The Twitter flash crash: A black swan event?

By Vincent van Leeuwen.

Recently financial markets endured a flash crash social media-style. The very first Twitter flash crash. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about: A few weeks ago, the Twitter account of the American Press association was hacked. The hackers used the account to send out the following fake tweet:

Afterward, the Dow Jones plunged 150 points before bouncing back up to “normal” levels. All within half an hour:

As a side note, I think it deserves a mention here that the media (as usual) did its utter best to exaggerate what happened, stimulating panic all around. The Dow Jones plunged 150 points in only a few minutes, which of course is a big deal. But in most images featured in the media it looked like the Dow had a total meltdown, because of the choices made with respect to the axes of the graph shown. For instance, if you were to draw a five-year horizon chart (below), axis would be at quite different levels. From such a perspective, our flash crash would have been nothing but a small bump.

After the crash, the same media exaggerating the scene were the first to scream blue murder about how financial markets have changed for the worse with the rise of social media. All kind of experts were quick to start jabbering away about the risks of Twitter as a user-generated news agency.

Now that most of the dust has settled, I thought I’d share my take on the matter. Please note that I’m not a financial expert. Neither do I have any intent (or the skill set) to become one. My knowledge of financial markets is limited to my finance Masters and my daily work as Founder of SNTMNT (which also means that I’m slightly biased). From my humble point of view though, I don’t believe that the problem here is Twitter. I fully agree with Mark Gongloff that the actual problem is way more fundamental than that: the algorithmic trading systems that are using Twitter as an input source.

I believe that a lot of the buzz and confusion around the events of April 23 can be related to a theory I recently learned about. It’s an interesting theory from 2007 by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, called black swan theory:

Black swan theory

Black swan events are unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and that have or will have a dominant role in history. According to Taleb’s black swan theory, many major scientific discoveries, historical events, and artistic accomplishments can be qualified as “black swans”. Taleb gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I and September 2011 as examples of black swan events.

I thought it would be interesting to see whether the recent flash crash can be considered such a black swan event. According to Taleb, an event qualifies as a black swan when:

1) The event is a surprise (to the observer).

2) The event has a major effect.

3) After the first recorded instance of the event, it is rationalized by hindsight, as if it could have been expected.

I don’t believe there will be much call for debate when it comes to the first and second qualifications of black swan theory, even though the media exaggerated point two. The third qualification on the other hand, allows for a lot more discussion in my opinion. I understand that many investors would argue that the Twitter Flash Crash was highly unexpected. The technologies behind the flash crash, mostly text algorithms mining the firehose for specific keyword pairs are all based on AI related concepts, which is in itself a very new science.

Although I do agree that the size of the black swan was unexpected, I strongly disagree (without rationalizing of course :) ) that nobody could have seen it coming though. This is because of two reasons:

1) Back in 2011, the Atlantic wrote a great article about how the buzz surrounding Anne Hathaway’s Oscar was influencing Berkshire Hathaway shares. Although the effects of it were smaller and the methodology behind it is slightly different (sentiment driven versus keyword-pair driven), I believe this was already a perfect example how signals from social media can be misinterpreted by a computer.

2) In a more general sense, history has proven some of the shortcomings of algorithmic trading. Both the flash crash and the above example happened because of shortcomings in computational logic, not human logic. A good example of this were major news outlets like CNN and CNBC who did in fact check their source and quickly learned that the AP tweet was fake.

I think that the history of algorithmic trading is a main reason why the Twitter flash crash is most definitely not a black swan. After all, I believe there’s no false rationalization here that algorithmic trading involves specific risks. Of course most of the time systematic trading strategies will do well and outperform the market. And of course proponents of algorithmic trading will say that it provides more liquidity to the markets.

Until it doesn’t.

Maybe it’s because I am only an outsider on the subject. But when I’m reading the many comments criticizing Twitter after the crash, I can’t help but wonder: Is sending out a fake tweet really that much worse than creating false liquidity by firing off fake bid / ask quotes all day long?

I’m not so sure. I believe that as long as we allow computer systems access to financial markets, there will always be vulnerabilities to extreme events like this. But don’t tell me that nobody could have seen it coming. I believe this crash was no different than in May 2010. Or on the day of the Facebook IPO…

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Image credit: Nevit Dilmen (Wikimedia Creative Commons)

Twitter, faster than its own shadow

Faster insights into ING outage situation thanks to sentiment score

By Wouter Kneepkens.

The last two weeks ING has been hit with various outages of its payment and internet banking services. The worst two hits were Wednesday 3 and Friday 5 April, when ING customers were confronted with faulty transfers as well as balances. During this first Wednesday the size of the outage only became apparent throughout the day. At 16:21 NOS was the first “regular medium” to bring the news of the nation wide, large scale problems. Rapidly followed by among others the NRC (16:26), RTL-Z (16:40) and BNR (16:43). 

Extreme events like this are very interesting to us as sentiment analysts, especially given the impact to a large amount of consumers. They offer us a way to measure our own capabilities up against other channels. As well as a way to improve our analyses based on the outcomes. Therefore we immediately jumped into our ING data on the Thursday.

Our monitors indicated clear skies up until 15:00 on the Wednesday. However, between 15:00 and 16:00 there’s an enormous reversal in sentiment (point A. in graph 1.). From a quiet, positive sentiment, our score switches to a very negative one within this hour. This reversal is followed by a continued and accelerating drop in the next hours (point C. in graph 1.). So, 30 to 60 minutes before regular media started covering the widespread problems (point B. in graph 1.), they were already visible to us.    

Graph 1.: share price (indexed) of ING and the AEX versus Sentiment score score, 3 April 2013 (sources: Yahoo Finance & SNTMNT) 

The fact our sentiment recognition managed to beat regular media with such a margin is highly satisfactory. However, that in itself is not our ambition. We’re analysing sentiment because of the impact it has on the share price performance of the companies involved. In this case our signal could have saved an investor from a price drop of 1.42% (table 1.). For a long-term shareholder in ING a drop like that is no more than a bump in the road. For a day trader on the other hand 1.42% in the final hours of trading could mean the difference between a good or bad day of trading.

Table 1.: Sentiment warning and share price performance over the subsequent hours, 3 April 2013

Searching out own hearts

Our analysis and results (1.42% saved in case of timely action) are also cause to critically assess our models. Firstly we need to realise that spotting only part of the downward potential, however timely, only has partial value to investors. Even someone with our current tools would have already lost 2.10% on this ING position between 09:00 and 15:00. While our indicator kept steady at “plain sailing” levels. We’ve therefore started to see how we can analyse sentiment over shorter time intervals (and so even faster). 

Lastly it’s always easier to make calls whilst not being engaged yourself, especially with the benefit of hindsight, instead of having to act in the heat of the moment. Would we have sold out shares in ING at 15:00 on the basis of the shift in sentiment?  We’ll find out in a couple of months from now, when we’ll start testing our own portfolio (of which we’ll obviously share the results). Until that time we’ll have to contend ourselves with predictions… 

Not a one trick pony

We also analysed our performance for the Friday 5 April outage. The results of which can be seen in graph 2. and table 2.. In first instance ING seems to follow the negative development of the AEX at large. However, from c. 12:30 onwards the bank share starts to tank faster than the rest of the market. Our indicator (which had already been negative for the earlier part of the day) registers a significant further drop between 12:00 and 13:00, followed by continued declines in sentiment. 

Graph 2.: share price (indexed) of ING and the AEX versus Sentiment score score, 5 April 2013 

Table 2.: Sentiment warning and share price performance over the subsequent hours, 3 April 2013

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About the author: Wouter Kneepkens, among other things, is Financial Guru at SNTMNT, blogging and covering financial markets. He has over 15 years of investment experience, some of which as a professional. 

Disclaimer: Neither the author nor SNTMNT currently holds an interest in ING. This article is not meant as investment advice.  

The Hybrid Database

By Vincent van Leeuwen.

I think it’s funny how people somehow seem to believe that every entrepreneur out there is “an idea guy”. Personally, I’m pretty far from an idea guy. Over the past year, I think I’ve had about one or two startup ideas that could be considered somewhat viable, let alone promising. My current startup is actually mostly the result of my brother’s thesis rather than my own creative sparks. Nevertheless, every now and then, people ask me about my “next great idea”. One of the answers that I often give them is an idea that has always fascinated me. And, as usual, it’s not one of my own. This particular idea actually comes from way back in 2008, when it appeared on the quite famous “idea’s-we’d-like-to fund-list” by Paul Graham:

The Hybrid Database.

“22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid. People often use Excel as a lightweight database. I suspect there’s an opportunity to create the program such users wish existed, and that there are new things you could do if it were web-based. Like make it easier to get data into it, through forms or scraping.

Don’t make it feel like a database. That frightens people. The question to ask is: how much can I let people do without defining structure? You want the database equivalent of a language that makes its easy to keep data in linked lists. (Which means you probably want to write it in one.)”

I believe there is a large gap that could be filled by a Hybrid database structure such as described by the founder of Y-Combinator. Some of the smartest people I know are employed as strategy consultants or investment bankers for evil empires companies like McKinsey, Goldman or JP Morgan. And many of them, including most of my friends from Uni, are using Excel on a daily (if not hourly) basis.

Funny enough, when I ask them whether they do programming, most of them would tell me that programming is not for them. I found this interesting, as I believe many of them are in fact already programming. I think Paul Graham’s perfectly answered his own question how much you can let people do without defining structure. Excel is in fact a programming language. A low-abstract-level programming language that combines many of the powerful benefits of programming like IF/AND statements and FOR loops with spreadsheet structure. Also, Excel’s macros are basically low-level Cron jobs that are used to push data around in many Websites we know today. I believe this lower level of abstractness in Excel is all that separates it from scripting languages like Python or Ruby that many non-technical people fear.

There is one thing though that Excel has always lacked. Probably a little like its creator Microsoft as a whole, Excel lacks a feeling for connectivity that was brought by the World Wide Web. I think this is why it has never been able to truly fulfill the need as described so wonderfully in Paul Graham’s list. And why the search for the Hybrid Database has always endured.

Since a few weeks though, I believe this search might be all but over. Very recently, I discovered that Google’s clone version of Excel, called Google Spreadsheets, actually has a very important feature that Excel always lacked:

An API.

I believe that the Google Spreadsheet API can be the starting point of a Hybrid Database, as the API will make it really easy for techies and non-techies to work together via spreadsheet programming language.

But before we continue, I can imagine that some of you might be thinking:

What do you mean “API”?

For the less technical among us: An application programming interface (API) is a protocol intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other. In other words, an API enables computer programs to talk with one another, allowing them to exchange data. By making spreadsheets accessible through such an interface, the Google Spreadsheet API enables you to insert and update spreadsheet rows & columns using scripting language.

I found this to be really awesome. By using gdata and a specific Python Wrapper, I was able to set up a script that reads and inserts rows in about 30 minutes. Especially if you’re working on projects that require collaboration on data manipulation between techies and non-techies (like the backtests we do here at SNTMNT for instance), this stuff is gold. It enables you to store data in a database-like environment, but at the same time the data is very accessible and easy to manipulate by Excel gurus. I can imagine this could be cool for a lot of other awesome stuff across many industries.

Off course there are some obvious performance issues when compared to traditional databases. Google Spreadsheets allows for a maximum of 400,000 total cells (not rows!) across all sheets, which is off course peanuts for a traditional database. Also, with such large amounts of data, processing and querying will probably not be lightning fast. Nevertheless, I believe that the Hybrid Database approach taken by Google spreadsheets could be a game changer for many businesses. Especially if Google Spreadsheets is able to make it’s API wrappers even easier to understand for the mainstream crowd. By getting business people to do more of their own programming using hybrid database structures and Excel programming language, I believe many companies could unlock an employee potential they never even knew was there.

Too bad that such a great “startup idea” is operated by a multinational, instead of a startup.

Update: After my post, someone pointed out to me on Twitter that apparently there’s already a (Dutch) startup trying to build some sort of Hybrid Database: https://www.olibol.com. They’re still in private beta, but do check them out :)

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Image credit: Tim Morgan.

SNTMNT is bringing Social sentiment analysis to the doorstep of half a million investors in Europe.

SNTMNT is bringing Social sentiment analysis to the doorstep of half a million investors in Europe. With its proprietary Trading Indicator API, SNTMNT identifies and visualizes sentiment in social media such as Twitter. Users can see in real-time what exchange traded companies people are talking about online, and what the crowd thinks about them. All boiled down in one single indicator.

As of today, sentiment analytics and social media trend predictions will be accessible to about half a million users at BinckBank, a top-5 European broker with clients in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Details
The rise of social media has made it possible to make emotions in financial markets tangible. By measuring social media sentiment surrounding stocks, SNTMNT has created an indicator that gives real-time insights into financial emotions in the market. The indicator takes away extra noise in asset pricing, and gives investors an additional trading indicator on top of fundamental analysis and/or technical analysis.

Where sentiment analysis so far has been solely available to larger hedge funds, we’ve just taken a huge step in making these kind of tools available to retail investors. As of today, we’re proud to announce sentiment analytics and social media trend predictions will be integrated for about half a million users at BinckBank across the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Italy. As far as we know, this is the first time that social sentiment analysis is integrated by an online broker on such a large scale.

But, maybe most important of all: Binck sentiment is up on the announcement :)

The Tormented Soul of Innovation.

By Vincent van Leeuwen.

Do you know what I hate most about network events?

That no matter how hard I try to escape them: Sooner or later I always find myself trapped between the very people I try to avoid. The type of people who keep on bragging and bragging about their “successful Internet businesses”.

I recently found myself at one of these joyful events. I had the pleasure of hearing one of these poor souls brag away to me about her daily whereabouts (which were insignificant to say the least). Unfortunately for me, the inevitable moment came when she asked me the quasi-interested W-D-Y-D question. After which she took my answer as a starting sign to begin bragging away once more. About her boyfriend this time:

“Oh really? My boyfriend is an Entrepreneur too! Pretty successful actually. He started out by doing Website development and then he also started doing SEO and SEA. Now he’s moving more into social media consultancy and Mobile development.”

“Ah, I see. That’s very interesting.” (thank god for my parent’s good nurturing)

“I know right? Yeah, he does so many different things. He’s quite a visionary.”

And I couldn’t help myself thinking:

He’s not a visionary. He’s just a fucking copycat.

Whenever I open the Deloitte Fast 50 anywhere in the world, there are plenty of them. SEO and SEA agency’s who are employing armies of monkeys placing shitty links all day. Full-service Web agency’s that-now-also-do-apps-and-shit. Or even worse: social media douchebags (who typically like to call themselves “evangelists”).

All businesses that profit from people who don’t know the Internet that well. All creating next to no value for anybody except themselves.

Please note that I’m talking about true copycats here. Not to be mistaken with disruptive innovation, which I believe is a beauty. I admire founders like Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou (Easyjet), Michiel Muller (Tango) or Sean Parker (Napster). They created value for millions by shifting industries entirely upside down. In some cases even without a large financial reward in return.

These founders remind me a lot of another group of innovators in a slightly different ball game a long time ago:

Do you know what painters like Van Gogh, Mondriaan and Monet have in common?

They all had to face rejection for their work during life. And they all died in almost absolute poverty. This must have been frustrating to say the least, as there were plenty of painters out there who could come by with their work just fine.

But they were not remembered.

You know why?

Because most of them were merely sticking to the painting status quo of their generation. The ones that we still remember and cherish today though, are the ones who were brave enough to fight this status quo. The ones who were able to see something that nobody else saw. The very ones who were so passionate about their work, that poverty didn’t stop them from doing what they truly loved.

Off course there are exceptions like Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali, both great artists who were already immensely wealthy and famous during life. I guess this has a lot to do with the more modern age both lived in. An age where dissemination of information simply went faster. I believe the lesson from this is that, in the end, innovation always wins. It just takes time.

And let’s be fair. If all of us were trying to be innovators, the success rate of innovation would probably be even lower than it is today. Still, I often find it quite frustrating to see how shamefully little creativity is rewarded with so much credits and coin by society. Especially when I see some frighteningly ambitious startup ideas (my favorites by far) struggle for traction. The reality for many entrepreneurs is that most copycats will probably make tons more money than you and me will ever do in a lifetime.

Still, I see no reason to envy them. Whenever I find myself at some snobbish party again, with someone jabbering away about his copycat voodoo, I always remember this one little thought:

True entrepreneurs are artists. And that’s something a copycat will never get.


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Image credit: ekenitr.

Sentiment, the Canary in the Coal Mine for Investors?

By Wouter Kneepkens.

The past month has tested the nerves of many investors in Dutch shares. They were caught with an impressive number of nasty surprises including those at Imtech (IM.AS), KPN (KPN.AS) and SNS (SR.AS). Massive amounts of shareholder value were wiped away in mere hours or days and commentators started talking about our infamous ‘Dutch Discount’ again:

Graph 1.: stock price development of KPN, SNS & Imtech, stock prices indexed to 3 December 2012

While investing is off course about making money, it is also about making sure you don’t lose money:

“The first rule of investing is don’t lose money. The second rule is: don’t forget Rule No. 1.”

- Warren Buffet -

Spotting freak events early can therefore have tremendous value for investors and make the difference between a timely hedge/sale or incurring significant losses. Given this importance we decided to see whether our sentiment data could have acted like the canary in a coal mine. Therefore we’ve taken a look at KPN and SNS over the last months to determine whether our sentiment analysis would have been of use.   

KPN

Let’s first have a look at KPN and what our sentiment data has to say about this company over the past months. We’ve plotted KPN’s share price from 3 December 2012 up to 1 March 2013 and included both our raw sentiment score (graph 2.) and the cumulative sentiment score (graph 3.). In this period KPN announced a EUR3bn rights issue and lost 42% of its value. Over the same period one can clearly see the sentiment score deteriorate too (graph 3.). While the share price experiences a short rebound the sentiment keeps falling and proves to be a strong indicator of what was still to come:

Graph 2.: KPN share price & raw sentiment score

Graph 3.: KPN share price & running sentiment score

Graph 2. provides information that could have been even more useful. It shows four very clear negative sentiment spikes during the period, each of which could have provided investors with an early warning. The most valuable warning was that of 22 Jan.’13, which was followed by a 24% decline in the 10 days after we picked up the signal. For the three other signals the results are also appealing:

Table 1: Sentiment warning and stock price returns over next 5 and 10 day period

In conclusion, the sentiment data clearly would have helped investors to avoid significant share price declines, had they acted on the signals.

SNS

The impact of the continued speculation of nationalisation, followed by the actual event, left an even bigger impact on shareholders than the announcements with KPN. Due to the nationalisation shareholders lost their total investment (although there is still talk about potential compensation). Although calculating reliable sentiment scores is more difficult for SNS, given a lower volume of social media messaging, we still see evidence of warning signs in both cumulative and raw sentiment data over time. Sentiment starts its clear decline well over two weeks before investors saw their investment shrivel to zero (graph 5.).

Graph 4.: SNS share price & raw sentiment score

Graph 5.: SNS share price & running sentiment score

Our sentiment data for SNS, as could be expected because of the more limited volume, look less solid than those for KPN. However, graph 4. does show three significant troughs investors could have benefited from. As early as 11 Jan’13 our signals indicate impeding negative returns. The nationalisation could also have been avoided by shareholders by acting on our 18 Jan’13 or, better late than never, on the 29 Jan’13 final warning (still over a day ahead of the event).  

Table 2: Sentiment warning and stock price returns over next 5 and 10 day period

Early warning signs

Although we ourselves are also well aware that our sentiment analysis is still far from perfect and that there are probably numerous cases where our signals fail, in these two cases early actions based on our analysis would have helped investors avoid significant losses. We’ll look at the value of our sentiment score in more regular trading in a next post. In the mean time, feel free to share your thoughts, or leave a comment!

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About the author: Wouter Kneepkens, among other things, is Financial Guru at SNTMNT, blogging and covering financial markets. He has over 15 years of investment experience, some of which as a professional. Feel free to drop him a line.

Disclaimer: Neither the author nor SNTMNT currently holds an interest in KPN or SNS Reaal. This article is not meant as investment advice.  

Image credits: studiomiguel.

25 Awesome Links to Learn Code at Lightspeed

By Vincent van Leeuwen.

I recently wrote a post on why non-technical founders like myself should learn some code instead of begging around for technical talent. Following the post, I got a series of requests by non-techies for a list that could get them up to speed more quickly.  

Please note that I can’t promise that this list will turn you into a world-class hacker overnight. All I can show you is what I used to get going. I do believe though, that if you’re truly committed, you should be able to start hacking your own prototypes in a few months time.

Before we start though
I recently read a great post by John Biesnecker on the joys of having a Forever Project. When it comes to learning code, I couldn’t agree more on having one. Especially when you’re starting to learn programming, I believe it’s essential to have a forever project. And no, this should not be some project that you believe will make you extremely rich within the year. Instead, I believe this should be something you’re really passionate about. A project that is hard to imagine actually embarking on, but “whose mental cost of abandonment is far too high to even consider” [^1].

Often it’s a game of some sort.

I would never have learned to code as quickly as I did without my personal forever project. Programming is hard. It will suck. And then it will suck more. Until, after hours of struggling, it finally works, and you don’t really care anymore. That’s the nature of it. And this is exactly where forever projects step in: Having a project you’re really committed to forces you to go through with it. It gives you a goal to strive for.

In addition, I found that having a forever project helps you relate. Programming tutorials are getting better by the day, but you can’t prevent that they’re very abstract at times. This can be difficult, especially when you don’t have a mathematical background. Having a forever projects helps you to relate some of this abstractness to your own situation. It gives you context and perspective.

Client / server side spectrum
As I’m not a true techie myself, it feels a little out of place to be the one explaining you this. But before we start, you should probably read a little bit about the difference between client side and server side programming. This will help you considerably to understand how programming for the Web really works underneath the surface.

Done?

Alright then.

Let’s dive in.

The Basics

1) HTML - W3Schools
I used W3Schools to learn the basics of writing HTML tags. Although probably not the most sophisticated resource out there, I like it a lot. It’s pretty old school, taking you from the very basics like paragraphs and images to more sophisticated stuff like forms. In addition, the tutorials are short and concise. Which makes them ideal to do some just before you go to bed (instead of watching yet another episode of Family Guy).

Regarding the HTML section, I would say that if you’ve made it through to HTML Colorvalues, you’re probably good to start some css.

And: don’t forget to do the awesome HTML Quiz :)

2) CSS - W3Schools
More of the same, this time diving into pages and styling them with CSS. This is probably pretty straightforward stuff by now, and hopefully where the fun starts. I personally always thought that messing around with CSS was a lot like making a painting, which I already thought was cool when I was just 5 years old.

And again, don’t forget to do the awesome CSS Quiz :)

3) Choose a text editor and start building stuff
If you’ve done all HTML and CSS courses, you should be able to start messing around. There’s only two more things you’ll need to do first:

A) Pick a text editor
I use TextWrangler, which works fine for me, but there are better ones. Whatever you do, don’t use Dreamweaver.

B) Debugging HTML
One of the disadvantages of writing HTML is that it’s quite a stupid language in terms of debugging. If something crashes, it doesn’t tell you where and why. Luckily for us, I recently found an awesome plugin by Kevin Burke that does just that. I’ve made a simple “plugin-ready” HTML document available for you to work with here. You’ll notice that if you for instance don’t close the “foo” div tag, it will throw you an error where things went wrong. Trust me: this will save you a lot of time and frustration.

OK, in terms of your forever project, you should now be able to design and build your own landing page. Off course the signup forms require some logic that you’re not capable of (yet). For this, you can therefore use embeddable forms like Betali.st, Wufoo or Google Forms. From a Lean perspective, I would recommend including 2-3 questions in your signup form (via Wufoo for instance), so you can do some early validation on some critical assumptions your business proposition has.

4) Subtlepatterns
This probably belongs more in a design tutorial, but still. If you’re in need for an awesome background, this is the place to be.

5) Twitter Bootstrap
You might have noticed how some Websites are starting to look more and more like one another. Bootstrap is the reason why. It’s a powerful front-end framework originally built at Twitter by @mdo and @fat. It will save you a lot of trouble. You can call UX elements like Grids, layouts and buttons with pre-defined HTML tags without ever having to write any CSS yourself.

I love Bootstrap. Any monkey can make a beautiful Website using this, which is probably why it’s the most forked Github repository by far. And, not unimportant, the docs are excellent too.

6) Advanced HTML & CSS
I never used this one myself, but merely stumbled upon it when writing this post. Still, it looks like an awesome resource for doing cool stuff with CSS3 and HTML5 if that’s your thing. One tutorial I thought was pretty awesome: Lesson 7: Transforms.


JavaScript and jQuery

Before diving in, I feel compelled to tell you that I personally never really learned JavaScript (JS) or jQuery by the book. I just kept messing around with it until it worked. Especially because you can use JS client-side, it only requires some basic knowledge of HTML & CSS to get started.

So you might be wondering: (as was I)

What is the difference between jQuery and JavaScript?

JavaScript is a language. jQuery is a library built with JavaScript. jQuery was designed to help JavaScript programmers by extending JavaScript functionality. Often, jQuery plugins will provide a shortcut to make stuff easier than it would be in raw JavaScript (credits StackOverflow and Microsoft).

OK then, let us continue.

7) jQuery basics: Codecademy
Actually you can use codecademy for much more than just JavaScript, including HTML/CSS, Python and Ruby. Since I only used it for the jQuery & JavaScript tutorials (which are excellent), I included it here. I found the Codecademy tutorials very entertaining to do. They are short and concise, and include some gamification elements to give you instant feedback on your progress.

If you feel like trying some jQuery plugins to get a hang of it, here is a really cool overview of what’s out there.

8) JavaScript basics: Codecademy
The JavaScript tutorials are more of the same, and will get you going on some real programming concepts like Functions, ‘For loops’ and ‘While loops’. I personally never made it past tutorial five, as I’m impatient by nature, but I guess the more you make, the better it is.

When you’re done with the basics of JavaScript, the Codecademy Projects tutorial might be a pretty cool starting point to start experimenting with all your skills combined.

Side note on debugging JS:
One of the problems I always have with JavaScript is that it either works or it doesn’t, much like HTML. And if JavaScript crashes, it doesn’t give you much feedback why. A good tool I can recommend to test whether a certain JS snippet is going to work or not without having to edit your whole HTML code is JSfiddle.

Alright then, let’s move on to some cool JS libraries that I enjoyed messing around with:

9) Bootstrap JS
The Bootstrap JavaScript snippets are pretty cool and well documented as usual. These are a nice starting point if you’re new to implementing JS snippets into your webpage. I found especially the Carousel pretty cool when doing product visualizations and the likes, but also dropdowns, modals and tabs have proven very useful.

10) Highcharts
If you’re ever going to use any charts to visualize data: Use Highcharts. It’s awesome.

11) d3js
I never really used this one myself, but it looks even more awesome than Highcharts when it comes to visualizing large data clusters. Probably a little more difficult to set up, so wait till you’re a little further before diving into this one.


Python

Before you start to download a Python release, it might be worthwhile to mention that there’s a big difference between Python 2.7.X. and Python 3.X. For reasons that go beyond the scope of this post (and probably even beyond the scope of my brain for that matter), the creator of Python, Guido van Rossum, decided that the syntax needed to be altered with Python 3.

So which one to pick? Unfortunately, I can’t make that choice for you. I guess it really depends on what your objectives are. For me, I just wanted to do Web development on my forever project using Django. If you’re to use Django, Python 2.7.3 is the release you should be using for now.

12) Biteofpython
Great book that is meant for newbie’s and that cover the basics of Python programming.

13) Diveintopython
Decent book that used to be very popular. Little problem with Diveintopython is that the guy who wrote it has disappeared from the surface of the earth. This makes it hard to find demo code snippets as he removed all of those too.

From my experience, I think that in general you should stay away from too much theory as much as possible. In the end I felt you learn most by just doing. The following are therefore a very warm recommendation:

14 Google Python classes
The Google Python classes were very useful to me, although I had difficulties finishing all of them on my own. Probably wait until you’re a little further (for instance after reading Biteofpython) to get going with these.

15) Learn Python The Hard Way
I actually only found out about these while writing a previous blog post, but this looks like a very good resource, maybe even to begin with from scratch.

Some great Python packages that will make your life a whole lot easier:

16 & 17) Pip install & Virtualenv
If you’re ever looking to install a new Python package (like Python-requests and Django that are listed below for instance), Pip is your friend. It enables you to install Python packages seamlessly with just one command line request.

Pip also has its counterpart, easy_install. But for a reason that goes beyond my Jedi powers, apparently you don’t want to use that.

18) Python-requests
Great tool if you’re ever going to do anything with APIs, or opening files over a url.

19) Beautifulsoup
If you’re ever going to scrape Websites (using Requests for instance), you will find that a lot of them are unreadable due to HTML tags. This beauty helps you to separate the wheat from the chaff.


Django

When I picked up coding, my purpose was to be able to do basic Web development. Therefore, after the basics of Python, I quickly proceeded to learn Django. Django is a very straightforward framework that enables you to build websites very quickly. Resources that were very useful for me included:

20) Djangobook.org
The official body that explains the basics and gets you going in building some basic apps like polls and stuff.

21) Beginning Django Ecommerce
This book was very useful for me. Especially if you’re looking to build a products that requires user logins and/or shopping cart functionality (moving objects across databases) this book is great.


Wrapping up: Some final gems and nuggets to get you going:

22) XML & JSON
Both are structures designed to transfer data. I personally never really learned XML, as I prefer JSON. If you work with Python, JSON is great because the syntax is very similar, basically enabling you to access data via dictionaries straight away. A great Python encoder/decoder for JSON that I really like is simplejson.

23) StackOverflow
Whatever problem or error code you Google: if there’s a result that links to Stackoverflow, click it. Man, I love this site. Almost any problem I ever had I fixed via Stackoverflow. To keep Stackoverflow this awesome though, please take the following into account: Never ask a question before you have thoroughly checked if this particular question hasn’t been asked before. Although I do not share recent sentiment about Stackoverflow becoming too much of a lazy noob place, I do see how it’s annoying to some that certain people are throwing questions out there that have been answered before. And believe me, your problems are peanuts. At the level you and me are at, it’s highly unlikely that someone else before hasn’t asked the problems we’re encountering.

24) Version Control: Git
I only have experience with Git as a version control system, but there are many others. Why you need such is beyond the scope of this post, but trust me: You do. Especially if you’re going to work on projects with other people. I found that the official Git docs do a great job explaining how Git works and why you should use it.
An advantage that comes with Git is that it integrates seamlessly with other cool stuff like Github and Bitbucket. Both are online repositories that allow you to share your code with others. Github has a strong focus on open-source (open source repositories are free, private are premium), while Bitbucket also offers private repositories for free.

25) Heroku
I can’t speak for Ruby but when it comes deploying & hosting Python/Django apps this thing its nuts. It’s free (as long as you’re small), hosted on Amazon EC2, and super easy to deploy using Git. In addition, Heroku allows you to host a PostgreSQL database for free. Only problem comes with static files. You probably want to put those somewhere else. Once you scale, Heroku will become expensive, but that’s none of our concerns for now.

A short note on Ruby and Node.js:
I started programming in Python because of two good friends, @dwightgunning and Aksel, both of whom I’m still very grateful. Although I have no way of comparison, I found that Python is a very friendly language to learn. Still, it is not the end of the universe of course. If Ruby is more your thing: here is an excellent blog post by Will Miceli that provides great links to Ruby / Rails resources. For Node.js you can check out NodeTuts (kudos @jvduf), while for PHP you might want to check out SexyPHP (kudos @PeterJaap for providing us with such a classy recommendation :) ).

But still, I feel compelled to ask: Why would you want to learn anything other than Python? After all, the Dutch invented Python, so it must be good :)

OK, that was it. If you’ve made it to the end: Sorry for this (admittedly) long post. I hope though that it will help to convince you to pick up some coding and maybe speed up the process.

If you have any recommendations that you believe should be included in this list, please do share them in the comments below. The more good resources, the better for all.

And, off course: I wish you loads of luck! May the force be with you :)


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Image credit: anieto2k


[^1]: Awesome quote stolen from John Biesnecker.

Why Twitter favorites suck.

By Vincent van Leeuwen.

Last week, Twitter launched a new product/feature: Twitter Vine. Vine is a mobile service that lets you capture and share short (6 seconds) looping videos. It’s already dubbed by some as the Instagram of video. In a sense, this early optimism reminds me of the days when Apple launched their immensely successful “Facebook for Music”. 

Although the App looks beautiful, some issues around Vine are already popping up. Apart from the fact that they seem to be having a porn problem, most Vines are just boring as hell. Which I think is even worse. 

I guess it’s still too early to fully judge the potential of these 6-second videos. Still, reading about the Vine got me thinking about what I believe is another shitty Twitter feature:

The Favorite.

I notice that more and more people are favoriting content rather than re-tweeting it, and I believe this is somewhat of a waste.

First: What are Favorites?
For those of you who don’t know: Favorites, represented by a small star icon next to a Tweet, are most commonly used when users like a Tweet. Favoriting a Tweet can let the original poster know that you liked their Tweet, and lets you save the Tweet for later.

I don’t know what it is about Favorites on Twitter, but I don’t find them very useful. For me, Twitter is about dissemination of information. Somebody once described Twitter to me like a giant Ant colony: the social graph flows in a very non-hierarchical, unstructured way. Especially when compared to more traditional social networks like Google+, MySpace or Facebook. I have met about 90 percent of my Facebook connections in the real world. For Twitter, this number is closer to 10 percent.

I believe this unstructured approach is what makes Twitter exceptional. It’s what creates its rapid speed in spreading information. And one of the core drivers through which Twitter adds an extra dimension to news. But favorites are not helping out here. Actually, you could argue that every favorite picked over a re-tweet is hurting Twitter as a real-time news company.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see the value.

Favorites could be cool as a social bookmarking tool, if there were only an easy way to push them to an external bookmarking service like Kippt or Pinboard. Unfortunately though, there’s no such solution (yet).

Favorites could be cool as an attention graph, if there were only an easy way to build a ranking algorithm around it. Still, looking at the Favorite API docs, this doesn’t seem very likely to happen anytime soon. It’s both user centered and rate limited.

Don’t get me wrong: I love Twitter. It’s one of the sole reasons my own scrappy startup exists. It’s just that I believe Twitter should be about sharing, not about playing for keeps. If every favorite was a re-tweet instead, I think eventually everyone would be better off.

Wrapping up
I’d like to end this post positive though. Therefore, in order to help Twitter Vine overcome their boringness issues, I’ve included my very own Vine contribution:



Best. Six. Seconds. Video. Ever.


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Image credit: eldh.

Seven trends for 2013 that your Grandma couldn’t have predicted.

By Vincent van Leeuwen.

I’ve read them all over the place once again this year. Those lame-ass geniuses that call themselves trend watchers, tech-bloggers or god-knows-what, making predictions that my Grandma could have made:

“2013 will be the year of the Tablet”

Wow. Tablets? And they’re slowly taking over desktop and laptop sales? Who could have thought!  

What do you mean, old news? The iPad was released in 2010(!). If you were to declare 2011 the year of the Tablet you might have gotten away with it. Doing so in 2012 would already have been slightly embarrassing. But naming the Tablet as an upcoming trend for 2013 just brings tears to my eyes.

Another one of my favorites:

“In 2013, I expect to see a lot more 3D-printer hardware and services competition.”

Oh really? In an upcoming market with currently only a few players? You must be a true genius to come up with such a wild vision.

Those are not predictions. That’s just stating the obvious. Small wonder some people are getting bored.

So what are the trends for 2013? Fuck if I know. I’m just a guy who checks Hacker News & TechCrunch twice a week and likes to play Startup Yoda. As such, I’d rather just share what I hope will happen in the New Year. Which I believe is far more interesting.

So, without further ado, here are my wishful trend predictions for 2013 (and hopefully beyond). I hope they will serve you well in bragging around at parties, and that they may help you score some well-deserved “I-told-you-so”s:

1) Gamification is not dead
A lot of the people who were screaming about how gamification would be taking over the world a few years ago, seem now to be the first to declare it dead. I believe this is probably because they had no clue what gamification and game design imply in the first place. What kind of motivation are you looking to trigger to solve your business or educational goals?

A lot of people seem to forget that points and badges are only one of many game mechanics that are out there. I still believe that gamification will take over the world. I just think that institutions that apply gamification should more carefully think through what they expect from it. Linking gamification in to the business strategy of an organization goes further than just tossing around points and badges. Which behavior-steering objectives are you trying to accomplish? If you invest in game design that supports these objectives through internal motivation, you’ll find that gamification has a lot to offer. New initiatives like Lemurs show that gamification is far from dead.

2) Curate for quality instead of aiming at the masses
A very interesting trend on the Web in my opinion. The promise of social media (and probably even the Web in general) once was that we were out to share more stuff with more and more people. There are some startups out there that are considered social that are breaking with this paradigm. Where Path is still open to anyone, and applies its exclusivity to the people you’re sharing with, others go even further. Forrst and SVBTLE require potential users to do an aptitude test before being able to sign up with the service. Both services seem to choose quality over quantity, which I think is really cool, and not something I’ve seen very often.

3) The desktop is not dead either
This is the biggest bullshit I’m hearing year-in-year-out. In a sense, this reminds me a lot of the evangelists who were once yelling that books would be dead before too soon. I’ve heard plenty of those back in the nineties. And again when e-readers like the Kindle began their march. Are books dead? No. Books and e-books are two industries that co-exist next to one another.

Off course tablets are eating away at desktop and laptop market share. And yes, the tablet market will grow faster than the market for desktops in the near future. But that doesn’t mean that desktops will disappear. I also see that the innovation right now happens more in the mobile and cloud spaces, but don’t forget that computing is done on a PC for many of us. I believe that this is not very likely to change for a long time, until those other devices become as good if not better as our large screen displays, full sized keyboards, and cheap processing power.

4) Apple will be back
You don’t have to be a genius to see that 2012 was not the best year ever for Apple. My largest frustration wasn’t even Maps, but some of their latest iTunes updates. More and more, I start to see iTunes as an absolute nightmare. The only thing I use the damn program for is to pick specific songs and throw them on my iPhone, and occasionally remove them. Ironically, this was the exact feature Apple decided to remove (and no, syncing is not the same). Getting updates from Apple used to be pretty cool, but nowadays I’m quite reluctant to give my contempt. Not to mention that they always seem to pop up at the most inconvenient times.

Nevertheless, I still wish Apple all the best. I love their vision on innovation and challenging the status quo, and will continue to be a Mac user for quite a while. But if they keep messing like 2012, people will keep complaining about Steve Jobs having left the building, which I don’t believe will be very good for morale & momentum.

5) Big Data driven optimization
In 2012 I’ve heard a lot of people jabbering away about Big Data, and whether it’s useful or not. I never really found this a very interesting discussion. I do believe though, that a lot of people are exaggerating Big Data’s implications for now. Just as Social a few years before. But one of the things that Big Data is giving us already is the means to further and further optimize processes. There’s just so much data (real-time) available, that anything can be optimized these days. Some awesome startups like Optimize.ly, KISSmetrics, Usabilla and PersuasionAPI are already taking advantage of this.

6) Subscription based e-commerce
I’m a big applauder of any initiative that improves my personal convenience and laziness in general. So this is a trend I very much welcome. Some startups that are trying to eliminate the nightmare called shopping: Birchbox, 12Society and my personal favorite: Dollar Shave Club. One of the obvious things that make these startups great, is that their business model has something that e-commerce always lacked: recurring payments. This gives a lot more stability, especially if you’re just getting started, and will make bootstrapping far more likely.

But far more important: What I really love about this kind of e-commerce is that it doesn’t involve high investments or knowledge about software engineering and technology in general. Technology is not necessarily the key resource in the Business Model Canvas here. The physical product and its distribution are. This opens up starting such a business to a far wider range of people. People who are maybe somewhat less technical, but who might be great entrepreneurs. 

7) PayPal will burn.
Last but not least, this is probably more a personal hope than an actual belief. More and more complaints are popping up about what a shitty business PayPal has become, especially in their attitude towards sellers.

A good example on this comes from my dad. He is one of those people who collect just about any object there is to be found in this wide world. Most of all vinyl records from the sixties. He’s probably one of the biggest record collectors in the Netherlands, and maybe even in Europe. Needless to say, the uprising of sites like eBay has been gold for him. Over the years, he has made over 5000 transactions, which I believe pretty much qualifies him as a power-user for eBay & PayPal. But is he treated as such?

Not even close.

A few months ago, he told me that anything he sends nowadays is via certified mail. This is costly for him, and severely limits the number of sales he makes, but apparently he has to. Every now and then, some knucklehead on the other side of the world forgets to pick up his or her delivery at the post office. Or appears to have given the wrong address. If such a thing happens, PayPal always refunds the buyer, with no questions asked. I find this stunning. It’s clear that PayPal are interested in buyers, not sellers. Why else would they provide customers with refunds at the drop of a hat, from buyers without any valid reason, when not even your bank is legally allowed to do so?

I don’t know how about you, but if you’re screwing over your most valuable customers like this, it seems to me that something is going very wrong. And that’s not even all of it. PayPal charges 2.9% + $0.30 PER TRANSACTION. Can you imagine your personal bank charging 2.9 percent for every transaction you’re making?!? This revenue model screams for disruption in my opinion.

Off course PayPal won’t completely burn (yet). Their market share is still humongous, and they have eBay behind them. Still, I’m happy to see more and more competitors popping up. One of the more well known is Stripe, which I believe is an awesome startup. Simplicity brought to near perfection. Which is one of the clearest signs of success in my opinion. These are the kind of startups you need to tear down the PayPal’s of this world. And seeing how they already have their own Samwer clone, I’d say they’re well on their way to do just that.

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Image credit: Psiaki.

Ten lessons from taking the Red Pill.

By Vincent van Leeuwen. This post was also featured as a guest post. 

It’s that time of the year again. Those few lost days between Christmas and New Years. The time of year that I get sentimental and think about my life for once. It’s been slightly over two years since I attended Startup Weekend in September 2010, which literally changed my world for the better. At the time, I was an insecure lad who just came out of Uni. I was working for a large Dutch bank, and was not liking it very much. I was not very happy with my life, but didn’t really know why.

Startup Weekend provided an absolute cultural shock to me. I was amazed of the atmosphere that was going on all weekend. Amazed of all the beautifully designed products that came out of only 76 hours. Amazed of the fact that, apparently, I wasn’t the only person in the world walking around with weird ideas. And most importantly: I was amazed to be doing something that I was really passionate about, rather than just passing the day to make a buck.

Still, I was scared as well. Scared of that others would think. Scared of throwing away my two precious Uni degrees. Scared of not making any money for the better part of the next decade. I guess, in a sense, I felt a lot like Neo, when presented the choice between a blue and red pill by Morpheus. Now, two years later, I dubbed it a good moment to share some important lessons that I learned after taking the Red Pill that day in September 2010.

1) Pursue your passions: Start with the why.
One of the things I found most valuable from participating in the Founder Institute was a lesson about the Golden circle by Simon Sinek. The golden circle argues that most people and organisations know what they do for a living. A large part of them also knows how they are doing it. But only a select group of people know the exact why behind what they are doing. Especially in entrepreneurship I believe this last part is fundamental. The first years of entrepreneurial struggle for me were often a bizarre roller coaster. Sure, I endured a few successes, but against those stood far more failures. Off course these failures are essential for learning in the long run. But in the short run, they give you a lot of worries and sleepless nights. Especially during some of these difficult hours, the golden circle has been of tremendous value for me: I always exactly knew why I was going through all this trouble.

2) Learn from the masters
Starting a journey without knowing the path is unwise. Not listening to experts who walked the path before you is foolish. When I started out after attending Startup Weekend, I was an complete idiot. I was the typical University graduate who “knew his shit” about Business Administration, which is not very useful in a startup. I couldn’t write a single line of code, and I didn’t have any clue how to start a business. Luckily for me, I found some books that enlightened my path.

Four books helped me out a lot over the last few years: Four steps to the Epiphany (Steve Blank), Running Lean (Ash Maurya), the Four Hour Workweek (Timothy Ferris) and Rework (Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson). For me, these books were absolute guidelines. I still didn’t know how to walk the path, but at least they showed me how it looked like. Up until today, I consider all four a must-read for any entrepreneur or anyone looking into entrepreneurship.

3) Life starts at the end of your comfort zone
Every now and then I run into them. We all know these people, most often working at large corporates or even the government. People who constantly whine about the great ideas they had, years and years before the rest, but “just never pursued them because it was the wrong time period”.

These people gave me a great lesson. They are all just making up lame-ass excuses for not trying. People told me it was impossible to have our product launch featured on one of the tech blogs without spending 3K on some fancy PR agency. It wasn’t. They told me it was impossible to pick up coding. Nowadays I’m not a great coder, but in 12 months I learned how to rock in HTML/CSS, JS & Python. Back in 1994, when Jeff Bezos started Amazon, he had to raise money from 22(!) investors. Any investor who knew anything about books, didn’t invest. They probably thought it was the wrong time period too. Screw these haters. Don’t let anyone tell you that something can’t be done. 

“Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.”

- Sean Connery, The Rock -

4) Screw exaggerating optimists
You’ve probably heard them far too often. Bragging about how close they are to signing customer X, who happens to be a publicly listed NASDAQ company. Or a million dollar investment that’s just around the corner from a well-known VC fund. I have encountered a few of these people and before too soon, I started asking myself what the hell I had been doing with the past few months of my life. Why weren’t we making such progress? Don’t feel bad about yourself because of these kind of people. When I encounter them, I divide their progress by half. Take 50% of their accomplishments and subtract their biggest client from this. This is usually where they really stand.

5) Don’t waste your money on legal fuzz that you can do yourself
One of the biggest mistakes I made is to flush down about 10k on legal fees on a piece of paper that eventually didn’t suffice when two of our co-founders left the building. This was an important lesson for me. With our first clients, we needed legal documents again to describe terms and conditions. This time, I asked around for some examples, and winded up writing all of our terms and conditions myself. So far, they’ve passed the legal department of our customers without any problems.

Off course you’ll need someone with proper legal background to look at something, but don’t think you can’t do anything yourself. As a kid, I thought that the grown-up world my parents lived in would be a completely rational world. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to realize: It’s not. Take advantage of this.

6) Keep your funding round short
I know this is off course easier said than done. We have the coolest angel investors in the world, but still our seed funding round (which was not even astronomically big) took us about six months to arrange. Most of this time was wasted on going up-and-down between our lawyer, investor and discussing all kind of legal matters involving highly unlikely scenarios. I found this a real waste of time and energy. Especially because I could have used this time on Marketing, Sales and CustDev, and actually help our business grow forward.

Don’t be like us and ask more other entrepreneurs for advice so you can overcome obvious pitfalls. Or go for a convertible notes / equity and save the legal nightmares for when you actually have proved that you’ve got a credible business model.

A perfect story from the Netherlands in my opinion: Favour.it secured their seed round in only 2 months. They could then quickly move on to more important matters. That’s how fundraising should be done.

7) Treat the media as your friend.
Before we made our first euros, we’d been featured on TheNextWeb, Financial Times and on VentureBeat. In addition, we’d been broadcasted on the largest television show here in the Netherlands. Off course the media has their own purposes to do so, but still: It surprised me how much these media helped us to create social proof for our business. This is especially invaluable when you’re just starting out and don’t have any clients yet. Much more valuable than I would ever have believed.

8) Mind the overlap
One of the darkest moments as an entrepreneur for me was to have co-founders leave the company. The biggest reason for this exodus, was the overlap in skill-set between some of us. This created overhead in thought, communication and negotiation. Especially when there’s no clear dividing of roles. This overhead resulted in slow decision making and endless meetings. Needless to say, this is killing for your business. It’s startup life. Decisions are never perfect. Making decisions is in itself already making progress, and the overlap is not helping out.

The lesson I learned from this is to really think through your team composition. I was foolish to believe that things like overlap between founders will work itself out along the way.

They won’t.

When you’re starting a company and considering a 3rd or 4th founder, take an extra pass at considering why you’re asking this person to join. Is he or she helping you accelerate value creation in the phase your startup is in? Or is he or she more likely to create overhead and overlap in thought and action instead?

9) Learn to code
This is off course only relevant for non-technical founders like myself. I wrote a post about this a short while ago, so won’t go into full depth here. Still, this has been one of my most important lessons. I didn’t write a single line of code until 12 months ago. I taught myself to code and, although it’s been scary at times, it has given me much more than I expected.

Please note that you don’t need to become the CTO of your own company as a non-technical founder. I believe that picking up programming should be to rather acquaint yourself with the particular challenges of engineering. You will find that it will help considerably to understand the technical people you’re working with (and maybe even selling to before too soon!).

10) You’re not alone
The most encouraging lesson of all has been the awesome community that exists around startups. Whether it’s at Startup Weekend, Hackers & Founders, Pitchrs or Lean Startup Machine, all these events point to the same: You’re not alone. I have been amazed how much people are willing to share, help and collaborate. I found it unbelievable how many Meetups there are, even in a small country like the Netherlands.

And next to the community that is around you, there’s a whole world out there who seems to know exactly what you go through. These articles by great entrepreneurs are never far away at times when you’re unable to see the forest for the trees. Whether it’s Michael Arrington comparing entrepreneurs to pirates, Ben Horowitz describing the Struggle or Pete Ford applauding frighteningly ambitious startup ideas: Moral support is never far away.

Wrapping up
So those are some of the lessons I’ve learned over the past two years. I’m still the fool I once was, but I believe I’ve become somewhat less foolish everyday since. One of the biggest breakthroughs for me came very quickly: To let go of what the outside world thought and expected of me. Actually, the moment I stopped giving a shit about others expectations has probably been the best decision in my life. Why bother about something that you can’t control anyway? Except for what the people really close to you think, I believe it’s probably the least interesting thing in the world.

Off course, not all my fears from 2010 have disappeared. Every now and then, I’m still doubtful of what the future might bring. I still haven’t made any use of my precious Uni degrees, which feels like a waste (although I believe it doesn’t hurt to have them). In addition, I have a gap on my resume the size of a Black hole. Also, my personal finances are still a nightmare. I just send a Facebook message out to some of my best friends (who all work at large corporates) that I will be passing on a skiing trip yet again this year due to lack of funds.

But every now and then I wonder: What if I could go back to 2010? Would I take that red pill again? Would I want to stay in Wonderland, and see how deep the rabbit hole goes?

Time and time again.


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Image credit: Paul L. Dineen.