Week 01 2022
The start of a new year is always marked with freshness. New ideas, new goals, new plans, new habits. Some people make it stick while some find it hard to stick over a few days, weeks or months. As an entrepreneur one has to set a system and structure to achieve the vision, goals and plans. Although it is not guaranteed that setting a system will ensure accomplishment of the desired results, but it’s like a map which one uses while driving, enabling tracking distance covered and distance remaining to destination. Using maps also shows the best route, duration and the destination, but it is not solely responsible or guarantees for arrival at the destination.
The world has gone through real rough times over last couple of years, but with hope, patience, focus and executing on plans, we have reached a better place today than we were at when the mayhem began. From being clueless about a virus to having the vaccinations out in over a year’s time and ensuring its effectiveness is indeed a magical story of hope, patience, focus and executing successfully on plans. Practical wisdom has also played its part in navigating these uncertain times, taught us that the risks cannot be eliminated totally but can surely be managed. A fresh start to the new year coupled with learnings from 2021 to all. Here are a few more stories I came across this week that are inspiring from the world of entrepreneurship.
Welcoming Change
The pandemic has enabled each and every one of us to experience new thoughts, new things, new ways of working, new mindsets, new places like to work from home, use new technologies to communicate from the comfort of a couch, all of them being a welcome change to many and maybe an unwanted nightmare to some. The way we live and work or the way we approach our lives and our work now has definitely changed, even if we happen to go back to working from our cubicles, we still will be carrying a lot new learnings along, combine it with what we had learned pre-Covid for a better post-Covid. Change is constant.
Talking to strangers
It may sound crazy, but you never know, which conversation with a stranger might lead you to accomplishing your goals. Mastering the Art of Talking to Strangers, can boost mental performance, besides the benefits of networking which Joe Keohane details in his book The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World. Georgie Nightingall Founder of Trigger Conversations hosts events and workshops that help people have meaningful interactions with strangers.
A True Entrepreneurial Success Story
Sridhar Vembu built Zoho to enable opportunities for the rural youth to enable rural development. He strongly questioned why people had to move to urban centres for opportunities. Starting small, being bootstrapped and focusing on solving the customers problems has ensure the company the success it deserves.
Michael Dell opens up on how he built a Billion Dollar Business and the launch of his new book Play Nice But Win.
Attract Your Ideal Customers
Entrepreneurs must focus on serving their ideal customers, as serving all is not worth it, it dilutes the energy and efforts in serving the ideal ones. According to Jeffrey Shaw an ideal customer is one who will be greatly served by who you are and what you have to offer. He also hosts a popular podcast Creative Warriors and is the Author of Lingo: Discover Your Ideal Customer’s Secret Language and Make Your Business Irresistible.
Conversations Entrepreneurs should listen
How Silicon Valley Biases Startups to do a lot of Dumb Stuff with Rand Fishkin
Unleash the Hero in you with Kevin Brown
While we are all use to looking for heroes on the outside and stories of heroism on the outside, we all have a hero within us. Kevin Brown is the creator of The Hero Effect a simple philosophy that distinguishes extraordinary companies and people from the ordinary. Extraordinary is within us, Ordinary is ingrained into us from the outside.
The Power of Subconscious Mind in Building Brands with Leslie Zane.
Build a Network to help build your Business – Lori Harder
From High school teacher to CEO & Entrepreneur – Kirk Cooper
Grow your business for free with word of mouth marketing – Jay Baer
Origins of The 4 Hour Work Week – Tim Ferris
Making Climate Change accessible to non-English speaking populations – Sophia Kianni Founder Climate Cardinals
Using Creativity and Humor to get anyone’s Attention – Jon Buchan
A Hollywood Heroes Entrepreneurial Journey so far
Ryan Reynolds launched Maximum Effort a marketing agency with George Dewey, when they had to run a campaign to gather excitement for Marvel Superhero movie Deadpool. Since then, they delivered many viral hits for many projects, ensuring customer interest or engagement through creative storytelling. The pandemic themed ad for Match dot com is a classic example.
A Hollywood Heroines Entrepreneurial Journey so far
Bethenny Frankel rose to stardom with her role in The Real Housewives of New York City, founded Skinnygirl a lifestyle brand and BStrong a disaster relief initiative, is also the author of several self-help books. Frankel shares some smart time management tips for busy entrepreneurs, one being the habit of stacking, which involves grouping similar activities together to save up on ancillary time. Entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs often dangle with multiple ideas running in their heads, for which Frankel offers to shed the fear of failure and move with speed over as many of those ideas as possible, it ensures time is not wasted over a few and in a short time without the fear of failure one is going to validate the ideas effectively.
Amongst the above there are other habits that one can cultivate to maximise their time use, it’s just about giving it a thought whether a particular activity is in line with some productive steps towards the ultimate goal.
Make my house for the work from home trend
Mustafa Johar and Husain Johar launched Make my House in 2016, a platform that provides construction and interior designs for existing and new homes. The goal of the platform is to make professional services available across geographies and solve the problem of lack of time for busy professionals in the metro’s.
EV Infrastructure trending
While EV’s are beginning to make a presence in the auto sector, but a major cause of concern remains around lack of EV infrastructure in the country. Noida based Uznaka manufactures EV charging equipment, EV charging station set up and support e-mobility services.
Finance
Everything is always taken care of while one is a dependent. Once we graduate and get a job or start a company, we begin to feel the power of finance in all ways. FamPay is a finance app that helps everyone below the age of 18 to understand money matters.
Innovation in raising money for charities
The traditional approach to raise money for charities use to be around holding events where people would go to and buy something of interest in an auction, the proceeds of which would go to the charitable cause defined during the event. Then came ecommerce and the web2.0, where you find companies like TOMS shoes and Flex Watches which donated either a pair of shoes for every pair sold in case of TOMS and a part of the revenue from the watches sold to a charitable cause. Now with web3.0, we see transparency in the whole process through digital smart contracts, enabling the giver to clearly see where their money is going. CharityPops NFT a Decentralised Autonomous Organsiation (DAO) has built a brand and a community that leads to validation of the concept and also gives the users the power to decide what piece of art or other goes on auction and what charities get funded.
Innovation in Food Packaging
Scientists have developed a biodegradable, antimicrobial food packaging that could help increase fresh foods’ shelf life by days. Lab experiments with the packaging showed its resilience when exposed to increased humidity or enzymes from harmful bacteria. The packaging releases natural antimicrobial compounds that can kill common fungi and bacteria such as E. Coli.
Another company tackling the problem of food waste is Full Harvest. It runs a digital spot market for surplus or imperfect foods that enables buyers to source it from the producers.
Innovation in Chip Design
A new semi-conductor designed by IBM and Samsung Electronics uses a vertical transistor architecture that has the potential to reduce energy use by almost 85%.
Technology a game changer in navigating covid times.
Innovation in reducing Plastic Waste
Plastic Energy has developed a process for advanced recycling of plastics that could not be recycled previously and would normally end up in a land fill or burnt. The process converts the plastic waste in to food grade plastic used in the food packaging industry.
Innovation in Online Payment Services
UK’s largest BNPL (buy now pay later) provider Klarna has launched a browser extension that enables shoppers to choose a flexible payment option with almost every online purchase. The browser extension also adds coupons and cashback offers to purchases automatically, saving consumers time and money.
Green Shipping
While global shipping is a major industry, it also took a hit with the countries closing its borders and restricting movement of goods. Now with things crawling back to normalcy or the new normalcy, the need to rethink our ways of working and living have been refined, by adding the important factors of caring for the planet and climate change in our decisions. Jim Hagemann Chairman of Maersk, is leading the effort to decarbonize shipping by 2050, he shares a plan to convert green electricity into green liquid fuel to power vessels in a process called “power-to-X”.
A French company Airseas has developed a parafoil sail called as Seawing that is deigned to be installed and cargo ships. The 500 square meter Seawing deploys automatically at a height of 200 meter above sea level, and helps propel the ship forward, helping save on fuel and energy.
Intrapreneurship the way forward
While big mnc’s such as google have set aside time for employees to pursue their passions, one day in a week. Intrapreneurship is a not a new concept, but going forward it surely is going to be trending in a lot of companies, once the companies realise that employees want more control and meaning to their work and goals.
Personal Project Progress
After a long break from farming, mainly due to reasons of scaling up through partnering with growers and other similar strategies that didn’t work out, the new year has started with a bang, with getting 100% seeding on all the 70 pots of spinach.
Little Snippets of Learning
There will be a thousand reasons to quit during the year, but just one solid reason to keep trying.
There will be days of super energy, super creativity, hence do strike when the iron is hot.
Time is finite, we all have the exact same number of hours in a day and exact same number of days in a year.
Success is a lousy teacher. Success is better a journey than a destination. Failure is the pillar of success.
Being Creative is internal, getting our creativity validated is external.
