Thinking Like A CEO And A Founder Can Help You Be Better At Your Job

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I’m in the fortunate position of being both a founder involved in the day-to-day operations at Trulia, and the CEO. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing, and I realize that my work provides me with a relatively unique perspective. Some situations require me to think more like a CEO, while other situations call for the passion of a company founder. But I think appreciating both perspectives can help you in your career.

As Trulia grew rapidly over the years, and we began to seriously think about a public offering to address the large opportunity, I began to seek out the advice of various mentors, including people on our board and other trusted, experienced executives. I wanted to know if I should look at my job differently, as we approached such an important juncture.

One piece of advice that stuck with me was that once Trulia went public I would have to be able to think more like the CEO of an established company in addition to the approach I learned as company founder. As founder, I had been keenly interested in the culture of Trulia and its products since the beginning, and I remain so today, but the transition of the company involved new demands in my role. Growing to meet the new challenges of the job is something that almost every founder will meet. And because of it, as startups grow it’s not uncommon for companies to hire a CEO from outside the company who has a proven track record leading public companies or is especially adept at specific things the company needs, such as securing funding.

My mentors and others have helped me immensely in learning how a CEO manages a company versus how a founder might typically lead a startup. Ultimately there are pros and cons to each approach.

As I’ve gone through this process, it has made me think about the two skill sets, which aren’t mutually exclusive, but are certainly distinct. Each approach contains important perspective that any employee can incorporate into how they look at their job and career, especially in the larger context.

I generally associate the following attributes to successful company founders, but I realize that there is variation based on the individual.

• An overriding obsession for the product: This is something that can drive many product managers and engineers wild, but founders are often heavily invested in the product. Steve Jobs probably best exemplifies this.
• Deep understanding on and influence of company culture: Founders have been in the trenches since the beginning, so they have unique insight on the culture as well as the company’s challenges, its employees, and its relationships with partners and customers. The founder can apply deep contextual understanding and cultural knowledge to situations and decisions.
• Emotional commitment: This attribute can frankly cut both ways. Sometimes it’s best for an executive to let go, and sometimes extra determination is needed to get things done. You can count on getting this from founders.

I generally associate the following attributes to successful CEOs.

• Willingness to make hard decisions: Successful CEOs need to be able to quickly make hard decisions. These can make or break a company.
• More logical than emotional: CEOs need to have a heart, but they have to stay focused on the facts, and make decisions accordingly.
• Ability to prioritize and focus: As a company grows, opportunities and challenges expand exponentially. Successful CEOs understand where to focus their attention and how to leverage their teams to move the business forward.

Unfortunately, there’s usually not one answer for the lens you should be using to address a work challenge. I’ve found that it’s useful to think from both perspectives during the same day or even the same meeting. But the exercise of thinking in this manner in itself should help you as you take on the daily challenges of your job.

Like   Comment  Share  TweetME   By: Pete Flint

Why We All Need Visionary Leaders

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Click Here To Start Your Vision

I have always felt as leaders with global experiences and exceptional connections we have a responsibility to share our journey and energy to inspire future generations.

In recent years, I’ve focused my time and energy on sharing Burberry’s brand, culture and digital transformational lessons. Speaking to different sectors - from banking to insurance to educational institutions - I hope in some small way to have shed light on ideas that could greatly impact the companies and communities they serve.

Just under a year ago, I had coffee with someone I greatly admire - the visionary digital educator Sal Khan who is single handedly disrupting a sector desperate for revolution. Very few leaders have what author Jim Collins calls ‘big hairy audacious goals’ but with their simple mission to make education accessible to everyone, Sal and Khan Academy could change the world.

Not dissimilar to Bill and Melinda Gates who want to eradicate disease, Scott Harrison ofcharity: water who wants to provide everyone with clean drinking water or Mark Zuckerbergwho dreams of connecting the world, it is so rare to find a great leader with a gigantic global vision and such passion and clarity as to how to resolve it.

Hopefully, this is not the first time you're hearing about Sal or Khan Academy. Perhaps you’ve seen his TED talk, visited Khan Academy or read about it in various business publications. In short, Khan Academy is a not-for profit with the goal of providing free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Through leveraging digital and great video content, they’ve created one of the most innovative companies in the world that will transform one of the most underinvested and fundamentally valuable foundation to our future generations’ growth and development.

I had the honour of speaking with Sal and his incredible team in San Francisco last spring, sharing lessons on brand, leadership and how to nurture a culture of creativity and innovation. I left that day with even greater respect for the clarity and intensity of their vision and the passion with which they execute it.

At Burberry, we have always said that our greater purpose is to create not just a great brand, but a great company. Through the Burberry Foundation, global teams unite to share key learnings with young people in communities where associates live and work to inspire, unlock and nurture their creative confidence. As the company prepares for tomorrow’s changes and challenges, one key measure of its success will be how many lives around the world are touched and transformed by the power of its performance. It is humbling to think our story could inspire the Khan Academy team to continue to do what they already do so brilliantly.

Education is a global issue for all of us. We need all companies to get behind Khan Academy and contribute to making sure every person on this planet has the opportunity of education.

Congratulations to Sal and the Khan Academy team!!!!!!

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The Power Of Being A 'Nobody' by: John Hope Bryant Influencer

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Being born into this world a nobody just might be the best thing that ever happened to me.


The world undervalues the economic nobody, and grossly over-values the wealthy somebody. On this point the world is wrong.

You have nothing to lose when you are a nobody. And because you realize that 'you can’t fall from the floor,’ you’re not all stressed out about whether you are going to actually fail at something or not. Everyone born as a 'societal nobody’ has the exact same middle name, inserted sometime after birth, which translates roughly: DO SOMETHING.


I had lunch today with the CEO of Sapient, a $1 billion plus company that was started by two young guys with a few thousand dollars on their credit cards. Now they employ 12,000 people worldwide and the company is publicly traded.

A nobody is often under estimated, until they aren’t. Below is my update on a 20th century standard.

First they will ignore you. Then they will criticize you. Then they will try to copy you. And then you will win.

When a self-knowing economic nobody wins at life, they almost never forget where they came from. They are often the kindest, philanthropic, most positive, confident (yet understated) people you will ever meet.

Crazy as it sounds, it is often the off-spring of the one who created from nothing that then somehow gets it in their heads that they’re some kind of a big deal. And it is this other thing -- of becoming ‘important,’ or seeing oneself as a ‘so-called somebody,’ that is a really dangerous thing. It can ruin you in ways that poverty never could.

Here are some recent examples of wealth that came from near nothing:

Jan Koum, the CEO and co-founder of WhatsApp, once lived on food stamps before Facebook made him a billionaire. 

Starbucks' Howard Schultz grew up in a housing complex for the poor. 

Born into poverty, Oprah Winfrey became the first African American TV correspondent in Nashville. 

Luxury goods mogul Francois Pinault (think Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent) quit high school in 1974 after being bullied for being poor.

Oracle's Larry Ellison dropped out of college after his adoptive mother died and held odd jobs for eight years.

These brilliant and hard working folks were not sitting around thinking deeply about how great and noble they were. That had no time for any if that nonsense. And they weren’t publicly profiling either; trying desperately to look a certain way before a bunch of strangers. They weren’t sitting around, endlessly choreographing their every next big move in life. They just moved. 

They worked, hustled, did what it took to win. They were focused on getting the job in front of them done, rather than simply looking good for those standing in front of them.

But most of all — they just never took themselves seriously. Never. To quote my friend Quincy Jones, “people should never come down with a case of seriousness.” Take life seriously, but never take yourself too seriously. Taking yourself seriously is the kiss of death. My mentor Ambassador Andrew Young once told me that “men fail for three reasons: arrogance, pride and greed.” Enough said.

I have a lot of experience with people who really believe that they’re a somebody, and they’re really exhausting to deal with. It’s a lot of work dealing with someone who takes themselves so seriously. And if they don't change, their doomed. As the age old saying goes, "the first generation makes the money. The second generation spends the money, and the third generation often loses the money."

People tend to feel sorry for the poor, but I actually feel sorry for my rich friends' children. I wouldn’t exchange my life, growing up struggling in South Central Los Angeles and Compton, California, for the privileged lives of my wealthy friend’s kids for all the tea in China. 

Young people who grew up believing that they were ‘somebody’ are suffering from at least four distinct disadvantages in life. 

(1) They never learned how to ‘suffer for the good.’

(2) They were more often than not spoiled rotten, which makes it harder to value a dollar, or even hard work and sustained struggle.

(3) The ‘entitlement’ problem. This is a misguided sense that success is somehow owed to some, which in turn causes you to take your foot off the gas in life and just coast. A perfect work day is then defined as in late, long lunch, and leave early. I always wanted just the opposite of this. Still do. I love to work and to make my own way. Every single day.

(4) Too much private school-only air. Private schools have their value, but if you never went to at least a few years of public school then in my opinion you are really in trouble. Public school is where you learn how to deal with difficult people, diverse environments, and challenging situations. Just like life itself. 

People who believe they are ‘somebody’ are doomed, precisely because they believe they are somebody. A so-called nobody has none of this needless baggage.

Those who have a nobody’s mentality actually have what they need to win, right from the start.

I remember asking Ambassador Andrew Young’s gardener back in 2009, how the global economic crisis was impacting him. He said in response, “I was poor before the crisis, and I’ll be poor after it’s over. It's my depressed rich friends who have all the problems. I feel just fine.”

Or when I went to see my mentor, Dr. Cecil “Chip" Murray, as a young man starting out in business in Los Angeles. I wanted to know ‘why folks were following me,’ and I wanted to know how I could manufacture and replicate even more of this feeling people were getting, so I could get even more attention. His response as usual was brilliant. “If you got it you John, you wouldn’t have it.” 

Murray continued, “…if you got a thing, you would then be conscious of a thing. If you were conscious of a thing, you would be self-conscious of a thing. And if you were self-conscious of a thing, it would be an act, a put on. Not real." He concluded by saying, “John, you’re not suppose to get it. People are following you because you’re real. Because they believe you’re authentic. The minute you get it, you also lose it. Just keep doing you John. Keep being you.” DO SOMETHING.

The power of being a nobody is an asset everyone on the planet owns from birth. It’s your birthright, to fulfill your God given destiny. It’s the new definition of freedom, called self-determination.

And you thought someone calling you a ’nobody’ was an insult.

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A $32,000 Startup That Was Sold for Millions

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I meet entrepreneurs all over the world who think that venture capital is a prerequisite for starting a company. They write business plans and ask for introductions to venture capitalists. I tell them that they should instead bootstrap their startups. That what would have cost millions of dollars a few years ago now costs thousands.

Think about it. Today’s laptops have the same processing power as the minicomputers which cost millions of dollars in the 1980s. For storage, you once needed server farms and racks of hard disks. Today you have cloud computing and cloud storage—and these are cheap.

You can also bootstrap hardware companies like Nest (which Google acquired for $3.2 billion). Sensors such as those in our smartphones would have cost tens-of-thousands of dollars a few years ago. They now cost practically nothing. Entrepreneurs on shoestring budgets can build smartphone apps that act like medical assistants and detect disease, body sensors that monitor heart, brain and body activity, technologies to detect soil humidity and improve agriculture.

Entrepreneurs can also participate in the genomics revolution (here is an article that explains this). It cost more than $100 million to sequence a full human genome about a decade ago. It now costs $1,000. Genome data will soon be available for millions, then billions of people. Anyone anywhere can write computer code that compares one person’s DNA with another; learns what diseases people with similar genes have had; and analyzes the correlation between genomes and the effectiveness with which different medications or other interventions have treated a given disease.

There are similar advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing and many other fields.

In 2011, I mentored a startup called Beat The GMAT that figured out how to rebuild and bootstrap itself on just $32,000. The company was acquired last year for millions of dollars by Hobsons. Its founders Eric Bahn and David Park say they are really enjoying their financial freedom and are glad that they took the risk. It wasn’t easy, but was the most incredible experience they have ever had. Below is a version of an article I wrote for Bloomberg BusinessWeek about how they did this. There
 are valuable lessons that you can learn.

After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1999, David Park founded discussion forum service Coolboard.com. It took more than a dozen software developers, product managers, and quality assurance staff 18 months to build the company's core technology. To fund it, Park raised $10 million in venture capital, of which $4 million was spent before the company was launched. It went down in flames in 2003, a casualty of the dot-com bust.

In 2005, Park partnered up with his friend Eric Bahn to launch his next business, MBA admissions social network Beat The GMAT in San Mateo, Calif. Rather than take venture capital, they limited startup costs, spending just $119,000. The site steadily gained traction, but they were nervous that technologies like Facebook and Twitter would make it obsolete. So they chose to make it obsolete themselves.

In 2011, the team decided to rebuild the site and the company. Their goal was to create a social network for business-school applicants that had features such as aggregated GMAT-prep and MBA-admissions news; a way for members to connect with one another; and social gaming elements to keep members motivated. It makes money advertising test prep services. Amazingly, the new site took only four months and cost just $32,000 in total.

I was skeptical when Park and Bahn approached me last year to ask for advice on business strategy for the site. They were convinced they could build a bunch of sophisticated technologies in months—on a shoestring budget. They were determined not to raise venture capital. I had doubts. My two software companies had taken years and cost millions. Yes, technology is much easier to build today than it was during my tech days. But I meet Silicon Valley startup founders every week who tell me about their ideas and their plans; and no one says they can build their products for less than the cost of a BMW 328.

But Park and Bahn did. How? To start with, they crowdsourced the design. Instead of hiring a bunch of marketing people, as tech companies usually do, they asked their user community for volunteers to help conceive a new site. Then they selected a handful of the most eager users and trained them on the basics of Silicon Valley–style product management. Next, Park and Bahn needed to find a designer. They used 99designs.com, which hosts design competitions, for a two-week contest that attracted hundreds of designers, yielding a design they used as the theme for the new site. The contest, prize, and designer's time cost $9,200.

They broke up Web development into two tasks: front-end engineering (turning design artwork into code) and back-end engineering (making the code actually function). They built their technology on top of WordPress, phpBB, and Drupal—free, open-source platforms. Front-end engineering usually requires sophisticated coding done by contractors who earn as much as $100 an hour. Instead, the Beat The GMAT team turned to a service called PSD2HTML.com, which converts Photoshop design files into HTML and CSS code. The cost of this service, at $160 to $220 per Web page, totalled $4,500. For back-end engineering, they hired four developers from Hungary and Ukraine on the outsourcing website oDesk. They paid $15 to $20 per hour. The back-end engineering cost $18,000 in total.

In software development, things don't usually go as planned. Park and Bahn had their share of missed deadlines, buggy code, and product problems. Outsourcing always makes things more difficult, because developers are in different time zones, speak different languages, and don't always understand what is expected of them. It took many sleepless nights and lots of caffeine to surmount these obstacles.

In the result, a company that later sold for millions cost its founder just $32,000 because the relevant technology now is so inexpensive. The ability of entrepreneurs to build sophisticated technologies so cheaply in the Web world is even foreshadowing the marginalization of venture capitalists. Software startups often spend the first few months of their existence polishing business plans and pitching to investors. They can instead be working with smart people all over the world, focusing their energy on perfecting their technologies, as Beat The GMAT did. When a law-school grad (Park) and a sociology graduate student (Bahn) can build successful technology companies, the notion that website founders need computer-programming backgrounds too is outdated.

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ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR CS5 TUTORIAL""" By: Derek Banas

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In these two video’s I show you how to use Adobe Illustrator CS5. I created this tutorial because of a request from DeathByKazillion.

Adobe Illustrator Tutorial & Review Part 1

Here I cover every new feature available with Illustrator CS5 and provide a review.

I cover specifically:

1. Bristle Brush
2. Perspective Tool
3. Creating Custom Brushes
4. Live Paint
5. Live Trace

If you like videos like this tell Google To make me extra happy, feel free to share it

Adobe Illustrator Tutorial & Review Part 2

Here I show you how to convert a jpeg or any image into vector art / EPS with Illustrator CS5. I also cover:

1. Rasterizing Images
2. Live Trace
3. Live Paint
4. Live Paint
5. Convert Muli-color Image into Vector Art
6. Working with Text Tool’s
7. Using Gradients
8. Using Strokes
9. Using the Knife Tool
10. Cleaning up Vector Art
11. And a bunch more in just 9 minutes

Adobe Illustrator Tutorial & Review Part 3
Here I show you how to use every other tool available with Illustrator CS5. I also cover:

1. Line tools
2. Shape tools
3. Layers
4. Colors
5. Text
6. Art boards
7. A bunch of random tip’s and trick’s

That’s All Folk’s

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The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Up Our Lives"""

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Let’s talk about the two basic mindsets that shape up our lives: a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.
A fixed mindset presumes that our mental ability, character, and creative skills are constant givens that can’t be altered in any significant way. Additionally, success is confirmed by that innate intelligence, which is actually an evaluation of how those givens correlate to an equally fixed standard. Moreover, evading failure at all cost and striving to succeed no matter what turn into a way to maintain the belief of being smart or at least skilled

On the other hand, a growth mindset flourishes on challenges and views failure not as a proof of being poor mentally or of lacking aptitude but as an encouraging starting point for growth and for enhancing our potential. A great deal of our behavior, the way we see success and failure, both in a professional and a personal context, and finally our capability to be happy springs from these two mindsets which we manifest in the earliest stages of our life.

Here’s How You Can Be The Best and Shine This Year

So, for those of you who are looking to shine this year and be the best you you can be, here are ten tips for how to achieve it.

As we embark upon a new year, there are so many ways to view our lives and the chances ahead of us – new opportunities, old regrets, the same cycles people go through every year. However, if you want to change this year-  if you want to shine this year as a human being and as the best version of yourself – then you’re going to need to work at what makes you tick. What makes you happy, what makes you sad, your strengths, weaknesses, your days and nights. Everything about yourself has to undergo an examination if not a re-evaluation.

1. Drink water every morning.
One of the easiest ways to shine this year is start every day off by drinking plenty of water as part of your early morning routine. The reason? Drinking water first thing in the morning has an incredible set of health benefits, including purifying the colon and allowing better nutrient absorption, aids weight loss and better metabolism, helps give you glowing skin thanks to flushing out toxins, and helps balance your lymph system. In short, it helps rejuvenate your system and helps you start every day off in the right way.

2. Change your morning routine to suit you.
Everyone has a morning routine and one of the ways to shine this year is to go through it and modify aspects of it that can be best suited to you. After all, everyone’s different and has their own way of working things in the early hours. If you always feel like you need more sleep, go to bed earlier or use a sleep calculator to find out when you should be going to bed to work with your circadian rhythms and cycles. Add in time for a morning shower if you always feel better with one but never have time. Make sure you have breakfast. All these little things can have a big positive effect on your morning routine and wlll help you shine this year.

3. Make an active effort to see the good around you.
The world is, surprisingly, a good place despite the bad things going around and not a lot of us actually choose to see. Let’s face it, with the news creating catastrophe and calamity in every news item, some pretty seriously twisted ideals of perfection and beauty being pushed on us, and a general feeling that cynicism is the standard, it can be hard to be optimistic and someone who sees the silver lining when everyone else sees an oncoming storm. If you want to truly shine this year, look for the positive. Surround yourself with positive friends and be more considerate to people going through their own situations, so that by looking for the positive, you transfer it forward and become the positive change yourself.

4. Exercise at least three times a week.
Exercise is a bit of a hate word around people – it brings back memories of school gyms and forced running and mandatory activities. However, choosing to go out and engage in something that gets your body moving is absolutely a fantastic thing to get involved in and something that is certain to make you shine this year. Find the kind of exercise you like to do, rather than immediately going down the gym even though you’ll hate it. If you like slow rhythmic movements, take up tai chi or yoga; if you like high-energy stuff, check our Zumba or aerobics. There are more than enough exercise options out there for you and if you really want to shine this year, it’s a good idea to go and get your body moving.

5. Get plenty of sleep.

This one cannot be stressed enough – sleep is key. All of our culture seems to be screaming, ‘you don’t need sleep, you can go for longer’ – but to do is to put into jeopardy your physical and mental health because sleep is an option. Sleep is a legitimate physical need that will cause you severe problems if you don’t get enough. A way to truly shine this year is to take care of yourself by engaging in some sleep hygiene. Make your bedroom the best kind of sleeping environment possible for you. Sweet dreams.

6. Make sure to dance at every opportunity.
A bit of a cliche, perhaps, but let’s be honest- people who shine through life are always ready to dance at the drop of a hat. Dancing is both ridiculously simple and complex – it’s a true expression of human emotion and the ability to translate our physical body into a joyous or mournful or reverential proclamation. Plus, dancing has incredible health benefits as it helps you keep fit, works your legs and arms through rhythmic movement, and releases endorphins into the bloodstream providing an entirely natural rush. Whenever you find the chance to, put on your favorite kind of music and dance to it. Dance with a friend, dance alone, let your body do the talking and feel yourself begin to shine.

7. Try something new at least every month.
There’s nothing that kills as quick as routine nor boredom – so the paraphrased saying goes. One of the most enjoyable ways to shine is to keep putting yourself out there more and trying new things as often as possible, within a minimum of one new thing a month. There’s an entire world out there waiting for you to experience it – a world full of fantastic films and delicious food and astonishing plays and beautiful music and joyful dance and great TV. People who shine always try and broaden their horizons and their own perspectives, so make sure you give into that childlike curiosity with that new album, new restaurant, new film. After all, you might just find a new favorite.

8. Visualize your happiness.
If you want your happiness, you’ve got to visualize it. See it, imagine it. Work through it so it becomes an approachable goal rather than a lofty ideal which is as unattainable as it is ill conceived. We create our own happiness and shape our own lives so if you want to truly shine this year and be the best version of yourself that you can be, is to decide what makes you happy and either cultivate it if you have it, or work towards it if you don’t. Create a vision board, a Pinterest channel, a sigil – whatever you need to try and plan out your happiness, use it. The future is yours.

9. Stop comparing yourself to others.
Comparing your life and yourself to other people is one of the most toxic and self-destructive things you could ever do to yourself as it undermines your own experiences and your personality and erodes away at all the positive achievements you’ve managed to accomplish throughout your life. Simply, you need to finish with both the negative and positive comparisons to other peoples’ lives in order to focus on your own. Comparisons lead to negativity, anger, jealousy and gossiping which not only makes you look more petty and negative, it also stops you from focusing on your life and your goals. Cut the comparison and truly shine this year as an example.

10. Stop the ‘should have’ thoughts in your life
We’re constantly being told what we should have and shouldn’t have in our lives. Designer clothes, cars, the latest electronic products, haute cuisine and expensive coffee, everything is construed as a status symbol, an indicator that the person has met untold requirements for being seen as desirable. That is an incredibly toxic way of viewing life and viewing ownership, because if you live your life by the ‘should haves’, then you will be forever chasing trends because what is a la mode always changes, always evolves.

Your life, however, should be based on the wants and needs that you yourself cultivate and desire. It’s not the end of the world if you want the latest tablet or phone or a cup of coffee or shoes – that’s fine – but what you need to assess is why you’re wanting it and then go off your instinct as to whether or not it’ll make you happy. If it makes you happy, go for it. If not, then find something that does make you happy. And then you’ll truly shine this year, and the years to come.

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