A blog of aggregated miscellanea and things I like uncovered from my daily travails. I'm @jacobjay, a peripatetic designer/developer of British persuasion, having interests in gastronomy, fashion, technology, interiors and sustainability. I'm currently living between New Delhi and France, working on a Lua web platform and e-commerce. I dig Macs, mountain biking and smelly cheese.
↩ Jacob's Ephemerata
Posts tagged “entrepreneurship”
“ When I first quit my job to start my own company, all I had was an idea. The goal at that point was to find someone with a technical background to actually execute my idea. I suspect that many of you are in similar situations. There’s something you should know: it’s never going to happen. ”
“ when I see people complain about the process of getting free money or that the chairs in the offices are bad then I laugh, because I think they have no perspective of what it takes to build a business, how hard building a business is for majority of people ”
“ Entrepreneurship depends on a sense that the present order is an unreliable and cowardly indicator of the possible. The absence of certain practices and products is deemed by entrepreneurs to be neither right nor inevitable, merely evidence of conformity and lack of imagination. ”
Alain De Botton, The Steve Jobs MBA Unit 101: Don’t think about the present
“ Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. And it’s that process that is the magic. ”
Steve Jobs, in a 1995 interview; via Daring Fireball.
The Entrepreneurial Generation - NYTimes.com
we’re all in showbiz now, walking on eggshells, relentlessly tending our customer base […] Call it Generation Sell. […] just [keep] doing what you [are] doing, at gradually higher price points
“KEEP IN BRAIN WHEN WRITE, TALK, BLOG, TWEET. ITERATE. IMPROVE WHAT WORK. DELETE WHAT NOT. PERSONALITY GROW.” Some great advice on creating product personality, from @FAKEGRIMLOCK (‘Giant Robot Dinosaur’).
“ […] But I want to hear about things out there that they love. About loving the thing they’re building. There’s less of that. ”
“ « planning […] can lead to a false sense of security for entrepreneurs, and can discourage necessary business “pivots” along the way » ”
‘Is Planning Bad for Business?’ by Inc Magazine
The Problem With Silicon Valley Is Itself
«What happened to irreverence, thinking outside the box, wanting to make a difference in the long run?» —Hermione Way, in TNW Entrepreneur.
‘Goodbye Habitat, hello knowledge hub’ in The Guardian
“As more of our famous stores close down, the high street can be reinvented as a place where we not only shop, but learn and do.”
“ Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. […] The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators […] ”
Essay II, Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson (19thC).
Making Money — Advice from Jason Fried [Inc.com]
“making money is not the same as starting a business”
“ An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. ”
Edwin Land (Polaroid Corporation)
