Entrepreneurness

I went to a conference a year ago, and one of Silicon Valley's most well known venture capitalists, Tim Draper, gave a talk. He mentioned something along the lines of "You can't get anywhere in business without dealing. Creating a business is a series of deals.  Dealing to an entrepreneur is like breathing to a person" A light bulb went off when he said that, and since then those words have been rolling around in my head, because I think they carry more usefulness than just the business sense. First of all, do you know how to make stone soup? Once upon a time, there was a great famine in which people jealously hoarded whatever food they could find, hiding it even from their friends and neighbors. One day a wandering man came into a village and began asking questions as if he planned to stay for the night. "There's not a bite to eat in the whole province," he was told. "Better keep moving on." "Oh, I have everything I need," ...

A designer must develop a product that by definition has the capabilities to meet some need that is not fully defined Seven basic actions of Problem Solving: 1. Establish the need or realize that there is a problem to be solved 2. Plan how to solve it 3. Understand the problem by developing requirements and uncovering existing solutions for similar problems 4. General alternative solutions 5. Evaluate the alternatives by comparing them to the design requirements and to each other 6. Decide on acceptable solutions 7. Communicate the results Planning occurs mainly at the beginning of a project.  Plans are always updated because understanding is improved as the process progresses.  These are called design iterations. There are 2 well known methods of design, the over-the-wall design method, and concurrent engineering . With the over-the-wall method, more often than not the customer is not content with the product that comes out of production.  Becau...

As I live life I tend to create my own theories/thoughts/guidelines as I start to notice patterns.  I like to document them as they come.  Here are some thoughts that have hit me lately. "Just before you begin to get smarter, you first feel really stupid"- SM  The graph below represents the population as a whole.  As people mature in their environment they are within one of the brackets and progress from 'dumb' to 'smart' as they understand the world around them better.  If they stay in their current environment, less is unknown to them and they maintain in a lower bracket in the pyramid, but at the top of their bracket.  If they choose to change their environment or a change is brought on forcing a drastic change, they will break through to a higher bracket , realizing that they knew less than they thought they did, but their potential for learning increases.  The pyramid represents the world population, people have a different 'maximum bracket' that...