, figure out how to simplify what their throwing extra steps into. There are a million free services out there – Google Apps, WordPress, Skype, YouTube – that have made it easier to be “simple” without a lot of overhead. Take advantage and make it simple for people to find happiness. That’s what they want. And that’s what they want you to give them.

If you want to be better than your competitors. Don’t figure out how you can one up them and add extra features to their services. Instead, strip them down. Make them easier. That’s what we’re all looking for. A way to make it easier. Whatever that “it” happens to be.

Editor’s correction note:  actually it wasn’t $1 Billion in revenue as originally noted, but 1 Billion pageviews and a multi-million dollar business, and the post has been updated accordingly.   Still – EXTREMELY impressive for such a simple idea.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

By: Tim Ferris

Putting All the Chips on the Table?

Growing up as I did, with an early interest in business, it was almost impossible not to envy people like Gates, and even measure myself against them. Gates had placed all his chips on the table at one time and walked away richer than Croesus. And me? Well, I’d never even sat down at the table. The way I saw it, I couldn’t. I graduated from a state university with a stack of loans to repay. No sooner had I begun to dig my way out of personal debt than I met my wife (who failed to bring her own shovel). I remember her father joking with me soon after we got engaged. “Son,” he said, “I want to let you know about Lori’s dowry—you get her student loans and her bad teeth!” He laughed from deep in his chest. I moaned from the same spot. Add to that three children born within five years, and I felt like I was slogging through quicksand. If only I was in a different position, I used to think. If only I had the courage to take on more risk, like Bill Gates, like lots of others I used to list to myself. And then finally, years later, I realized that that’s not how it happened at all. William Henry Gates III was born October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, to a family with a rich history in business, politics, and community service. His great-grandfather had been a state legislator and mayor, his grandfather was the vice president of a national bank, and his father was a prominent and very wealthy lawyer. Because young Bill excelled from his earliest school days, especially in science and math, his parents saw that he was enrolled in prestigious Lakeside Prep, known for its intense academic environment. This was in the late 1960s, when the world of computing was just beginning to peek over the horizon and carried a golden price tag. But no problem. To assure Lakeside’s students wouldn’t be left behind, the school held a fund-raiser and, with the proceeds, rented what it thought would be a year’s worth of time on a computer owned by General Electric. Bill Gates, his close friend Paul Allen, and a few others torpedoed that plan in a big hurry. They started hanging out in the computer room day and night, learning everything they could, even to the detriment of their other academic obligations. Within a matter of weeks, the expected year’s worth of allotted computer time was gone, but that was no problem either. The school simply struck a new deal, this one with Seattle-based Computer Center Corporation, to get additional computer time at good rates. That might have worked if young Gates and his friends hadn’t immediately started (a) hacking into CCC’s security system so they could reset the meter that tracked computer use and (b) crashing the system just for fun. They were caught, and the company banned Gates and his cohorts from its computers for several weeks. (The thought of Gates and Allen as the godfathers of a hacking subculture that has cost Microsoft and the world overall hundreds of billions of dollars does indeed boggle the mind.) But again, the exile was only temporary. CCC’s business was beginning to suffer from the system’s weak security and the frequency with which it crashed—many of the same flaws Gates and his friends had been exploiting—so the company offered the gang a deal: find the bugs and pinpoint the weaknesses in the system, and they could have unlimited use of the computer. In 1970, Computer Center Corporation ran into financial trouble that would eventually put it out of business, but by then, Gates and Allen had found a new computer home at the University of Washington, where Allen’s father worked. Lakeside also pitched in: during Gates’s junior year at the prep school, the administration offered him a job computerizing the scheduling system. Over the summer, Gates and Allen wrote the program, which coincidentally assured that Gates was assigned to classes with mostly girls—a sequence straight out of a nerd’s revenge movie. In the fall of 1973, Gates left Seattle to begin his freshman year at Harvard, part of his preprogrammed life plan. Allen, who almost certainly could have been admitted to Harvard along with his pal, chose a different route. He wanted hands-on experience, but the two remained in close contact, often discussing the potential of one day starting a company, and at the end of Gates’s first year at Harvard, Allen moved closer to Boston so they could continue to pursue the still-vague possibilities. Then, in December of Gates’s sophomore year, the vague future began to take on a more exact face. On a visit to Harvard, Allen stopped at a convenience store and noticed the current issue of Popular Electronics magazine. On the cover, under the title “World’s First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models,” was a picture of the Altair 8800. Energized as he had never been, Allen showed the magazine to Gates, and within a few days Gates had called the maker of the computer, Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS), and told them that he had written a BASIC computer program that could be used on the Altair. This was a lie. Gates and Allen were just trying to gauge interest from the company. But MITS was deep in its own deception: the computer shown on the cover had not been developed yet, and even the prototype had been lost in shipping. Still, the magazine article had generated interest far exceeding expectations, so MITS asked Gates and Allen to come in and demonstrate what they were thinking. Only then did the two set out to write the code. Gates focused on programming while Allen worked on simulating how it would work on an Altair 8800, which they didn’t have. At the meeting eight weeks later, the program worked perfectly, and MITS arranged a deal to purchase the rights to Gates’s BASIC. Gates would later say that it was at this moment he knew the software market had been born. Yet, despite his growing certainty of the opportunity in front of him, Bill Gates waited another 12 months, until his junior year, to drop out of school and, with Allen, form Micro-Soft. And even then, the company might have amounted to little more than a footnote in the history of software without Bill Gates’s mother. Long active in community service in the Seattle area, Mary Maxwell Gates became the first female president of the United Way of King County and eventually chair of the executive committee of the national United Way, then one of the most influential nonprofit positions in the world. Serving on the exec committee with her back in the early seventies were, among others, John Akers, who would later become the CEO and chairman of International Business Machines (IBM), and John Opel, who preceded Akers in both positions. Mary Gates mentioned her son’s new business to Opel, who by many accounts then relayed this information to other top IBM executives. There’s no definitive record of what got said when to whom, but only a few weeks after Mary Gates got the ball rolling, IBM took a huge chance by contracting with Bill Gates’s fledgling company to develop an operating system for the company’s first personal computer. The success of both the IBM PC and the Microsoft Disc Operating System (or MS-DOS)—and the sweetheart deal that let Microsoft retain rights to its software—is what ultimately made Bill Gates the richest man on the planet.
Experience, Not Faith
So, did Bill Gates walk away from one of the world’s most coveted degrees toward an uncertain path? Well, he did ultimately make decisions from which there would be no turning back. That part of the myth is dead on. But was Gates a great risk taker? That’s a more complicated story. His family’s money and position provided cover for his youthful computing hijinks and helped assure that he would have the best education available. As for the famous Harvard dropout story, he didn’t really. Rather, he took a formal “leave of absence,” a kind of emotional umbilical cord that kept him tied to Harvard long after he had vacated the campus, just in case things didn’t work out. But by then, he had already turned the odds in his favor. After half a decade of dancing with the opportunity, beginning early in high school, he had already covered most of his downside risks. He knew, for example, that he loved the work, and the early Micro-Soft had projects in the pipeline. What’s more, Gates had validation that both he and Allen were highly competent with this new technology, and he could see that the topside potential was huge. The industry was just emerging, and his mother was in the particularly influential position of head of a United Way executive committee that also included two future CEOs of the world’s dominant computer company. As they say, it’s often not what you know but who your mother knows that can land you billion-dollar contracts. Far from being one of the world’s great risk takers, Bill Gates might more accurately be thought of as one of the world’s greatest risk mitigators. And in that, he is not alone. The simple fact is that everyone is afraid of risk at some level, including everyone I interviewed for this book. That’s a given of human nature. But the further fact is that Door No. 3 is a myth, whether we’re talking about the myth of Bill Gates or the myths that we privately tell ourselves. You don’t have to be fearless to make dramatic changes in your life. Transformative change isn’t propelled by raw courage. It’s “sparked” by a series of events that build exposure and experience, both of which help to create asymmetric risk. Through sparking, the upside opportunity is confirmed while downside risk is mitigated. Ultimately, the leap—when it comes—is not one of faith but of experience, even of comfort, just as it was for Gates. ### Interested in more behind-the-scenes stories?  Check out Leap <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591842565?ie=UTF8&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1591842565> .  It can be read in two quick sittings and will get you off your ass to do whatever it is that you aspire to do

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

One life…. one dream and one great empire. These amazing perspectives on life should be an inspirational tool for us all. And even more so to always keep in mind when we feel we loose our way.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites