My Mentors - Never Stop Learning

Mo Gawdat Power MBA

BooksAreGreat — Thu, 13 May 2021 09:40:39 +0000

I learned that from Mo Gawdat in the Power MBA

Career, founded companies & learnings from Mo Gawdat

Profile Mo Gawdat:

Country of birth: Ägypten

Birth Year: 1967

Published Books: Solve for happy

Current Job: Podcast Host, Speaker, One Billion Happy

Career:

Everyone knows Google. But very few people know Google X. Google X is a subsidiary that pursues so-called Moonshot projects. Google Glass, contact lenses that measure blood sugar, balloons with WiFi – all of these are Google X projects.

Mo Gawdat was Google X’s Chief Business Officer from 2013-2018. He holds a Bachelor of Civil Engineering and an MBA from the Masstricht School of Management.

After the death of his son, Mo Gawdat dealt intensively with the subject of being happy. He wrote the book the “Formula for Happiness”. From this arose his mission to make one billion people happy.

5 Learnings from Mo Gawdat

1. Our default state is to be happy. According to Mo, we are actually always happy. But there are certain things that prevent us from being happy. If you look at children, this statement is true. If they’re not hungry, injured, or tired, they are happy. In his book he reveals the obstacles that prevent us from being happy.

2. You are not your thoughts. Our thoughts have a very big influence on our mood. I’ve never doubted that the voice in my head isn’t me. But according to Mo this is only our brain that generates these thoughts. This is not the real you

3. Your expectations make you unhappy. It’s one of the easiest ways to become happier, especially in times of a global pandemic. If you approach a topic with high expectations, disappointment is usually inevitable. Set your expectations as low as possible or, better yet, have no expectations at all. This will make you calmer and happier.

4. Good leaders start with themselves. Only those who can lead themselves can lead others. Look for the right balance in your life. Only when you have your body, your mind, your work and your family in the right balance can you inspire other people and show them the way.

5. Mindfulness is a tool. The best algorithm is only as good as the data it is fed with. The same goes for you. Be mindful of the input you get every day. Only with the right “data” can you move your mind and body forward.

The story of Google X

The X in the company name stands for the X in 10x (ten times). It refers to finding solutions to hard-to-solve problems, with 10-fold effects.

Often projects that want to eliminate such big problems fail because of the business model or the necessary environment to even implement such ideas. Google X offers this space to inventors and companies.

The two Google founders launched the company in 2010. The term Moonshot is also frequently associated with Google X. This means projects that come close in their ambitions to the first moon landing. Science fiction – something that cannot be imagined today. Google X has set three criteria for their projects:

A big problem in the world that affects millions or billions of people.
A radical, science fiction sounding solution that seems impossible today.
A technological breakthrough that gives us a glimmer of hope that the solution could be possible in the next 5-10 years.

Here are 3 projects that have been successfully implemented by Google X:

Project Loon

Internet access means technological progress and prosperity. There are still entire countries that do not have a functioning internet. Google X’s answer to this problem? Gas-filled balloons in the stratosphere. These supply the most remote places with Internet.

Project Wing

The supply of goods or the last mile are a major problem in developing countries. There are no roads or narrow mountain passes to cross. With the help of drones, goods will be transported in the future, if Google X has its way. The drones deliver the goods even to the furthest corners of the world. Test flights are currently taking place in Australia.

Waymo project

Self-driving cars are within reach in 2021. Autonomous driving was one of Google X’s first projects. This has now become Waymo. In parts of the US, self-driving cars such as taxis can be ordered using the app. Science fiction has become reality.

Here`s what you can learn from Mo Gawdat in the Power MBA:

The way to lasting happiness
What it takes to be a good leader
Leadership in the 21st century

Start Your PMBA*

The life story of Mo Gawdat

Mo Gawdat was born in Egypt in 1967. He completed the Bachelor of Civil Engineering. He did his MBA at the Masstricht School of Management. He had his first job at IBM Egypt as a systems engineer. He also worked as a day trader and was able to earn a lot of money thanks to his math skills.

He and his family moved from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates. There he worked for companies such as NCR Abu Dhabi, BAT and Microsoft. In 2007 he started his career at Google. There he was responsible for getting Google up and running in emerging markets.

In 2013 he started his career at Google X as Chief Business Officer. There he managed to develop innovative business models with the team members and to transform the Google X products into profitable companies.

During his career as an employee, he managed and founded over 20 companies in the health, fitness, food and real estate sectors. He also oversaw many startups to help them grow.

Despite the steep career, Mo felt more and more unhappy. But he already had everything you could want. A wife, two children, financial freedom and a great job. But still he was depressed. So he started looking at the subject of happiness. As an engineer, he approached the subject very analytically. He saw his body as a machine and wanted to find the problem, why this machine was not working properly. He read every book there was on the subject and attended countless seminars.

By making small changes, he was able to notice more and more improvements in his state of mind until he had managed to overcome his depression in 2010. But in 2013, his son Ali died of routine surgery at the age of 21.

Instead of falling into anger and sadness, the family dealt with Ali’s death very differently. They were grateful that he was allowed to live. They invited all friends and relatives over and celebrated Ali. 17 days after Ali’s death, Mo wrote incessantly on the subject of happiness. He went to his agent with 600 pages of manuscript. In 2017 his book Solve for Happy was published.

The book was so well received and touched so many people that he started the One Billion Happy mission. His personal goal is to make one billion people happy over the long term. If every seventh person in the world is permanently happy, many problems and sufferings in the world would disappear, according to his thesis.

Since 2018 he has only dealt with this topic and can be seen as a speaker at many events. He also started a podcast called Slo Mo, which is exactly about this topic.

Occasionally, he still advises companies and young entrepreneurs on business and leadership issues.

The post Mo Gawdat Power MBA first appeared on Never Stop Learning.

Eric Ries

BooksAreGreat — Thu, 13 May 2021 09:28:34 +0000

I learned that from Eric Ries in the Power MBA

Career, founded companies & learnings by Eric Ries

Profile Eric Ries:

Country of birth: USA

Birth year: 1978

Published Books: The Lean Start up; The Startup Way, The Leaders Guide

Current Job: Speaker, Entrepreneur

Career:

The book The Lean Start Up is now 10 years old and has become compulsory reading for every start-up founder. The author Eric Ries started his career at the start-up There.com as a software engineer. It was there that he discovered his passion for start-ups. Four years later, he and his colleagues founded the start-up IMVU. An instant message service linked to video games. One of the investors was Steve Blank, the founding father of the Lean Start Up movement, so to speak. There, Eric Ries learned a lot about customer feedback and quick small tests to test hypotheses.

The book The Lean Start Up emerged from the experiences of the IMVU period. After several years as a speaker and consultant, Eric Ries founded another start-up – The Long Term Stock Exchange. A national stock exchange that helps companies and investors invest in long-term vision. Eric lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children.

5 Learnings from Eric Ries

1. Find your business model. The only thing you have to do as a start-up is to find a profitable and scalable business model. To do this, you use the Lean Start Up approach and test your ideas quickly and cheaply.

2. Think MVP.If you wait until you have created the perfect product, it is usually too late. Why? Because you didn’t build the product on the customer, you don’t have any more money for another product or the competition is just passing you in the Porsche. Live according to the motto: “Done is better than perfect.” Build products that reflect the core function of your solution, that’s all you need at the beginning.

3. Talk to your customers. Go out and interview your potential customers. Don’t wait until you have a finished product. Talk to people right away. Get constructive feedback and use it to build the MVP. Then talk to the customers again and adjust your MVP. And don’t be afraid that someone will steal your idea – everyone has ideas a hundred times a day. But the implementation is what matters.

4. Test as much as you can. Work with hypotheses. Test your thinking as often and as quickly as possible. Nowadays you can set up a Facebook or Google Ad within 15 minutes and receive immediate feedback.

5. Be quick. Do you remember Studi VZ, localists, etc.? Facebook devoured them all through lightning scaling. It no longer counts to be the biggest, but to be the fastest. Do not try to build strategies or systems for years at the beginning, follow the path of the customer and the turnover. So you will stay in the market much longer than the other way around.

The Story of the Long Term Stock Exchange

Eric Ries already complains in his book “The Lean Starup” about the short-term motivation of many start-ups. 2-5 years to make the thing big and then go for an exit. This way of thinking cannot create great visions and long-term changes.

That is why he founded the Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE) in 2015. A national stock exchange that brings together companies and investors who want to work and invest together on long-term visions. In 2019, the LTSE was approved as a national stock exchange by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The guidelines for being listed as a company on this exchange include the following points:

Long-term focused companies should consider a broader group of stakeholders and the critical role they play in each other’s success.
Companies with a long-term focus should measure their success in years and decades and prioritize long-term decisions.
Companies with a long-term focus should adjust executive and board member compensation to reflect long-term performance.
Boards of directors of long-term companies should deal with long-term strategies and monitor them explicitly.
Long-term focused companies should get in touch with their long-term shareholders.

It has been possible to invest in listings on the stock exchange since September 2020. Companies can also be listed on the LTSE and other US stock exchanges. Well-known start-ups and companies that are listed on the LTSE belong Strava, MIXT, molekuleair.

Here`s what you can learn from Eric Ries in the Power MBA:

Eric Ries is one of many world-class lecturers in the 11-month Power MBA continuing education program. The company has made it its business to democratize MBA courses and make them accessible to everyone. Instead of paying thousands of euros for an MBA, the Power MBA costs only € 1000. There are 15 minute lessons every day with the best lecturers from today’s entrepreneurial world. Including Eric Ries. Its modules deal with these topics:

Lean Startup Principles
Compete vs inovate
Road to disaster
Lean startup using the example of Zappos
Types of MVPs
MVPS keys and barriers

Start Your PMBA*

The life story of Eric Ries

Eric Ries was born in 1978. He studied computer science at Yale University. One of his lecturers was Steve Blank, who is also seen as the forefather of the Lean Start Up movement. He was a huge influence on The Lean Start Up book.

After graduating in 2001, he went to Silicon Valley and started at There.com as a software engineer. The company was working on a virtual 3D based product, but soon failed.

Then Eric joined the start-up IMVU as a co-founder. The company’s goal was to create an instant messaging service in video games. His old lecturer Steve Blank was also invested in this company. He asked all IMVU executives to complete his entrepreneurship course. It was there that Eric Blanks got to know the method of quick customer feedback. This method should lay the foundation for the book Lean Start Up.

With the help of quick small tests, they managed to learn very quickly and to continuously optimize the product. Within 6 months they created an MVP. They then raised $ 19 million in two financing rounds.

In 2008 Eric stepped down as CTO but remained with the company as a consultant. Six months later he started his next job as a risk advisor at Kleiner Perkins. During this time he started advising start-ups. Through his experience from his previous jobs, his training and consulting work, he developed the Lean Start Up approach. He shared the learnings and the system on his blog. Until he finally published the book The Lean Start Up in 2010/11.

He was then regularly invited as a speaker and lecturer and received a position as entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School. During this time he advised young and old companies on how to use the Lean Start Up approach.

He published two more books over the next few years. The Leaders Guide and The Start Up Way. Since 2015 he has mostly been involved with his company on the Long Term Stock Exchange. A national stock exchange that brings together companies and investors who want to invest in visions for the long term. Since the end of 2020 it has been possible to invest in companies on this exchange.

The post Eric Ries first appeared on Never Stop Learning.

Ash Maurya Power MBA

BooksAreGreat — Thu, 13 May 2021 09:15:59 +0000

I learned that from Ash Maurya in the Power MBA

Career, founded companies & learnings of Ash Maurya

Profile Ash Maurya:

Country of birth: Nigeria

Founded Companies: Leanstack

Published Books: Running Lean, Scaling Lean

Current Job: Speaker, Unternehmer

Career:

Ash Maurya is best known for his two books Running Lean and Scaling Lean. The entrepreneur was born in Nigeria, his parents come from India. After studying electrical engineering, he went to the USA. Due to his work visa, he was not allowed to found his own start-up, so he first joined the start-up Nortel. After 2 years he was drawn to the company telecom technologies inc, where he spent almost 4 years. The company was bought by Sonus Networks.

After this time he was finally able to found his first company: WiredReach. The startup enabled the creation of peer-to-web applications. In other words, the sharing of large data without having to upload it. The company was sold in 2010.

The next start-up was Spark59. A platform that helps entrepreneurs to realize their ideas. Through his blog and his books, he has become an internationally sought-after speaker and mentor. Spark59 has become LeanStack. The company where he still works as Founder & CEO.

5 Learnings from Ash Maurya

1. Idea – Hypothesis – MVP – Learn. Don’t jump into an idea without validating it. First, work out the business model on paper. Then create hypotheses that you check with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Draw your lessons from it and start all over again.

2. Types of Hypotheses. At the end of the day, hypothesis generation always revolves around three areas: Desirability – Will customers be interested in your product at all? Viability – Can you win customers and earn money with them. Feasibility – Are you able to build the product at all?

3. Use the Lean Canvas. Ash Maurya is the inventor of the Lean Canvas, a modification of the Business Model Canvas. It is, so to speak, an overview of a business model for startups. The tool helps me enormously because it shows the big picture of the startup on a piece of paper.

4. Talk to your customers. One of the things you should be doing once you have an idea for a startup isn’t creating business cards or building a website. No! Get out on the street and talk to your potential customers. Do they even have the problem you want to solve? And addresses your solution. The feedback you get in such conversations is priceless.

5. The three phases of a startup. It was only through Ash Maurya’s book that I found out about the three phases of a startup. Problem-Solution Fit = The phase in which you turn your idea into a product and optimize it again and again until it is the right solution for the customer. Product-Market Fit = After you have a functioning product, the task is to bring it to market with a suitable business model and to find the right marketing channels. Scale = In this phase you scale your company upwards in order to either sell it or continue it yourself.

The Story of Leanstack

Leanstack is Ash Maurya’s newest company. Originally the company was called Spark59. According to a study, it takes 58 product ideas to manufacture a successful product. Spark59 is the abbreviation for finding successful product ideas faster. I don’t know exactly why the company is now called Leanstack. I think it fits better into Ash Maurya’s book series and is more catchy.

Apart from the title, nothing at the core of the work has changed in the company. The aim is to help entrepreneurs to become successful with their ideas and startups. The focus is on the product. The company has three pillars on which it is built.

Software tools
Content
Coaching

The software tools include Lean Canvas, Customer Forces, Lean Sprints, Traction Modeler, Goals, Playbooks. With this software you can quickly and easily test your ideas, validate hypotheses and track the growth of your startup.

The content is mainly about Ash Maurya’s two books and his blog. All of these are valuable sources of knowledge that can be acquired for little money. On top there are free video courses and playbooks.

The coaching includes a 90-day startup course, Coach Certification Workshops and Leanstack Coach Directory. The 90-day startup course is specially designed for founders who have an idea or who have already started to realize it. In 90 days, Leanstack will help this startup to find a functioning business model and generate more sales.

The Coach Certification Workshops are training to teach the contents of the two books by Ash Maurya and to help other startups grow.

The Leanstack Coach Directory is a listing of all certified coaches that you can book to help your startup move forward.

You can learn that from Ash Maurya at the Power MBA:

Ash Maurya is one of many lecturers in The Power MBA online continuing education program. He teaches in the module Testing Business Ideas & Lean Startup. There he can be seen next to the inventor of the lean startup movement Eric Ries. The modules with Ash Maurya mainly focus on the following content:

Testing of business models
Lean canvas
Types of hypotheses
Startup stages & challenges
Metrics to achieve product-market fit

Start Your PMBA*

The post Ash Maurya Power MBA first appeared on Never Stop Learning.

Power MBA Instructors

BooksAreGreat — Thu, 13 May 2021 08:36:09 +0000

Power MBA Instructors – These experts teach you

From Hyperloop to Netflix – experts from the top companies will teach you their knowledge

Power MBA Instructors – short summary

Probably the most important reason to do the Power MBA are the mentors. Apart from the elite universities in the USA, there is no university that can boast with such experts. And these universities cost up to € 70,000 a year.

From Tesla to Cirque du Soleil, you learn from real-world experts. But not only the people who have already made it are shown, but also young startup founders who are still in the early stages with their companies. This mix makes the program super exciting and multifaceted. Only concepts that survive in practice are taught.

Every single 15 min lesson is instructive. Not once did I get bored during the 11 months. That was rather the exception during my student days. There were hardly any lectures there that didn’t get me to sleep.

Start Your PMBA*

How do you get in touch with the Power MBA mentors?

At the beginning of each semester there is the Meet your Teachers Webniare. Here the Power MBA employees interview the mentors. These lectures are live, but you can always watch the recording afterwards. You can submit your questions about a week before the webinar. If the questions are interesting enough, they will be asked and answered by the mentor during the webinar.

Furthermore, the Power MBA lecturers appear again and again in the videos and teach on the respective topic. At the end of each lesson, you can provide feedback and ask questions. These will be answered by the Power MBA team, usually in less than 24 hours. Here you can also ask questions directly about the mentor or topic.

Otherwise you can network with the mentors on LinkedIN. But whether they answer you here is not in the power of the Power MBA. But getting started is much easier with further training.

All Power MBA teachers at a glance

Here you will find a list of all Power MBA Instructors:

Eric Ries

Steven Chen

Marc Randolph

Jennifer Fleiss

Rosie O´Neill

Jonathan Mildenhall

Uri Levine

Sophia Amoruso

Daniel Lamarre

Mo Gawdat

Randi Zuckerberg

Martin Eberhard

John Mackey

Bisila Bokoko

Lisa Conn

Jami Taylor

Joe Wilson

Diana Ganz

Aaron Montgomery

Deborah Singer

Dirk Ahlborn

Alexander Weber

Ingke Purrmann

David Flatow

Laura Hoehlein

Max Zeumer

Karandeep Bhogal

Mirko Caspar

Ash Maurya

Sabrina Guzman

David McDowall

Chris Barton

Julien Callede

Gabor George Burt

Start Your PMBA*

The post Power MBA Instructors first appeared on Never Stop Learning.

Chris Barton Shazam Founder

BooksAreGreat — Thu, 13 May 2021 08:29:24 +0000

I learned that from Chris Barton in the Power MBA

Career, founded companies & learnings by Chris Barton

Profile Chris Barton:

Country of birth: USA

Established Companies: Shazam Entertainment Ltd.

Published books: none

Current activity: New startup in the Health Sector

Career:

Do you still remember 1999? When you could only do 3 things with mobile phones: write SMS, make calls and download the 8-bit playback of Shaggy as a ring tone. During this time, Chris was already working on a mobile phone function that could not really be used until 2007 with the first iPhone.

Chris Barton was a pioneer. The idea of Shazam was way ahead of its time. In an interview when asked what he would have done differently in retrospect, he replied: “In an ideal world, Shazam would have started about five years later. So we would have missed the more difficult times – while we waited for cell phones to catch up with our vision. “

5 Learnings from Chris Barton

1. Don’t let yourself bend. It was not easy for Shazam to satisfy the shareholders and business angels and to remain true to their vision. Chris taught me that in spite of all difficulties, I have to hold on to my vision. I can only implement my vision with conviction and thus make it a success.

2. Passion. The first eight years leading up to the first iPhone were tough for Shazam. You had to come up with survival strategies while waiting for cell phones to catch up with your vision. Only through determination and perseverance was it possible for him to hold onto his vision in difficult times.

That teaches me how pointless it is to work on a company for the sake of money. I can only master challenges if I stand behind what I do with passion and heart and soul.

3. The right people. To make Shazam a reality, Chris and his partners were looking for a programmer for their music recognition software. They didn’t just put up a job advertisement and hope for the best. They searched for 9 months. In doing so, they compiled a list of 20 specialists in this field. Sorted the 5 brightest minds out of it and then slide their No. 1 at. The founders were not only good at their fields, they also shared the same passion, drive and integrity – which ultimately led to success.

From this I draw how important it is to get the right people into your team. It’s not just about talent, it’s also about passion. And to find these people, it is not enough to wait for them.

4. Minimum Viable Product. To get investors excited about Shazam, the founders initially programmed a simple version of their later software. So they were able to demonstrate it on some pieces of music during the presentation. They tried to keep their expenses as low as possible.

That showed me how important it is to achieve the greatest effect with little effort, especially at the beginning. So to develop a minimum viable product *. (* literally a “minimally executable product” – is a product that covers customer, market or functional requirements with little effort.)

5. Think outside the box. Chris could have developed a service that scoured the radio stations’ playlists for a piece of music they were looking for. Just like the other music recognition services. But he doesn’t. He kept thinking. So he came up with the idea that there had to be software that recognizes the songs by their sound. At that time, such software was still unthinkable. With this way of thinking, Chris set a milestone that no one could take away from him so quickly.

The story of Shazam shows me that only those who revolutionize can have resounding success.

The story of Shazam

Shazam is known today as the music recognition app. Based on an acoustic fingerprint, it can analyze audio sequences and thus display the title and other information. It all started long before the App Store and Google Play existed.

The Shazam founders developed music recognition technology in 1999 that previously seemed impossible.

In 2002 they introduced the world’s first mobile music recognition service. To use this, you called a speed dial number. The music was recorded during the call. The call ended automatically after a few seconds. If the melody matched one from the database, the user received an SMS with the title.

In 2008 the app came into the AppStore. In 2017, Apple sold the company for an estimated $ 400 million. Shazam now has over 100 million app users per month.

You can learn that from Chris Barton at the Power MBA:

How he came up with the idea of Shazam
How much he values the choice of his co-founders
Why did he believe in his idea
How he got investors during the dotcom bubble
How to avoid expenses in the beginning
Tips on how to be a good CEO

Start Your PMBA*

The life story of Chris Barton

Chris Barton’s interest in technology was piqued early on.

When he was about eleven, his mother brought home a Sinclair computer. On this, one of the first PCs, he taught himself how to write simple software programs.

He loved business and computer technology and knew that he would later marry his two passions. During his studies at UC Berkeley, he took economics and many courses in computer science.

He got to know the co-founders of Shazam, Dhiraj Mukherjee and Philip Inghelbrecht, at this time.

After meeting his fellow student who was about to open an Internet real estate business that later went public. (ZipRealty) sparked the desire for his own company.

During his MBA exchange program, he studied at the London Business School for a few months. There he experienced a real wow factor. In a class called Strategic Innovation, he learned the importance of thinking outside the box in order to create real and sustainable innovations in the business world.

He brainstormed for an idea for his company that would be revolutionary and saw the potential that cell phones would create a whole new world of possibilities.
Already at that time there was the possibility for users to call up a song that was being played on the radio. To do this, however, the radio station had to be specified, whereupon the station’s playlist was searched. However, Chris tried to think beyond the idea of radio surveillance software. And that is when the idea of Shazam was born. Chris Barton wanted a technology that recognizes a song recorded with a mobile phone based on its sound. This is how it should work everywhere, not just on the radio.

This may sound obvious to you and not particularly innovative. In 1998, a technology that was supposed to recognize music was science fiction.

Chris Barton founded and developed the business idea and technology together with Philip Inghelbrecht, Avery Wang and Dhiraj Mukherjee in 1999. Shazam later caught the interest of Apple, which bought the technology for a speculated $ 400 million in 2017. With over 1 billion downloads, the app is one of the most popular apps on iPhone and Android Datum today.

Chris’s career has also spanned companies like Google, where he worked for 8 years, and Dropbox, where he was director of business development for wireless operators.

He is currently starting a new startup focused on machine learning and computer vision.

The post Chris Barton Shazam Founder first appeared on Never Stop Learning.