Ahabwe Collins

Are you an entrepreneur? If so, you are one of the rising billion - the fastest growing economic sector in history. In the 1950's, the rise of corporations and the middle class grew to several 100 million, when the world had a population of 2.5 billion. Today, there's 7 billion of us, and in the 1st 20 years of the new 21st Century entrepreneurs are growing from 4% to 12% of the population.  We've grown from less than 200 million in 2000, to over 400 million today, to 1 billion by 2020 - this sector is 10x the size of the 9-to-5 workforce created in the first 20 years of the industrial revolution. This movement is already transforming the world in the most incredible ways, from how we share resources, advance technology and find solutions to impact the world. So if you're an entrepreneur, you're not alone. You're in good company. And you're part of a historic sea change that is already shaping the future in the most amazing ways. * Data from OECD, GEM &

Have you ever been rejected for a job? Brian Acton has. After 11 years at Yahoo! and out of a job at 38 years old, Brian went job hunting... first to Twitter (rejected) then to Facebook (rejected). What do you do when you’re 38 years old, competing unsuccessfully against 20-somethings for a job as a systems engineer? If you’re Brian, you go out and play frisbee...  Two years earlier, he had trav elled South America playing ultimate frisbee with Jan Koum, who he had met while working at Ernst & Young as a security tester. Now, in the midst of his job rejections, he met up with Jan again for a game of frisbee. It was while playing, Jan told Brian he was working on a start-up to create a new kind of mobile app, but he had run out of money. Jan had lived on welfare with his parents when he first arrived to the US from Ukraine. Not wanting to go back on food stamps, he asked Brian for advice on whether he should quit and start looking for a job. Admiring Jan for his courage in starting

In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared a nd they went bankrupt. What happened to Kodak will happen in a lot of industries in the next 10 years - and most people don't see it coming. Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later you would never take pictures on paper film again? Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975. The first ones only had 10,000 pixels, but followed Moore's law. So as with all exponential technologies, it was a disappointment for a long time, before it became way superior and got mainstream in only a few short years. It will now happen with Artificial Intelligence, health, autonomous and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs. Welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution. Welcome to the Exponential Age. Software will disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years. Uber is just a software tool, they don't own any cars, and a

Which version of Facebook are you using? Did you know there are tens of thousands of versions of  Facebook running at any one time - and you’re using just one of them? In an interview this week with Y Combinator, Mark Zuckerberg explains that in today’s fast-changing world, “The key is building a company that is focused at learning as fast as possible.” “Companies are learning organisms. You can make decisions so you can either make it learn faster or you learn slower.” This is how Facebook makes that happen: “We invest in this huge testing framework and at any given point of time there isn’t just one version of Facebook running in the World. There’s probably tens of thousands of versions running.” “Because engineers here have the power to try out an idea, and ship it to maybe 10,000 people or 100,000 people. And then they get a read-out on that version of what they did - whether it was a change to show better content on Newsfeed or a UI change or new feature.” “They get

"Early on in our history when things weren't really going well. We had hit a tough patch and a lot of people wanted to buy Facebook.” “I went and I met with Steve Jobs, and he said that to reconnect with what I believed was the mission of the company, I should go visit this temple in India that he had gone to early in the ev olution of Apple, when he was thinking about what he wanted his vision of the future to be.” "So I went and I travelled for almost a month.” Mark travelled to Kainchi Dham Ashram, in Nanital, Uttarakhand. The same place Steve had visited, and where he got clarity on his life purpose. For a month, Mark meditated in the temple and travelled through India. “Seeing how people connected, and having the opportunity to feel how much better the world could be if everyone has a strong ability to connect reinforced for me the importance of what we were doing and that is something I've always remembered over the last 10 years as we've built Facebook.

W ell known Venture Capitalist & Y Combinator co-founder, Paul Graham, wrote a famous essay called “Do Things that Don’t Scale”. It’s one of the best essays on how to start a business. He wrote “One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. Startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful t hat just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going.” “A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.” Paul then gives 9 unscalable startup tactics with examples of well-known startups who have used them to get started: #1 - Recruit users manually Stripe’s tactic: They took user’s laptops one by one and installed their software by hand #2 - Remember startups are fragile Airbnb’s tactic: They went door to

What’s the price when you fail? This week, Elon Musk watched as his latest attempt at landing his Space X Falcon 9 rocket went wrong, ice froze one of the legs and the entire rocket toppled over and exploded. That’s another $60 million up in smoke. What was Elon’s reaction? First, he tweeted “Well, at least the pieces were bigger this time!” Then, he posted a video of the explosion on Instagram. And finally, he posted yesterday “My best guess for 2016: ~ 70% landing success rate (so still a few more RUDs to go), then hopefully improving to ~90% in 2017.” “RUD” stands for “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly” which is another way of saying “it blew up”… What can we learn from Elon happily blowing up his rockets? Most people would see this as an expensive failure, but Elon is a master of learning by failing, and he expects to fail epically and often. It doesn’t cost Elon to fail as he builds it into his business model. Each Falcon rocket is expected to be lost anyway if he wasn’t testing ho

“You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.” ~ John C Maxwell How many of these top 10 entrepreneur habits do you have today? What good habits can you start and what bad habits can you stop to change your results tomorrow? 1) Create a routine - Set a rhythm to connect to the big 5 P’s every day: Purpose (why?), Products (what?), People (who?), Processes (when?), Productivity (how?) 2) Keep the mornings for the toughest projects - Start with what’s most important, not what’s most urgent. Make yourself 80% proactive, 20% reactive. 3) Work out & meditate - Richard Branson says the #1 thing he does to improve his business success is exercise. The universe will only look after you as well as you look after yourself. 4) Give a head start to tomorrow today - Design each day ahead of time and ask the same question Steve Jobs asked: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want t

The Monk Moment - Many great entrepreneurs have had a moment when they have lost everything. Monks create this situation intentionally through "Vairagya" when they give up all money and possessions. Many entrepreneurs end up in the same situation unintentionally.  :-) Elon Musk lost $180M and was in debt in 2008. Seven years later, he's worth $13 billion, but he'd be ready to risk it all again. St eve Jobs lost his entire Apple fortune by 1994, betting it on NeXT and Pixar. In 1995 everything turned around, he sold NeXT to Apple, Pixar to Disney and he passed away an icon. Walt Disney mortgaged away his entire fortune in the 1950s to build Disneyland, against everyone's advice. He too went from giving up everything to becoming a legend. Each bet everything material they had on something invisible - their purpose and vision. Monks call the state that comes after giving up everything "Moksha" which means liberation from the illusion. We're not alive un

Here’s a tweet Travis Kalanick sent in January 2010. The reply from Ryan Graves happened 3 minutes later. That tweet was worth over a billion dollars. January 2010 was the month Travis was doing a test run with 3 cars in New York for a mobile app that he and his friend, Garrett Camp, had just created.  They had decided it was time to start a company around the app and, needing to find a General Manager to run it, Travis took to Craigslist and Twitter looking for the right person. Ryan’s reply to Travis came as he was looking for something new. He had some experience at GE, and had worked for Foursquare for a while for free after the company turned him down for a job. He was ready for a new opportunity - and took a chance with this tweet. Travis replied back, they met, they hit it off, and Ryan joined Travis and Garrett on March 1st as their first hire. With their new company started, the three of them then invited all their friends to demo the product and they officially launched in Sa

John Pemberton invented Coca-Cola when he was 55 years old. Ray Kroc bought McDonald’s when he was 59 years old. Colonel Sanders began franchising KFC at 62 years old. Tim & Nina Zagat were 51 yr old lawyers when they wrote the 1st Zagat guide. Charles Darwin was 50 years old before he wrote “On the Origin of Species”. Julia Child was also 50 years olf when she wrote her first cookbook. Henry Ford was 45 years old when he created the Model T car. Microfinance pioneer, Muhammad Yunus, launched the Grameen Bank at 43 years old. Samuel L. Jackson was 43 years old before he had his first hit film, “Jungle Fever”. It’s never too late to succeed. It’s always too early to quit. “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” extracted from the official facebook page of Roger James Hamilton

Focus at your customer more than your product. Get fixed on your customer experience, and your product will keep changing to serve them best. But fix your product, and customers will find a path that fits them, with or without you. If you're waiting on the street corner, wondering where all your customers are, this post is for you. We've moved from the industrial age where it was all about the product and productization to the technological age where it's all about the customer and customization. Instead of focusing at product development and production lines (which we learned about and were a part of at school), focus at customer experiences and customization lines. Your business doesn't start when you have a product. It starts when you have a customer. So who is your perfect customer? Start from there and ask yourself (and them): Problem - What's the problem they need solved? Promise - What's the benefit you deliver to them by solving it? Product - How will yo