azeem.azhar

Hey Alex,

Thanks for the response. Couple of points:
On the Harrison Ford quote on my blog, where I originally posted this, I attributed to the quote to Harrison Ford. When @mikebutcher asked me to post this on TC:UK, I thought I’d better do some fact checking (happens occasionally) and the provenance of the quote ended up being in dispute, or maybe I thought a picture of Leia was more suited for TC:UK.

As someone whose entrepreneurial achievements I have a tremendous amount of respect for (‘It’s the van Somerens’ was often muttered in kow-towed tones by attendees of First Tuesdays back in the wild west), the thing that surprises me about your note is that it sounds incrementalist.
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This is a truly awesome post, which I recommend anyone interested in entrepreneurship should take a look at.

There is a great quote I came by from an HBS entrpreneurship professor (I forget the source). Entrepreneurship is “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled”.

In order to do that, you do need to score strongly on Mark Suster’s 12 criteria.

And if you look at some of his criteria its clear that that are determinants could be driven by what happens in utero.
Take for example risk taking in high-frequency financial trading which can be predicted by the second-to-fourh digit ratio on a hand (http://bit.ly/ce15Bb). Coates et al point to prenatal androgens (i.e. testosterone levels in the womb) as having important organizing effects in the brain, resulting in different adult behaviours.

And as you point out, the effects are not linear or totally deterministic.
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Sixty per cent of my time is spent with customers, forty per cent with investors, thirty per cent with my team and thirty per cent doing work. The result is a busy schedule made easier by these ten great products.

1. Pzizz on iPhone : totally essential. Pzizz is a power napping application which I have been using since it was an app on the Mac

Builds unique sleep environments, allow for refreshing 15 minute power naps during the day. Sadly usually only have time for one every other day.

2. Docscanner on iPhone : constantly running around, so you never have the paper work you need when you are near a fax or scanner. And vice-versa. Docscanner takes better than average photos of documents and then allows you to transform them into scans that are acceptable to lawyers and bankers.
3. Berghaus Extrem Incinerator Duvet: London has been freezing these past two months, and I have done much more walking and running around in this wet, snowy city than I would like. My Incinerator Duvet jacked has kept me warm and dry. Plus doubles as an sensory-isolation chamber during power naps. (You need to see it to believe it.)
4. Quaker porridge oats : Eaten on most mornings to get me through to at least eleven am.
5. Sharemyplaylists : Great for finding a suitable playlist for late night working sessions. Something laid back for writing presentations, some more thumping for building a training set for one of our modules.
6. Dropbox : Just have to add my entrepreneur love for Dropbox.
7. Xpad : Very simple Mac App for keeping scratch notes. Autosaves, but sadly doesn’t sync easily across Dropbox.
8. Chartbeat / Analytics App / Server Density : three apps that help us stay on top of our site performance and uptime. Chartbeat has become completely essential, but Analytics App which is an iPhone app for grabbing headling Google Analytics data during the day. David Mytton’s server density is a useful Nagios-as-a-service.
9. Blackberry Bold : Great device for writing emails, to dos and tweets, while carrying a laptop bag in the order hand. Unlike my iPhone I can pretty much navigate this with one hand, while walking/running. It also functions really well in 2G mode, giving me better-than-odds chance of reaching 10pm with a mobile phone that still has batteries.
10. iPhone tethering: When it works, money saving. No more £10 trips to Starbucks just to pull a presentation or check something online.

Number 11 … of course there is a number 11.

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