Don't wear shorts at interviews - Part II

As I posted just a few days ago, my appearance in shorts has strongly contrasted with my classmates. Now I face even more popularity by becoming the face (just for a short time) of Cambridge Conversations run by Cambridge Judge Business School. For the sake of not losing these precious moments of myself getting exposure in the press (God knows when this will happen again, and surely won't be soon), I have attached them in this blog. As I assume this blog is mostly read by my classmates from Judge, I guess I will experience some funny remarks.

Don't wear shorts at interviews

Well, I did make it in the Cambridge MBA entrepreneurship showcase and I definitely left a mark. Enjoy the start of this video ...

For and against Internet copycats

You will probably agree that that the copycat business is huge and all around us. As an entrepreneur I had at least 3 occasions when my ideas were copied. And yes, it is a nasty feeling. You get angry, the other guys are worse than the devil, you spend hours looking at their product and criticizing how bad it is compared to yours. But with time and experience I have started to appreciate newcomers, because they improved my own product. Yes, indeed! I have put together an non-exhaustive list of what got better:

1. Copycats are the result of careful analysis of your product. They usually come in a better form and build on the existing business model.
2. It makes you rethink your product - why are other equally that successful as you, or better/faster growing. Somewhere on the way you ignored something - be it speed to market, culture, creativity, sufficient financing. You become more open to partnerships.
3. Copycats bring you out of your comfort zone, because they change the game. Now you have competition. You push yourself more, you want to persevere. And there is nothing better than that in order to improve your product and add more value to your customers. You start coming up again with ideas, look for new ways to grow.
4. It changes your attitude. Many companies become arrogant and ignorant with size. Although this does not apply to all I tend to call them incumbents. And my personal believe is that incumbents should be disrupted all the time. Only this way you make them rethink their recruitment, customer support, structures. 

I love the example with the hairdresser salon. If someone opens a hairdresser and few months later another guy opens a similar one few blocks away, is he a copycat? No, just another hairdresser salon. And the one offering a better service will serve customers in the long-term and the one with inferior service will either have to change or go out of business. This si the real world and there is nothing fairer than that!

Share your opinion and feel free to support or argue with me.

To live in Prenzlauer Berg or not to live in Prenzlauer Berg

Another blog post and of course a new story. And guess what - the story is about finding an apartment in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin. There are a few well known facts about this "angesagt" district in Berlin:

1. Buildings are very nice
2. There are plenty of good dining locations
3. People look schick
4. Apartments are expensive and difficult to get

Well, now imagine you are newcomer in Berlin e.g. started work 2 weeks ago and one of the prerequisites is to show your last 3 monthly paychecks in order to be considered for renting an apartment. Besides this when you visit the place you usually discover that you are one of 20 candidates for it and have to wait on the staircase for your turn to glimpse at it. 

Question: Now what do you think are your chances to get a place like this?

Answer: Nil

Question: What you do then?

Answer: You look for a WG!!!

WG is an abbreviation for an apartment shared by few people. I thought it would be easier and cheaper to get in one of these. Berlin has plenty of places like that and they are gigantic. While I was visiting WGs I have seen 140-250 sq. m. places. These are usually old apartments with 3m decorated ceilings, few bathrooms and many rooms. Inhabitants usually share the living room and kitchen, and everyone has his own 20-45 sq.m room. 

So, I signed for www.wg-gesucht.de and www.immobilienscout24.de and started calling to all ads that were popping up. And they were popping up quite often - 3-4 per day. Then I started visiting these places. Here is what I found out:

1. These places were definitely not cheap - prices varied based on the quality of the room and the number of people living there, but in general you always end up with a price between 380-600 euro. Considering that Berlin is a lot cheaper than London or Paris, for this money you can basically rent an apartment 2-3x that size (25 sq.m) yourself. Definitely not in Prenzlauer Berg, but a few tram stations away. This leaves a somehow bitter taste even if you like your new "Mitbewohner" as it seems that you are paying a huge amount of the rent and costs of the other guy(s).
2. The selection process hugely reminded me of cat walk show. You are examined in greater detail and face some funny requirements and views. For example, a man would tell you that although he has a girlfriend, he prefers to live with a woman, which is one of the few things that I am not ready to comply with. 
3. You see a lot of different apartments, life styles and get to know the city.
4. You meet a lot of people and some of them are worth staying in contact with. Some of course not. But I definitely made friends. 

So, you probably wonder what happened? I waited long enough to find a nice apartment and grabbed it immediately. No WG, not for me, and probably not for the guys that want to have some privacy.

Feel free to share your experience in apartment hunting, be my guest.

Iuhu, we made it in the press

The MBA is over but memories pop up all the time. Our Singapore effort ended in early September, yet we were pleasantly surprised by the Graduate School Projects Team in Singapore that sent us 2 copies of their magazine which featured our project "Adapting Singapore's IDM Industry". I could not have had a better end of the 1-year MBA. I had an amazing time and met many extraordinary entrepreneurs. Big thanks to GSP@Singapore, Judge Business School and my great colleagues Ben and Chun Zhi for making this happen. 

By the way I think we did really good work and learned a lot. Reiterating this for the ones who could stay with the impression that I mostly enjoyed the "dining options" :) 

The Big G, The Big F and what went wrong (if something went wrong at all)

Well, you will probably say I am a pessimist or a negativist, or some other kind of "...ist". But I just cannot stop asking myself. Is everything running so well at Google and Facebook as I read in the news? Google is posting record earnings every quarter with numbers going up around 30% compared to the previous year. Similarly Facebook is doubling its revenues every year for the last 2-3 years. But have you actually taken a glance at the products?

Google

The "Don't be evil" company is now all around us - our searches come from G, our emails are served by G, our phones are largely powered by G and the ads we see on webpages are provided by G. Since recently our social network is also powered by G. We all see the constant updates, improvements and new features, but don't you have the feeling that something is missing? Is the company actually innovating? 

In my eyes the rising star G+ has been a fresh new breeze and I welcomed it. But after the initial enthusiasm, I must say, my engagement level with it has substantially diminished. I believe this was caused by the fact that at the end of the day I was using just another Facebook. Well, yes, indeed, it is a Facebook with hangouts. But in general I do not see any differentiation between the two. Design is important but not a huge differentiator and putting my friends in circles is an interesting concept, but an month later Facebook updated its private settings and it offered similar functionality for your friend groups. 

//By the way on a side note I really think that the high-level G+ evangelists which are also employees of the Big G should reduce their postings in the streams. It is obvious that busy people with so many responsibilities do not have the time to do this and their subordinates are completely overwhelmed with the task of playing their bosses. And by the way this is disrespectful to your readers ...

But back to the what went wrong question. G+ is actually "stuck-in-the-middle". It is neither a better Facebook, nor a substantially different product. I think Google fell in the trap of copy-cats. Not that a copy-cat is a symbol of failure. But in that business it is all a matter of execution. Seemingly the few failures in the social area forced G to look for working models (and forms) from its competitors. Unfortunately although the market can sustain a second social network, it expects the next generation of social networks which G+ in its current form is not.

But what about ...

Facebook

The company has accumulated more information about us then we can recall. And a lot of funny, exciting, intimidating etc. pictures some of which should stay hidden forever. But what really keeps us on the site is to check how our friends are doing. Everyday I read about babies, trips, exciting events, funny jokes and many more. From my friends. 

Facebook has wisely decided to introduce the Timeline concept in an attempt to broaden the user engagement from the last few hours to your whole life. Yet, contrary to 6 months earlier there are no more news about company shares acquired at the secondary market and valuing the social network to a new record mind-blowing sum. Some investors have also already sold their shares with a good few fold profit. You might argue that this is more an investor strategy decision and is normal. Yet, there is a believe that the Big F is wearing off. It seems to lose its engagement level (sounds familiar?). This was probably one of the justifications for the Big G to jump with a copy-cat in this business. Ironically, the Timeline change and the changes to the interface accompanying it have seemingly diminished even further the attractiveness of the platform. Some tests I run to measure visits to the content I post showed a strikingly lower engagement level which was sometimes reached a 3-fold reduction. Not surprisingly F has announced that it will allow users to roll back some new features in an effort to calm them down. Now combine this with the commoditisation of the product and then follows the logical question:

With a weak G+ and an F- in the social networking market who is going to take their place?

Hello World

Well, life goes on even after such a wonderful year as the one I had in the UK. Dragged by my incurable passion for entrepreneurship I find myself right into the German mecca of it - Berlin.

And that is not all - I actually survived a month in the whirlpool of E-commerce and Agile.

While my days are full of action, there is still room for improvement at night, so I start this blog in an effort to stir the hot pot in my areas of interest. Some thingies that will come first are introductions of Berlin startups, some of my biased techy apocalyptic prophecies, announcements about local WYSIWYG disruptive events as well as my thoughts about digital portfolio and geo location apps. The very latter is unavoidable and hopefully entertaining.

Happy reading!

Hristo