10 Stoic Quotes On Ancient Knowledge To Motivate You

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1/ The first 18 months of starting a company is often life or death. I must've made 5 different companies that each failed within 9 mo. 😭 Each time the company failed I figured out what I could do better. Eventually startup #6 got to $40K/mo by month 18. Here’s what I learned...

2/ Stay focused! Ignore things that are a waste of time: meetups & conferences, meetings with no clear agenda, fundraising if you're not fundraising, reading lots of tech media articles, etc. Every week should feel like significant progress in the first year.

3/ Your first 5 hires will be the difference between life or death. Choose carefully. Be picky. Many of the things we do at the company still are a result of those early hires' legacy. Have fun as a tight knit team. It will change & evolve as you get bigger so enjoy this moment.

4/ Growth may be flat for the first 9 months. It's gonna be okay. Almost every company has experienced this: Airbnb had to sell cereal in-between, Slack failed as a gaming company first, Tesla sold only 147 cars after 6 years! You probably won't be an overnight success either.

5/ In the beginning, do customer support yourself. You will learn a lot about why your product sucks. I did 5,000+ support tickets when it was the two of us. Delight customers & fix things fast while you learn. It will help you build an amazing intuition about your customers.

X : Our executive team is concerned that we need to up our game in order to out innovate Amazon.
Me : Do you map?
X : Yes
Me : Like this?
X : No. What's that?
Me : A map of a tea shop.

X : Why is that a map?
Me : Long story, all to do with how space has meaning. To keep it short, maps help people to focus on user needs, the components involved, to communicate missing components and scenario play ideas like staff becoming robots.

Me : They’re also good for measuring and managing capital flow, making investment decisions, removing bias and getting rid of duplication.
X : I don’t see how that helps with innovation?

Me : Well, innovation is a tricky word because we use it to describe many things. If you’re talking about differentiation with the adjacent unexplored then you’re experimenting in the “uncharted” space e.g. immortality with magic provided by the special custom built kettle.

X : That sounds like nonsense.
Me : A lot of what people think will be the next great innovation is nonsense. Actually, most of it is. That’s the nature of the uncharted space, it’s experimental, high risk and generally results in failure.
X : We need more reliable innovation.

One thing that goes unremarked about Wikipedia: the vast majority of the content was written over 12 years ago—which means (given turnover) that the editors dominant today were not directly involved in that creation.

Put another way, the editors who built the dominant nodes in this network...

...have little overlap with the ones who made this much more recent managerial flowchart.

Internet time runs at hundred-fold speed—the difference between the people who painted what's in the Uffizi, and the people in charge of keeping those paintings from deteriorating. Very different tasks, and (one presumes) very personalities as well. @PaulSkallas?

SRI THIRUNARAYANA PERUMAL, MELKOTE (KAR)

Known as Dakshin Badri, Thiru Narayanapuram is one of the four famous Swayambu Kshetrams, the other three being Srirangam, Kanchipuram and Tirupati.
The presiding diety is Cheluva Narayana Swamy/ Selva Pillai/ Rama Priyan.

Once, Sri Rama gave his aradhana murthi of Sri Ranganatha, to Raja Vibhishana on his request. So he was left without a murthi for his daily pujas. Brahma is said to have provided the murti of Selva Pillai to Rama who later passed this on to his sons, Lava and Kusa.

When Kusa’s daughter married a Yadava prince, this murthi moved to the lunar dynasty from solar.

It is said that the utsav murthi got the name Selva Pillai due to Sri Ramanuja.
Once, a Sultan took away this murthi and Sri Ramanuja went in its search to the Sultan’s palace.