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I came across an article called “The No. 1 habit of highly creative people” by Leo Babauta.

In one word: Solitude

I immediately thought of things and theories related to happiness, creativity, greatness, success, personal suffering, I thought of poets, scientists, philosophers, writers, musicians…great intellects. I keep pondering about whether personal suffering is the single most important drive to success and creativity. I keep thinking about the connection between happiness and achievements, and thought of the fact that Mexico and Philippine are statistically considered the two happiest countries in the world, yet having un-proportional low impact on science, technology, business, art etc.. I keep thinking about what a man with dream should pursue: happiness or greatness? Or could there be one that unifies both. I keep thinking about the study showing the correlation between high intelligence and ultimate unhappiness. Is pursuit of happiness doomed for people whose ideal life should be spectacular, an ideology, an odyssey?

Understand Solitude and desire

Wikipedia has it – Solitude is a state of seclusion or isolation;

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.” ~Albert Einstein

Solitude is against human nature. Yet, solitude creates space for human to think. Solitude comes as a natural part when we are young, do not have family, no one relies on us, we live for our own being. We roam the society alone until one day we meet someone, form a relationship, a family, and life goes on. All of sudden, it’s hard to find your own space, let alone to think and create things substantial.

The kind of solitude when we are actually alone (or lonely) is different from the one that we purposefully seek out when we have family, circles of friends, and lots of social interaction. Even though I have clear idea of what to work on, the fear for too much solitude drives me to seek ways to satisfy youth left in my body: the desire, the temptations come knocking at the door. I find myself distracted by all kinds of parties, exotic resorts, beautiful women etc.. I feel the urge, the fire, sometime I let them burst out, sometime, like most of this memorial weekend, I forced myself to completely remove the part hour, turning off TV, make fresh hot green tea with some raw honey, open up curtain to let the breeze in, see the green branches swing outside my window, open up a notepad to actually CREATE. The kind of solitude created this way suppressed my physical desire, my desire for others’ attention and female touch and love, my desire to travel far and away and indulge myself in the bright sun and pouring rain. But it’s also the kind of solitude that gives me space to think and keep moving, finding creativity and getting things done. To create is to suffer. But if it gives back things that are satisfying to you more than just physical indulgence, would you mind to suffer a little?

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• The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People (zenhabits.net)

Building a vision is THE most important thing to do for an entrepreneur. A vision is a cause, a statement of your product (in larger sense, it’s you as the founder, inventor) that speaks directly to the heart of your users. No matter how big or small of a problem you aim to address, the clarity of your vision will make everything comes more naturally: mission statement, product development, marketing, etc..

Step 1: Understanding Vision

Everyone understands vision differently, I personally think vision comes in three forms.

1. Personal Vision: it comes from founders’ personality and behavior pattern. Legendary visionaries/entrepreneurs  like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sam Walton, all  found their calling because their non-failing pattern of  doing things their own way, Steve being the innovator, Bill being the problem solver, Sam being the one who is “for people”. Many generalist entrepreneurs found their vision by simply doing things they naturally are inclined to do.

2. Industry vision: it comes from deep expertise. Google’s vision is to “organize the world’s information”. A generalist can not build something like Google. They might be able to build Dell, but not Google. Google vision comes AFTER two Phd students founders discovered a new way for more effective search that was built on scientific research. Many technology companies with a B-2-B model were founded by industry veterans who have been around certain fields long enough to deeply understand the “pain”. These types of companies are usually started by researchers or industry veterans.

3. Opportunity vision: many companies were founded to solely target one narrow area, such as many online ad networks, facebook/twitter apps, even lot of iPhone apps. They are stripped down version of industry vision because it requires less industry knowledge, hard skills to get it off ground. Many social web 2.0 phenomenons were also products of such visionaries, including Digg.

Step 2: Find your own vision

Since finding vision is so critical for you to happily, rightly go on your entrepreneurial journey, you must find who you are, and what your vision could be.

Since I am still at the early stage of evaluating and planning my startup, I have thought about projects of all three types of visions. I thought about using my professional background (search engine marketing, web analytics), or academic background (mathematical modeling, data mining), I also looked at short term projects such as some twitter or facebook apps; In fact, I spent about 6 months last year building something off twitter API, could it be accepted by some people and maybe sell for half a million dollar, it very well could be if I continued. But I could not find the passion to continue, I could not find the reason “WHY” I was doing it, I quickly gave up that effort.

Today, I am focusing on being myself, learn from my own mistake, look at my past, behavior patterns to see what my “heart” tells me to do. The following is some of the findings (I am still searching, not finished yet)

1. I am not type A (aggressive) business man, nor am I a scholar.

2. I am easily influenced by my environment, more so, by my friends. In fact, most of my achievements (if any) I did it because some of “smart friends” did it before me and I didn’t want to fall behind. I am almost elevated by my environment, because of it, I gained confidence, I aimed higher, I obtained the desire to be original, inventive. Without environment and people who I am exposed to, who I know, who know me, who I admire, I would not be able to dream high.

3. I am an average person: meaning, I like attention, I am not a great listener, I offer unsolicited help but I know the boundary and limit, I can work harder but I am slightly lazy.

4. I am always optimistic (or laid back), I have become ambitious.

5. In real life, I am the “go-to” funny, party person among friends, coworkers, etc., in fact I might be easily a stand up comedian, IF, I don’t speak bad English, which I do. And I am obviously self-obsessed, and can be shallow…Arn’t we all?

6. I like to know what others think about me, in fact, I care a lot what others think of me.

Knowing who I am, Would it be nice for me to invent tools to facilitate my own personal growth? For example, making it easier to be exposed to the motivated environment, quality people? Would it be nice to know what others think of me and make it easier to grow to be better person? Whatever I am inventing, I want to invent tools that I feel deeply connected to, only then I can feel passionate about it and devote to it.

Step 3: Refine your vision

Enough about myself, if you are an aspiring entrepreneur, try step 1; Depending on your vision type, you might need to go through different “self discovery” for step 2 when you are looking for your vision. I think the key is to refine your vision constantly till you are fully convinced. This process may take just a spark, it may take months. Never give up, always pay attention.

Don’t forget, it’s extremely important to think your steps out loud, write them down, because it actually helps you organize your thoughts and get to where you want to be quicker. There is an old Chinese saying: sharpening your axe before cutting the trees.

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I asked Cyan Banister, founder/CEO of Zivity.com, what she thinks herself more of: founder or CEO? She said “first and foremost, founder, inventor…likes to create new things”.

When you start to think yourself as entrepreneurial “inventor”, you will start to add higher standard to everything you do with long term vision.

Along this line, I continue to discover and use the best web products (does not cost more money), following is just a list of a few. It’s not important for you to actually use these products, but it’s critical for you to understand it’s your job to discover the best, and learn from the best, and be the best that you can be.

Listen to Music: lala.com

I use lala.com almost exclusively to discover new music. The system lets you randomly discover music from other people, lala will then mix them up to play you non stop “random” songs, you can add them easily into your collection. When Apple (its vision is to change the status quo, and make us think different) buys a company, you know it’s a good one. Lala’s vision is to discover music differently. It fits in Apple’s vision, it also challenges Apples’ iTune platform, which in this case, it’s the status quo. Lala is the best, lala is the innovator.

Read books : Goodreads.com

I discovered Goodreads.com through its users who tweet ferociously. It’s the best social network for readers. Its vision is to “get people excited about reading”. It has an amazing book discovery engine and people are passionate of using it.

“Admire” people: formspring.me

Not actually. Formspring.me provides intimate, anonymous, totally controlled ways for people to ask each other questions. I find people are lot more willing to answer/reply you on formspring than on twitter. It has apparently “invented” something that twitter did not. Its vision is to “connect individuals”

Remember everything:  Evernote

If Google organizes the world’s information. Evernote organizes people’s life: your ideas, what you see, what you hear, what you want to say, how you cry, how you laugh. Every moment of your life can be jogged down, organized on Evernote. Its vision is clear, people love it.

It’s no longer easy to create another generic “social network” that millions people would adopt. Or is it? In the past 6 months, two “side projects” have captivated millions of people’s imagination, and continue to grow stronger everyday. We are not talking about 10k visitors/day, or even 100k/day, we are talking about an app pulling in 1million visitors on an average day. That is viral.

I am talking about chatroulette.com and formspring.me.

I am sure you have heard of them, and I am here to explore what we can learn, as entrepreneurs, about us, and human behavior in general from these two apps and find the common denominator and minimum requirements for any apps entrepreneurs are working on in order to achieve this level of success.

1. We love attention

Formspring.me puts individual in spotlight for anyone to throw questions at them. Human can be self-doubt, self-assured etc., but we love others to give attention to us. As Readwriteweb.com (lately I have not been a big fan for them)’s Jolie O’Dell puts it, it’s our “our deep and insatiable love of self-reference”.

2. We are curious

As human, we are curious about what is “next” for us. On Formspring.me, we are curious to see what the “next” questions or attention will be thrown at us. As askers, we are curious how far we can push the person we admire to answer my “next” personal question. On chatroulette.com, we are curious about the next person showing up in the webcam: the amount of suspense while the other party’s webcam is on and whether you two can have a “conversation” is incredible nerve racking, or ridiculous, driving us to want for more.

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

3. We like to be in control

On formspring.me, anyone can ask question to anyone else, who in turn can choose to answer or ignore any questions. On chatroulette.com, anyone can “next” anybody: that is the way how average human feels “empowered”: to deny or receive other human

4. We like odds

Odds is randomness. In real life, Odds to win something drive people to do stupid things. Chatroulette.com at its core is meeting “random” people through webcam. (what is the Odds to see some pretty women stripping, any straight male might think, for example.) Formspring.me lets you connect people through personal questions, what is the “odds” that s/he will answer my question (without knowing who I am, hahaha), you might think.

5. We like intimacy

Both chatroulette.com and formspring.me provide ways to connect two individuals directly on a personal level. And we love the closeness with people we admire or good looking funny people we don’t know.

6. We like it simple

What more to say, both apps can be built in a day or two for a barebone structure. But the key is: it’s very intuitive to use for any average Internet users.The UI flow could not be simpler.

7. We love ourselves, we love attention.

It’s the first and foremost human trait.  And it’s the most important lesson for us entrepreneurs to understand if we were to build a popular social apps.

We often hear entrepreneurs attribute their success to “gut feeling”. We often heard people persuade us “to listen to the heart”.  Have we ever wondered what the gut feeling really is, scientifically? It turns out, as Simon Sinek’s book “Start with why” explores, it is more of a biological fact than “feeling”. In fact he wrote the whole book and build a whole business to “inspire people to get inspired”, based on this biological fact. I have so far covered the first 6 chapters of the book and I can say this is by far the best business book I have ever read, beyond tipping point, built to last etc.. Why? Because it’s relevant to us entrepreneurs, and it’s actionable.

So, this week, the 4th week since I started the series “daily things to do as an entrepreneur”, I am practicing “gut feeling” to all my ideas and see which one sticks the most.

Step 1: Read “start with why” by Simon Sinek

Get the book “Start with why” and read it, at least the first 6 chapters. If you can’t wait for book to arrive, watch this interview with Simon Sinek to get a glimpse of what he has to say. To us entrepreneurs, building something “people want” and “trust” is the key. To get there, we have to start with the basic: set out to define our mission to see if it resonates with average people. Simon examined the way Apple defined/built its first iPod as “1000 songs in your pocket (wherever you go)” instead of “a mp3 player” (which is what iPod really is). It feels “right”, people hence love it. As entrepreneurs, we must find our mission.

Step 2: Finding your mission

I often hear entrepreneurs succeeded by developing something out of his/her personal hobby or passion. It intimated me a lot because I could hardly find any hobby that I am truly passionate about. But I am over it. I now realize that finding your startup mission or cause is different from finding your hobby or passion. We may never have a true passion or hobby per se, we definitely should and can find our entrepreneurial mission, ie. why we are doing our project, and why people should use thing we build. That mission has to be personal to average people, it has to strike people’s gut feeling, it has to “feel right”.

Step 3: Evaluate all of your ideas using “gut feeling” test

With “evernotes” iphone App, I collected bunch of ideas on regular basis, they started as “what it does” for people. But now I throw question “why should people use it” and see if the answer comes natural, feels right, before I even consider to spend time thinking about how and what to do to build them.

Step 4: Practice makes perfect

Practicing step 3 often enough, you will soon discover that entrepreneurial projects passing your “gut feeling” test all bear certain common traits. It’s no longer a matter of “if people would use it?” (because you will find people who like and use your product), it has become a matter of “how many people will use it” (or market size problem because your product may only address a small problem)

Step 5: Carry on

Once you have defined mission, everything else become crystal clear. It’s time to get down to work, finding partners, hiring, building, or DIY. It’s only the beginning.

I am having fun go through this steps, I hope it’s helpful for you as well.

Last Monday, I went to a popular venue in San Francisco called Elbo Room where a few bands took turns to play on stage. The first band’s members dressed all like rock stars, completely rocked out on their electrical guitars, they even had a girl on stage at any given time hitting a hand drum; it was exciting, it was very loud. I thought it was good but I couldn’t remember any songs seconds after. Everybody else present was also clapping, nodding, being polite. Moments later, another band was on stage: three guys all in plain clothes, seemingly all just rolled out of their sleeping bag. But the miracle happened a few short minutes later: the entire house rocked out, people were on their feet, people were singing after the sleep-walker like singers…the songs stuck in my head right away!

So, two bands: one was showy with full nine yards of techniques, the other band was simple but memorable. Which one do people choose? The latter.

I think entrepreneur ought to work hard to be like the 2nd band. Be the band that creates melody, not technique.

Contemplating

It’s about knowing yourself. Before picking the ideas, you need to think if you have strong vision about certain ideas/areas, or if you are willing to work on any ideas as long as you can become successful. Knowing you as a visionary or opportunist could bring a clarity to your struggle to success.

Idea

Create simple but powerful ideas. How do you know your idea is powerful? Talk to the people who you think could be your future users. Randomly choose 10 of them from your office, coffee shop, while you wait in line for a movie, etc. talk to them in plain English. If 80% of people think it’s very useful from your less 30 seconds of elevator pitch, you probably are onto something people want. Otherwise, move on to the next idea.

Standard

I mean: set up high standard. Just because idea is simple it does not mean you have to execute it to a lower standard. Always, always set up the highest standard for your product originating from your idea. Be the Porsche of your idea. Be the best that you can be.

Narrowing

I am talking about narrowing your options. If high standard means needing more resources to make fewer things right, then focus on the fewer. Don’t try to make everything right, because you will either stretch your resources too thin to create something with true high standard, or you will focus on getting more resources which will lead to possible delayed failure. And a perfect market for your idea does need good timing. Work on the purest part of your idea first, the essence that got you excited at the first place, create the melody for it, strike a tune, give them to your target users. You will quickly find if they like it or not.

Fun

Great songs makes us happy. If your idea is a great one, you should feel the fun creating, delivering it. If you are no longer having fun, time to stop and go back to first step “contemplating”, starting all over again.

To embark on a successful entrepreneurial journey, we must know who we are. Vivek Wadhwa had a popular article on techcrunch called “Can entrepreneurs be made” analyzing schools of thoughts on this subject.

I think there are only two kinds of entrepreneurs: visionary and opportunist.

What is a visionary?

The most memorable definition of “visionary” that I heard was a talk given by Ctrip.com (largest Chinese travel site) founder and chairman James Jianzhang Liang, a 39 year old man with a net-worth of $300+ million. In the entrepreneurial context, James thinks one sets out to do something because he has a vision. He then casually defined “vision” being something one gains from deep understanding/experiences within certain fields. As such, visionary is a person with a vision.  Because of the unparalleled domain expertise needed, Start-ups founded by visionaries usually are funded by high profile Angels or VCs and have longer cycle before it gets to profit or sustainable business model. Google, Aardvark, Twitter are visionary-founded companies. Paul Graham’s Ycombinator encourages entrepreneurs to start project that people want as if it’s “non-profit”, do not think about business model. Hence, Ycombinator produced many great technology startups with deep vision that aims to change the world.

What is opportunist?

Opportunist is a daydreamer, someone with a lot of ideas, restless, unsettled. If visionary is someone with superb intelligence and expertise, opportunist is somewhat plain in comparison, but could be relentlessly resourceful. Someone who is so motivated s/he will go to the end of the world, or skip all sleeps to seize an opportunity. Entrepreneurs who are opportunists often do not necessarily want to save or change the world. They started up due to sheer desire to make it better for him/herself, family, to be independent, or they stumbled upon an opportunity so good that they carried on and became a runaway success. Companies started up by opportunist usually do not have ground breaking technology, and often case, they were not funded by high profile VCs before they even reached profitability. VC’s money, if any, simply worked as a weapon to reach bigger economy of scale. “Lemonade stand type” entrepreneurs are usually opportunists. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Michale Dell (dell.com), Kevin Rose (digg.com), Gurbaksh Chahal (sold startup to become later valueClick.com, now working on gWallet), and many other non-technologist entrepreneurs in the tech fields created many great firms that make the world better place. Entrepreneur turned Angel Mark Suster thinks it’s critical to “Validate that you can make money before starting.” in his popular blog post “Why the ‘fail fast’ mantra needs to fail”.

Ask the question: Am I a visionary or opportunist?

You have to dig deep into you soul to find out who you are and go for the entrepreneurial path that suites you the best.

Entrepreneurship aside, I have long remembered what one of my math professors told me: “you are opportunist, I am confident you can find a solution”.  She was talking about the dilemma I was in back in 1999 when I got admitted into Stanford without any financial aid or scholarship, and she thought it would work out for me just fine. Easier said than done. I had never been a hard working good student and having Stanford accept me was a huge honor, I had no hope whatsoever to get any kind of scholarship. After working for the entire summer 1999 in restaurants and summer camp, I still did not have enough money to cover the book cost let alone the tuition and living expanse. Almost forced against wall, I approached 200+ professors at Stanford, only 4 replied back and I secured 2 interviews with them and got one job as research assistantship which covers all expanses. The rest became history.

Now that I pretty much figured out I am the opportunist type, Now what?

Evaluate and find the projects that speak to my “Opportunist” nature.

I had a LOT of mathematical training, I admired “visionary” and wanted to become one. I did not want to waste my “knowledge” learned from stochastic, probability, network analysis, optimization algorithms, decision sciences etc. Among the projects I was evaluating, I tended to lean towards the one that could “change the world” using these advanced methodology, connecting academia with reality. Little did I know, the gap between the two is beyond my capability, my “schooled knowledge” had become “sunken cost” that should not have been taken into consideration when I decided what to tackle. Instead, I should focus on the ones that people really want, maybe reproduce proven concept in different fields, because that suites me being an opportunist, that suits me being a non-technologist, non-scholar.

How to start your entrepreneurial endeavor: Be authentic, Be you.

Starting up requires a lot of preparation work: defining project, scoping project, finding partner (or not) etc. I find there is no one answer from others that is perfect for me. I find it’s absolutely possible to startup with only one founder through hiring programmers, given idea is not the only thing you can give your potential hire. To me, I don’t enjoy coding, but I am perfectly capable to define project scope, product spec, database modeling, logic flow chart. Unless you are super lucky to find one superb hire who does everything for you including archetype, you will need to translate your idea into something feasible. To be authentic, it’s critical that you truly are solving a problem in real world that people want AND you deeply understand.

As an early stage entrepreneur, I made ton of mistakes, the biggest one was to jump into conclusion too quickly and only resulted in delayed and painful failure. No matter how much people emphasize execution, a solid idea is still number 1 thing. It’s like talking about maintaining a great marriage after you picked the wrong girl (or guy): at some point, crap will hit the fan. I have learned to spend the time to evaluate  the right idea before executing it. And I find doing following is hugely helpful.

1. Discuss

If you have friends who are successful entrepreneurs, don’t be shy, ask them for help and input. It’s even better if they are close friends. I had a tendency not to discuss business with friends. Only after I geared into “entrepreneurial desperation mood”, that is, the determination to become successful entrepreneur, I started to throw my ideas at them and see their responses. To my surprise, many of my “revolutionary ideas” are not that relevant. But you have to open up and discuss with people to know that. As what Gurbaksh Chahal told Andrew Warner, “One key thing is, don’t think you have a revolutionary idea – that’s just the starting point. 1%. 99% is all execution. Go out, and get it done. And get it done masterfully.”

2. Focus

Let’s face it: your time is limited. One hour more spent on unnecessary things is one hour less on getting to your goal, provided you are well balanced and have a rested mind. So, what do I do: I cut half the time I read techcrunch or other technology news site, focus on doing things that are directly beneficial to bringing my entrepreneurial mission to life.

3. Adopt

Instead of reading news about which startups are getting how much venture funding, try identify a few popular ones and adopt them to your daily use. Only when I started using new popular products on daily basis, I was able to “feel” the essence of it, in some cases, think about how I can learn from them. Following are just a few software products that I have been using in the last week.

1) Evernote (iphone app): it lets me record my thoughts wherever, whenever, however I want. In a rainy Sunday morning while I was still in bed checking iphone emails, a few ideas struck me and hit “voice” and recorded them. I often use it to capture the momentary inspiration while walking, eating. Evernote is also a beautifully made product, great execution.

2) Disqus: it’s a blog comment product.

I have not been a big fan for widget product. But that is the presumption that an entrepreneurial mind should not have. After seeing both Andrew Warner and Howard Lindzon use the product, I gave it a try. It is the social commenting made easy, you will be notified with people reply to your comment, especially the author you commented on. It’s “comments” delivery service. Another perfect example of what Aardvark did for Q&A world: bringing your product to where users live, be it email, IM, Cell phone etc.

3) Try your friends’ product

If your friend made a successful product, you should be the first one jump into using it and see why it’s popular.

4) Try 2 to 3 other new products each week

This past week I also tried using TwitCasting and Foodspotting, although I am not sure how big they can grow, I am so very surprised by how well both products are executed. Using them is like a dose of fresh air.

4. Simplicity

Stick to the rule of 30 seconds elevate approach. See if you can use one sentence to “pitch” your idea to others and get a “wow” answer. If at the end of 30 seconds, they are like “hmm, uhhh…”. It’s time to go back to drawing board.

5. Dare

Dare to scratch your entire idea or product. Before pulling the trigger to make something, strive to “make something people want”.

6. Timing

Timing is important. When you or someone brilliant spotted a new industry success, think about overall the key success factors and if you can incorporate some of the attributes that are part of the proven success. Each year there are usually a few hugely successful products coming out of nowhere followed by ton of copy cats. (Groupon, remember?) I am not telling you to be a copy cat, but do something that much smarter than just being a copy cat. There is hardly any revolutionary or completely new ideas, almost all ideas are related to each other one way or another. But the key is the few, the proud. Take a look at chatroulette.com, and think what you can learn from it.

7. Leverage

Leverage is a beautiful word, it comes with the value. If you create value to others, you have the leverage. If you do someone a favor, you have the leverage. I am not asking you to think about “leverage” before interacting with other human being. I am saying when you do something you care deeply about, such as entrepreneurship for me, I find it natural to comment on others’ blog entry with more thoughts in it, and as human being, we love to know what others think of us, hence love to see my blogs or products or whatever are getting others’ attention. And when I find your comment valuable to me, I feel the necessity to communicate with you. This often creates unparalleled opportunity to open discussion channel between celebrity bloggers and new comers, even nurturing a healthy professional relationship. That is the leverage. You should create social leverage as a human being, and your product should even more so on focusing on creating social leverage to other people. Only this way can we “make something people want”.

As a side note, do you think iPad will be a hit? Just ask yourself a question: would you want one? If so, it will be a hit!

Since last week, I have done a few things differently from norm (or my intuition) to keep my mind occupied, focused and clean. A clean mind is a clear mind with more focus. Early entrepreneurs tend to have lot of ideas going on at the same time, I did following and found they are incredibly helpful for me to be upbeat and focus.

1. Focus

I already said I am working on a personal recommendation system. It sounds easy but it is a profound field that challenges many scholars. By using both Google, Aardvark, Linkedin etc., I have discovered many folks who have similar interests, I am also able to have deeper understanding about the field, and how mathematics can be applied

2. Talk (to smart people)

Usually, Entrepreneurs are loners, in some sense. They keep heads down and hide themselves in the cave to crank out great things they believe in. Is that enough? Since last week, I have started to chat with smart people more. It was not anything serious. But the results were astounding. The wisdom from combined brain power is exponential to ones own.

3. Organize

Starting from my home page at igoogle.com, which was a big mass of blog feeds from variety of blogs I subscribe. It kept growing and getting messier everyday, to the point that I don’t really know what I am looking at. So starting last week, I have re-organized igoogle feed reader into three columns with thought leaders’ blog focusing on entrepreneurship, technology trend, and niche fields. After a few glance, I immediately have a healthy dose of entrepreneurial insights, technology news, and new development in the niches field. I find it sets me in a great mood with more confidence and happier attitude. I recommend everyone do this exercise

4. No rush

Entrepreneurs have sense of urgency, they are the people trying to get stuff out of door and “make it”. I used to be always like that but it has not really worked. As Simon Sinek, the author of Start with Why said to me “I firmly believe that struggle is the single greatest source of innovation. And entrepreneurs are the ones who innovate from struggle. Entrepreneurs solve problems then share the solution.” and struggle is the reason entrepreneurs do what we do, it’s not for money, it’s for the “why” or the “cause” that are personal to ourselves. And when one does things to the right cause, one can not rush it. As I pointed out, the biggest struggle these years for me is to find the right people to do the right things, and this struggle is leading me to what I am working on.

5. Team

Wisdom is an exponential function of number of intelligent, experienced individuals. Instead of working alone, searching and inspiring people to work with you, even it’s a struggle to find the right people. If you have not found the right people, read what other successful entrepreneurs are doing. Andrew warner’s mixergy, and Paul Graham’s website, in particular the incubator Y-combinator that he started, are great places to get inspired, stay focused, maybe even stay connected with potentially like-minded people.

6. Read

Entrepreneurs tend to think they are smart enough to do things on their own, they don’t have to go to classes, they don’t have to read books. They are the ones who write the history, isn’t it!

The short answer is “No”. Last week, I broke my reading norm which tends to be fictions, bought two books from Amazon (not kindle version, I still love the feeling of flipping the real pages next to the fireplace in a cloudy day), one is Simon Sinek’s “start with why”,  the other is Paul Graham’s “hackers and painters”.

I think above things are what I did slightly differently from what I usually do on weekly/daily basis. And I feel good about it. So, I encourage you do a few things slightly differently, get some new flavor injected into your life, I think you might like it.

I am at a stage to start a new journey toward entrepreneurial success. I figure it’s a good time to look back at the past: a history of my own may have better lessons in it for me. Following is a quick glance about how unsuccessful, in-authentic, I had become, and my quest to to where I want to be.

1999 – 2006: from top of the class to a dying industry

School is over-rated but I am always grateful to my school: Stanford, where I regained confidence. Nevertheless, I graduated from EESOR program in 2001 without having any clue what I wanted to do with this degree and my life. The dot com era just went busted; there were hardly any jobs left. One day, my friend who was in the linguistic Phd program referred me to a company called Google which was looking for search quality raters to improve their search technology, I signed up and immediately started working on contract base till early 2002. I did not hate it but certainly did not love the job of reading bizarre search queries and results.  I honestly could not figure out why my boss, who was also my neighbor AND a Phd in biochemistry, would want to work as QA manager for Google, which was still fairly unknown among average people back in 2001. I sensed the opportunity rising to stay in Google as full time employee in its quality assurance group, but I left for a later becoming the stupidest journey I ever embarked on in my life: working for the dying US technology manufacturing industry till early 2006: 4 years of my youth! I blamed this on myself and the horrible H1 visa policy toward foreign students like me: should that manufacturer turn down my H1 visa application, I would have stayed at Google and become at least “quadruplet millionaire”.

4 years went by just like that. It was boring as hell! I could not take the manufacturing industry anymore. All I wanted was to get out, but getting out was (still is) difficult when you were tied up with a company because of H1 visa!! You cannot move around freely. It was suffocating.

Colorful 2006: Become a first time entrepreneur

Long story short, there was this big day in 2006 that I jumped ship.  Life is too short, I had become far behind in my career comparing to people of my age to start all over. I wanted to make it up, quick. What would be better than doing startup?

With no job, no money, I started a website in Mar. 2006: It’s kind of shameful for me to admit but it was about online dating: I called it 2above.com, with a hint that 2 is better than 1 (Lame! I know, LOL, but Isn’t that true in life, that 2 is better than 1?). The other inspiration was from site like 37signals, it felt like it was a trend to have a number in your domain name. And 2above also means to be above average, to be the best that I can be.

Well, 2above’s “pay-per-email-to-your-potential-date” model did not work out, although I am still damn proud of the launch party I managed to pull off at mina111 on Mar. 12, 2006, a day when snow fell on bay bridge. It was so cold, but still people lined up to see what this fashion party brought by a startup called 2above was all about.  200+ people including all of my two dozen friends in bay area attended the party filled with talented designers, beautiful models, and I did it with ONLY $400, $900 paid to Mina111 gallery, $500 ticket income. All of the models and wonderful people in our party were volunteers. They were awesome!  (Thank you again, if you are one of them and happen to read this)

Nevertheless, it did not work out.  Months later, I changed that into a group dating site called groupmingle.com (current groupmingle.com has no affiliation with me whatsoever): not only the site itself got some decent traffic within a few weeks after I worked day and night posting information all over the Internet. I also used it to start a great professional mingle group on meetup.com, thanks to the organizer who took over from me, it has become one of the popular professional singles meetup groups in bay area, and it still is today.

Bootstrapping my own website startup was difficult, I did not have expertise, certainly did not have much money thanks to the previous job, still I managed and worked with a dear technologist friend/advisor of mine on the side to set up another venture focusing on video social network just in case groupmingle does not work out. We managed to get a $30k+$20k total $50k angel investment waiting for us to sign the term paper, in exchange of 60%+ equity. Yes, laugh all you can, but that was the only offer that we got for a video streaming project. It was like a term sheet to bankruptcy from day one. We turned it down without hesitation.

I continued to hang on to groupmingle project all the way till the end of 2006, completely bootstrapping without any other side job or sponsor. During that year, I perfected my windsurfing skills whenever I felt stressful, hopeless.

2007: smell of startup money and cruelty

Finally, that day came: the day that all entrepreneurs are scared of – running out of money. Luckily, I was able to convince a search engine advertising startup who was just acquired for $60 million by a much bigger company (allow me to remove the name of it), to take me as who I am and I became their search platform’s product manager. The job got routine-like pretty quickly, although looking for a way out, I did learn a lot about search engine marketing which turned out to be very useful and rewarding experiences.

Another classic day of entrepreneurs came into our shiny office in a beautiful day of San Francisco bay area, rather suddenly, 9 months into the job. The parent company that acquired us sent its CEO and a whole management crew from NYC, fired almost everyone on our team which they just acquired, founders included. The only ones left were a Caltech physics PhD and a MIT graduated director of engineering, allegedly critical to “optimize our revenue platform”. Read this, there is no magic in earning customers’ trust, hence “revenue”, the hedging technique used in search engine bidding war was rather not high tech at all, as the result, achieving sustainable profit from that technique is just not sustainable, much like real estate bubble’s burst. The firing was anticipated, but certainly sooner than everyone thought it would come.

2008 to today: Embracing a growing brand

One thing I am good at is to be optimistic. I never really got nervous when I was out of job, or running alone a startup project; I remember my professor told me that I am an opportunist. I know it sounds better when it comes from an investor, business partner rather than your academic advisor. When I was thinking about what to do next, I took the time to fly my aging parents to bay area all the way from China, showed them this country that has become my 2^nd home.

With deep understanding about search engine marketing platform, I soon got two companies competing  to hire me, while an online shopping company offered me better compensation, I chose the company I have been with till today: fitness anywhere, and moved up to my beloved San Francisco from also beloved Palo Alto. Fitness Anywhere (the inventor of TRX brand) turns out to be an amazing company, an amazing story. And I am lucky enough to witness how a great brand (called TRX) is being born and grows to be a world class one. It teaches me every day the right things to do to grow a startup (Fitness anywhere was funded by one person in 2005/6, now we have become the go to choice for fitness training).

Life has become slight easier and more enjoyable when you have pleasant work environment, friends, comparing to running a venture alone. But I know the real fire inside of me is to become someone who can create. The success of our founder convinces me more: create something valuable for the society, become a fearless person who dares to chase his/her dream, no matter what circumstances are.

2009: Getting onboard with current technology

Starting from the end of Mar. 2009, I started to use this blog to analyze Twitter applications, its eco system and twitter.com itself, which in many sense resembles Google in 1999/2000 in its growth rate. Twitter has grown extremely fast for its simplicity, stories-sharing and viral effect: it’s so easy to share information in real time. As the twitter’s real time information network explodes, it comes with a billion dollar question: how to better use these gazillion tweets? Hence the twitter’s app world is exploding, with a few twitter apps/websites announced each day. Who are the signals, who are the noises? Who are in for the long run with good cause, who are in for the short term, and quick bucks?  For about 4 months time, I did a lot of research about this eco-system, had tons of interviews with notable or nameless twitter app developers which resulted many blog entries. Around summer time 2009, this blog was getting a couple hundred visits a day. And I have become confident about what type of web applications can become sustainable success.

It’s time to strike out. Yes, I am throwing it out there about what I am working on. Yes, I need your help, you, brilliant engineers, and brilliant business guys!

And confident I have become, I am ready to strike out again. This time around, I have been through a lot more in my life, had and still have ton of problems that are personal to me that I want to find solutions for, and of course, I am more experienced about what web entrepreneurship is about. With social media reaches its tipping point in 2009/2010, I feel the timing is right to do something that utilizes this unparalleled momentum and technology available to create something that simply works and give more power to everyday people.

Yes, I am in the game of building a useful recommendation system to connect people. This system will not solely rely on either human or machine, but it’s smart enough to offer manageable recommendations for people to enjoy their life more and connect with each other more.

Thinking back, I am still proud of full ride research scholarship I earned at Stanford business and medical school, working with world class mathematicians and medical researchers. I have gained a little bit exposure in the applied mathematics areas and consider myself a mathematical inclined entrepreneur at heart.

But, I am not a great software engineer, and I am not sure if I am a great marketer. I figure: instead of figuring out stuff on my own, I rather become more social and open to society, let talented people in to become better at what we do to build something useful, influential to the society we live.

I will continue to use this blog to share entrepreneurial insights. I sincerely welcome entrepreneurs, bloggers and engineers to contact me without hesitation to share your insights and stories. I will be gladly publish your opinions should it become obviously beneficial to the circle of entrepreneurs, hence humanity.

And finally, my vote to most inspiring to me

Most inspiring entrepreneur: Neil Patel

Most inspiring startup: Aardvark