Yu-kai Chou

Here is a page where I list useful links and good articles that I enjoy. The list will grow as time goes by.

Entrepreneur’s Startup Gear Kit

These are some equipments that gear you up to be an entrepreneur. Having a high level in life must be accompanied with good gear.

Outright.com : Don’t want to spend money on Quickbooks for your bootstrapped company? Try Outright.com.

Vistaprint.com Need to print cheap but high quality business cards? Vistaprint so far is the best one I have seen. Make sure to google their discount codes before buying though!

Elance.com and RentaCoder.com: If you are building a software product but can’t do it yourself, these are sites where you can find low-cost developers to help you out. Don’t forget that you get what you pay though!

SalesForce.com Free Edition: This is one of the mainstream Customer Relationship Management software out there. This is the free personal edition which they no longer advocate on their homepage.

Skype.com and Freeconferencecalls.com: Yup. The basic set of virtual audio group meetings to help you manage your team. Use Skype if you have internet access, and use Free Conference Calls if you guys are all driving

Vyew.com: Need to use a sophisticated collaboration software like WebEx or GotoMeeting but don’t have the budget? Try Vyew.

LegalZoom.com: LegalZoom helps you register your business and other legal needs with a more manageable price than hiring actual lawyers.

Worldstat.org: Need to do research on your demographics for your business plan? This site has a pretty complete collection all in one place.

Literature

Paul Graham’s Essays: one of the software/internet entrepreneurship gurus and a bunch of high quality essays on entrepreneurship, programming, and society.

Futuristic Play: an extremely insightful blog on startups, social media, and venture capital by a guy who is very FD (looks to incorporate gaming into everything).

Ask the VC: two Venture Capitalists, Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson, answer questions regarding the VC world and how startups interact with them.

MIT Enterprise Forum-Startups: A collection of articles about the different issues regarding startups. A differentiated value here is that it goes into more technical detail on the legal and operational side of running a business.

Marc Anderssen: cofounder of Mosaic, Netscape, and Ning’s blog about entrepreneurship, startups and technology.

Getting Real – an ebook by 37Signals: This is an ebook on running a web app startup by doing LESS than your competitors, created by the company that made Basecamp and Campfire.

Podcasts (Right Click and “Save Link As” to save mp3 files)

Stanford Ed Corner – Mark Jung (IGN): a very descriptive podcast regarding the different phases of a startup. I especially enjoy the Setback phase where everything is falling apart and listen to it every once in awhile to experience the gloomy peacefulness.

Stanford Ed Corner – Joe Liemandt (Trilogy): an awesome podcast of Joe trying to convince everyone to drop out of college and start their own company. He goes into great lengths on how he dropped out of Stanford to “build” an enterprise technology.

Stanford Ed Corner – Jeff Hawkins (Palm): Jeff is one of the most brilliant and insightful visionaries that I know of. In this podcast, he talks about how entrepreneurship should be used a tool and last resort, ONLY if you can’t get the stuff done in a larger corporation. This is drastically different than what Joe Liemandt says.

Stanford Ed Corner – Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn): an incredible and informative (and out of breath) speech on many key principles of Entrepreneurship. Worthy points: get to failure points as quickly as possible, simplify problems into a few major risk points, distribution is everything.

Stanford Ed Corner – Scott Krien (Juniper Networks): Scott talks about his experience in developing a great company. Worthy points: do not get caught up with the media, rely on common sense, and try to develop existing employees instead of constantly finding new geniuses.

Stanford Ed Corner – Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook): Mark isn’t such a great speaker, but he has pretty good information and philosophies, especially the challenges a young CEO faces. Worthy points: the ability to listen as a young CEO, hire intelligent people and create casual environments where people can reach their full capacity.

Stanford Ed Corner – Gregory Waldorf (eHarmony): Gregory talks about the 5 key elements of a successful startup: building a great team, taking smart risks, be able to adapt, having passion, and executing immediately.

Stanford Ed Corner – Andrew Frame (Ooma) and Warren Packard (DFJ): a podcast that highlights the importance of dislocating large markets, active recruiting, organizational design, board construction, alignment of vision, managing mis-hires, building for scalability, product development, intellectual capital, and mentorship in establishing a lasting enterprise that adds value in the marketplace. Worthy point: most CEOs regret firing mis-hires too late.

Stanford Ed Corner – Gil Penchina (Wikia):

Other Cool and Useful Sites:

Wayback Machine: The Wayback Machine provided by Archive.org shows you what the web and internet sites looked like years or even decades back. Definitely worth a watch.

Domai.nr: Your .com url is taken? This site helps you find creative solutions like deli.cio.us.

StatBrain: a good site that tracks the traffic of websites. Also check out Compete.com and Quantcast though as they show demographics

PDFonline.com: create pdf files online.

Muscovery: a good site that allows you to discover new band and music after you pick your mood.

Typeracer: a site where you race a car against others by typing faster. Have fun while improving typing speed. Very FD.

God and Science: Christianity for Athiests