Week #3 begun odd: Monday was bank holiday or I should say Egg & Chocolate holiday.
Then my bike refused to work and forced me to subway all short-week long. For the record, when on saturday I decided that I should try to fix it, it was perfectly working... How odd?
3 missed lunchs (Hadn't been told creating your own company was a VERY efficient diet)
zillions of great people met IRL: @pegobry @mounir2012 @moumsinette @mikebutcher @roxannevarza (TechCrunch France is re-launched! Yay!) @laurentk @bjonathan @cgiorgi @pictarine @hypios @allmyapps @qameha ...
and all the usual suspects: Hughes and Pascale from the incubator, @kwagaproduct @PhilippeLaval @MichelRacat @dealmeeting @TeamKadeal @leezamstrories @wwipolo @coletteballou ...
+100 tweets
6 check-ins on foursquare
And last but not least: I received my NexusOne!
Now, question is: how to keep this level of intensity?
6 days to go for a brand new adventure to start (hence the attached pic).
I'll be leaving the comfort of the employee position on March 19th to start StoriesOut, my own company the following Monday.
StoriesOut will be about Social Media, Marketing, PR and Communication services & coaching, primarily to exciting innovating IT startups and incubators. The baseline is "Let's write your story".
Huge excitement and stress.
The past few years have been tremendous. I've learned a lot, discovered even more and met stunning people.
I can't say there's been only one trigger for this shift, probably more the addition of experiences and thoughts. I've been fascinated by the energy of the entrepreneurs I've met. By technology and its ability to disrupt and change any "established" market. By the speed of high tech market and the actual real time assessments, decision-making and measurement.
I felt it was time for me to tell those stories and to create my own.
And I feel like I'm loosing and missing a lot of information, time and at the end of the day, I don't have the "big picture".
So, I woke up moaning about how hard it is to cope with so many info and how frustrating it is to miss so much.
Quite patiently - it wasn't 7:00am yet - my personal geeknius (geek+genius) advocate for a thorough market survey: "you may like to try this and that, probably that you'll find something to meet this need".
I did as told. Didn't find my solution yet, but felt it was worth sharing my first findings:
- uberVU (I love the name) - social info on key words displayed in a (very) nice dashboard - realtime Here's a quick demo:
There's a nice "Trial for free for 30 days". Cost is pretty fair as well: - Wikio - blog & news syndication seems pretty thorough in the aggregated sources and allows you to popularize them through votes. And it's free. Basically, it provides you with "what's hot".
- Newscred: Then a tweet from @nicolasgamard led my to NewsCred Basically I found it a Reverse Google Reader: instead of following a given media, you type in a topic and newscred displays related news in a "your own newspaper"-way. See mine: http://adeforsan.newscred.com/#
OK now, let's test them on a given topic. I looked for a synthetic view on Kwaga. Results:
My post from yesterday raised some great comments and discussions, among which the lonelyness of the entrepreneur generates many exchanges.
Here is my proposed "zen cure": Mantras for entrepreneurs.
A mantra is a sound, syllable, word, or group of words that are considered capable of "creating transformation" (from wikipedia).
Here are some of mine:
Reed: be reed-like went you create a brand new service or product, based on your own personal conviction and belief. Anchored on your rock-solid-yet-flexible self foundations.
Exchange: be evangelist-like and faithfully present, explain and convince anyone you come across. And yet listen.
Sieve: listen sieve-like and sort all given advises and keep the best nuggets
Echo: strengthen your foundations in integrating new valuable ideas to your own personal convictions
