As a young team, we need a well-rounded advisory board who know what they are doing to guide us and prevent us from making bad decisions simply because of a lack of knowledge.
However, finding impressive strangers to help you could be a scary task, so by adding “gamification” to the process, or simply viewing it as a game, things become a lot more straight forward and less daunting. (How many of you are afraid of approaching a boss in a video game?)
In order to find the right mentors and advisors, you need to first know what are your objectives. Are you trying to create a scalable business? Are you trying to solve certain technology issues?
2. Identify the Kind of Advisors you would need for your Objective
Once you know what your objectives are, create a list of skill sets and experiences that you need to assist you further. Be as detailed as you can, such as “Someone who has 20 years in this field, has brought at least one company successful, and is local to my city.”
3. Create a Hunt-List of Qualified Advisors
This requires some work. You need to go on LinkedIn, go to conferences (and especially check out the speaker list), read the press, and identify a list of super powerful individuals that could be your advisors. Don’t be timid in adding the strongest folks in this list. You never know.
4. Start the Hunt
The next step is to hunt for these advisors. In this day and age, it is easy to find their traces online and possibly offline. See what social networks they spend a lot of time in. See if they have a blog and have a podcast show. Also, pay attention if they are going to conferences soon.
5. Soften up the Ice
Before you reach out directly to them, go to a few of the places that they have presence, and create some interaction about that. If they have a blog, comment on their posts a few times. If they are on Twitter, Retweet and respond to their tweets.
6. The Direct hit
After some soft engagements, write a respectable email, social network message, or approach them at a conference, and say, “Hello, I’m _____. We’ve had a few back and forths on your blog. I’m working on a [2-3 sentence]. I was wondering if I could have a conversation with you sometime for the purpose of you potentially being one of our advisors. I think your experiences in _____ would make you perfect and I believe YOU will be the one that helps us become successful.” If you have done everything well from before (including truly finding the right and relevant person), you have a good chance of making it.
7. Sell as usual
During the meeting, you should sell your company just like you would to any investor. Get this advisor excited. Get this advisor to like you. Also, be clear on expectations of what you want from an advisor and what you would give for it. I recommend guaranteeing a monthly 1-hour phone call, as well as in-person board meetings once a quarter. Most startups give out about 0.1%-0.5% of the company for a good advisor that is willing to commit.
8. Add a point on your LeaderBoard
Once you have gotten this advisor to help you, give yourself a brownie point and then go for the next one!
Throughout my career, I have firmly believed that, when you meet passionate and motivated people with a sincere attitude, only good things can happen. Building relationships is one of the most important and meaningful things you can do in life, regardless if it is for professional or personal enrichment. To apply another Gamification Analogy: Outside the comfort zone there is a harmless dragon that looks scary, but you are invincible to it. Once you realize there is nothing you can lose by approaching and talking to more people, you will be ready to slay the harmless dragon.
For SEO sake (Search Engine Optimization), my company Future Delivery decided to switch main domain names in Bluehost from FDnetwork.org to FDcareer.com. What I was not informed of is that I need to not only back up all the files, but the databases too, however way it can be done. Once I realize that is the case, it is already too late.
In economics, we learn about sunk costs, which means that what is lost is already lost, and you need to make decisions based on the future instead of the past. I lost some of my most important thoughts, feelings and comments of times when I am angry, frustrated, delighted, impressed, confused, and rare times when I am insightful. To make matters worse, I also lost my planner/diary for 2008 very recently.
Would I be reduced to something less if I have lost my past? Would it change how I should live my moments, and how does it affect my future? The past may not be worth thinking about. I will take the present, and leverage it to make a better future. I will live on, and so will my blog.
base=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0″> (Note: this is just a summary intro and not the whole interview)
So in LA there’s a pretty prominent startup-focused organization called Mixergy, run by an awesome guy, Andrew Warner. Mixergy organizes events and interviews successful startup entrepreneurs to educate the world about how to become successful entrepreneurs. Andrew recently interviewed my Co-founder and CMO Jun Loayza for the latest episode, and I thought it was pretty awesome. I could probably have you download the interview from here, but I think it would be more fair if you went to his site to check the whole thing out, so go listen to the interview here.
I thought the interview was pretty extraordinary. However, due to the time limitation and the nature of the interview, there were obviously some details that could not be expressed. For that reason, I would like to tell some of the missed stories about FD. OK, well, to be honest, I also thought I sounded like an introverted pervert in the interview and I wanted to bring myself a little justice 🙂 I’ll do that at the end though.
Last Friday I went to the Crunchies 2008 event, and had a pretty awesome time.
For those of you who don’t know, the Crunchies Awards is somewhat like the Oscar for the Tech/Startup World, and is hosted by the dominant technology and startup blog Tech Crunch. Before the awards, people have selected from an ocean a startups and nominated one for each kind of award like Best CEO, Best Boostrapped, Best Innovation, Best App etc etc. Each award has 6 nominees, and in the actual award, they point out the winner and the runner up.
So due to extreme busy-ness, I have not been able to update my blog regularly on a lot of meaningful analysis of society and entrepreneurship as planned, but at least I’ll update on what’s going on in my life. Right now my life is divided into a 7 areas: 1. FD World(Venture), 2. Facilitator for a powerful Think Tank, 3. Co-Founder of the Veridical Group(consulting firm) 4. Vice President of Professional Activities in Delta Sigma Pi(Business Fraternity) 5. Lead Advisor of the Board in Bruin Consulting, 6. Personal Development and Expression, 7. School and maybe GMAT.
1. FD World is a Virtual World model that aims to make THIS world more productive and people more successful, which is the opposite of the escapism purpose in other virtual worlds used in the entertainment industry.
2. The Think Tank is a group of highly intelligent(hmm…and good looking) people each with their own specialty and resources/connections to collaborate with ideas and create synergies in influence towards Green Campaigns, social injustice and economics. With members like UC Student Regent D’Artagnan Scorza and Sustainability Expert and Activist Michael Cox, the Think Tank is capable of making changes throughout the UC System and the Government in implementing Green Regulations towards companies, and other “stuff.” I’m the facilitator of the group and I hope to create some value through this.
3. Helping out my great friend Jun Loayza in starting his Small Business Consulting firm, the Veridical Group. I am developing the business analysis system that I created, Octalysis, which will be the main framework for VG, and we already have 2 clients, and 3 more lined up. 4. I am going to reengineer the professional structure of my big family Delta Sigma Pi(Business Fraternity) as VPPA and enhance the already-impressive professional culture and brand name of the fraternity.
5. I will be the Lead Board Advisor of Bruin Consulting and work to preserve what the graduated founders have left for the next generation of the board. They are a strong group and I just have to make sure team morale is maintained and that “BC Magic” is still in the air.
6. Just reading up on business books(Married to the Brand and other Entrepreneurship Stuff), articles(Mckinsey Global Institute, Harvard Business Review…), podcasts, creating new relationsihps and strengthening old ones, and expressing myself/sharing knowledge through teaching and writing blogs like this one. I guess teaching chess is included in this section. 7. I’m taking 3 classes during Summer Session A and the second half I am moving back to Taiwan to put together my programming team and maybe take a GMAT course. I don’t know if an MBA would be greatly useful for my career path but it sounds like fun.
So far this has been my corrupted week since my Bulgarian friend from Kansas is visiting me and we are just having lots of fun at the Getty Villa, Santa Monica Beach, Universal Studios, Sea World, E3 Party and what not. We then are going to North Cal to attend an entrepreneurship conference in Stanford, along with Jun. I’ll meet up another great friend Alex Adams too, so that’s cool. Finally I need to spend less time with girls although the body is quite weak sometimes. We’ll see what happens. Life is good and hopefully productive.
I believe I should explain my reasoning for not liking this movie fast before everyone tries to burn me. I understand what is great about this movie, but it does not mean we can neglect the little things that it does wrong. LOTR is the most famous movie with the most glitches I have ever seen. I understand that making a fantasy movie like this is not easy to be glitch free, but there are way too many. I have only seen the first part, the big battle of the 2nd part, and I decided not to watch the whole and the third part. Since what’s good about this movie is found everywhere, I’ll just talk about why I don’t like it. I’ll include the parts I’ve seen on the 2nd one too since it’s convinient to do so. First lets give some point values:
Video: 92 Audio: 90 Scenes: 92 General Plot: 87 Specific Plot: 83 Intensity: 82 Consistency: 88 Glitches: -12 (avg is -3)
As you seen all the stuff are pretty solid. The only thing I can pick out of the movie, besides the glitches is the slow pace. The movie doesn’t seem to have a fast pace, and with 3 hours of this, you get quite tired watching it.
Yea, I’ll get to the point, what are all the glitches that I am talking about? Well, first, glitches are more oftenly seen the 2nd time watching the movie, I have only seen it once, so ones I didn’t identify doesn’t mean it’s not there. But I can already tell you a plethora of it:
(Yes, I realize this is just a movie and meant to just entertain, but it is also art and make-believe, so it should not constantly remind you that “Yo, I’m just a movie! I don’t need to make sense!” Even Muholland Drive made sense.)
1. During the first part, there was a place where the big fire devil(pardon me for not remembering much names, I’m not aquainted to Tolkiens’ book and only seen the movie once. But one should not let the book influence a movie rating) was chasing the fellowship. They were running on the stairs and the place is so crappy that their weight made the stairs fall down. So the question is, if those little guys can make the stairs fall down, HOW IN THE WORLD DOES THAT FIRE DEVIL RUN AROUND AND CHASE THEM!???? Oh, maybe he can fly…but wait! He fell down with Gandolf! He can’t fly, he just magically appeared to catch up to everyone. It looked more like a video game to me at that part where you keep running in one direction and someone is chasing you and will never catch you, when you finish the level, it catches up and you have to fight the boss….^^||
2. Wraiths suck!!! From the description in the movie, wraithes are described as super powerful beings. There’s 9 of them in the world and it seems like each one of them can defeat a thousand men. What I saw in the movie is…. The only thing they do is ride horse and scare short people. They are afraid of fire, they are afraid of water. Six of them were trying to kill Frodo and one human with a torch scared them away…. I don’t know what kind of definition of suck would you use, but they suck. My friends told me they’re better in the book; the book doesn’t count in the movie. My friends also said: “What makes them so powerful is that they can’t die! You just can’t kill them! Anything that can’t die is scary and powerful…” Then i bring up my favorite analogy. You’ve played Super Mario 3 yea?(best Nintendo game ever) In it there’s this skeleton turtle that when you step on it, it turns into bones and then it revives a few seconds later. Even though they can’t die, they are still WORTHLESS!(Sincere Apologies for those who suffer from these creatures in the game, but then it just means you suck too.) They have no threat. (I know you can find ways to kill them, but not my point). Anyway, the wraiths suck. Then my friend told me in the 2nd and 3rd one they become more powerful, and I said “Good! That’s more like it!” But then I discovered they are more powerful just because they are riding on dragons!!!! Frodo can be more powerful when he’s riding on a dragon too. Oh yea…finally, I heard one or some died because the girl stabbed a dagger in them…….point made.
3. The fact that the elf guy constantly have like 8 arrows left all the time and has time (explained in the book….) to pick them all back when surrounded by thousands of orc is just a little glitch.
4. The Dramatic place where the Dark Lord got his finger chopped off, starting the whole thing is pretty dumb. The human had a broken sword, he hit the dark lord’s finger. The dark lord loses all the power and dies… This does’nt make sense. The dark lord has all his powers, perhaps because the rings fulls his body with energy. The guy slashes at the dark lord, his finger, close to the ring, is suppose to be one of the lords toughest places. Yea they made it dramatic, but in reality situations, the guy would slash at the dark lord (first the dark lord is powerful enough not to let the guy touch him) and then when he hits the finger, the broken sword will instantly turn to dust and the dark lord will laugh and all is to a end….yea, atleast they should make the dark lord fall in a more probable way. If this was the ending of a great epic itself, wouldn’t the view/reader be pissed? Why can’t the Dark Lord just trip, hit his head, and die, hoping he has insurance?
5. This is more of an understanding part. Frodo puts on the ring and becomes invisible, where is the dark POWER? How come the dark lord doesn’t become invisible?
6. The magicians fight…is funny. Goes like this. A shakes staff, B hits wall. B shakes staff, A hits the wall, so on. What the hell are they doing?? Are they playing RPG? I’m sure they are desperate on waiting their bar to fill and regret that they didn’t put more points in speed….WHAT ARE THEY DOING? It should go like this, A makes B hits the wall, and does it again, and again, and again, and again, and makes him spin in the air until his bones shatter, and then make him hit the wall 10 times more…that’s realistic fighting if they really have those powers! They are like, “Go hit the wall! Ok, now it’s your turn.” And then the bad guy suddenly gets smarter and wins….wow, best fight I have ever seen.
There’s some really minor ones that I’m just too tired to talk about them now.
We’ll move on to the 2nd part. Realized I just watch about 20 minutes of it and I can pick out a few.
1. The Ent tree thing was carrying the 2 halfings for a whole day, and then he suddenly saw all the dead trees and got mad (He should kill humans too), he cried out loud and in 2 seconds the whole Ent race appeared ready for battle. Ummm…if the whole Ent race can appear in 2 seconds, WHAT WAS HE DOING WALKING FOR A WHOLE DAY WITH THE HALFLINGS ON HIS BACK?? Yea, maybe all the Ents were stockers.
2. The elf guy can shoot a orc in the head when it’s half a mile away. When it really matters, when he should kill the orc with a torch 500 ft away, he shoots the shoulder, and then the other shoulder, and watches the kamakazi succeed….
3. The dwarf jumped up and landed into the mass of Orcs…who had spears! This is butt and leg first. I’m surprised there was place for him to land. Does no one know what a spear is for? Maybe they just wanted to make the movie less violent so they don’t want to show raw dwarf on a stick…..
4. When they were on the bridge filled with orcs, they rode horses through the bridge like knife thru butter and the orcs all fell off the bridge. Wait….horses are more powerful than orcs? One horce in front can knock aside 30 orcs? Well, maybe they are more powerful, but then WHY DOESN’T THEY JUST TRAIN 1000 HORSEMEN AND JUST CONSTANTLY RIDING BACK AND FORTH, BACK AND FORTH? That way all the orcs will die(if not damaged) no? Oh, I later heard that’s kinda what happened. Orcs are war creatures designed to kill.
Well, anyway, those are the ones I still remember. Probably lots more. LOTR is really a good movie, but the glitches pulled it down alot, so it can’t make my collection.Too too many…. If you can refute me, plz do. I like being convinced wrong, though there might be some inevitable resistence. Feel free to msg me.
Last thing to keep in mind, this review I wrote in my 12th grade, but I have brought it back up again and again when people ask why I don’t think it’s the best movie ever. I thought I’d just bring it onto facebook. If you read up to this point, eprops to you.
