Yuli Ziv fashion meets social media and tech

My latest article on the future of search is now on Mashable. Check out the full read and join the discussion. http://mashable.com/2010/04/29/google-search-wont-dominate/

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This is a special birthday post to myself, which I’m writing after having one of the most eventful and toughest weeks ever. To give you a sneak peek – finalizing a huge business deal for my company, planning a new social media campaign for a big client, working on a TV show format with major producers and on top of that seeing my beloved dog of 13 years, who made the journey with me from Tel Aviv to NYC, fighting cancer and eventually making a decision to put him down. It was a tough week… but despite the very sad parts I felt very alive every moment of it, experiencing the highs and lows fully, and embracing each moment. It made me think how much my way of experiencing life changed in the past 3 years, since I stepped on the entrepreneurial path. Now I truly believe this is the only way to live, of course if you are willing to experience those raw and intense moments that make you feel fully alive. It does require a certain courage, but that courage won’t come if you wait for it. To quote my favorite author - “courage in the path is what makes the path manifests itself.” I thought about the list of things that drive me every day, and make me feel alive:

1. Your “highs” are so good, they make drugs look ridicules. No drugs have managed yet to duplicate the feeling of creating a dream and achieving it. It’s the only experience that proves us we have control over our own destiny, and the only way to experience it, is living it every day. Can anything compete with that feeling?

2. You replace “Thank God it’s Friday” with “Thank God it’s Monday”. When working in the corporate world I noticed most talks among colleagues surrounded around the weekends. From Monday to Wednesday the most common question would be “How was your weekend?”. Then from Wednesday to Friday it would be replaced with “Do you have exciting weekend plans?”. So essentially your entire life would be focused on making your weekends special, and work becomes that time in between you have to “serve” in order to enjoy them. As an entrepreneur your life suddenly becomes one big flow, where you have an opportunity to enjoy every moment of it, without dividing it to weekdays and weekends, not even to mornings or nights.

3. Your parents have no idea what is it that you do, and they stopped trying to get it a while ago. While it might sounds like a potential issue, I see it actually as a sign of being on the right path. If the previous generation would get it, you probably won’t be called the next innovative startup. Many of our parents also don’t come from the Generation E (as in entrepreneurs), the idea of doing what we do sounds unjustifiable risky to them.

4. Sometimes you cry like a baby, mad and loud. If you don’t have moments of complete helplessness, emptiness and desperation you are probably denying them. I’m not saying you should create those moments, but it’s ok to be honest about them and accept them as part of the flow.

5. You often find yourself imagining most embarrassing outcomes, like living on the streets or becoming a call girl or boy. You might not be that threatened financially (we all have alternatives), but in a weird way the idea of selling your sexual services for money appeals to you much more than a corporate job. After all it keeps your independence. It doesn’t mean you will actually do it, but playing with the idea in your head makes it seem like not such a big deal. It makes you go back to your startup reality thinking there is nothing to lose.

6. Your fear of heights and other phobias disappear, as you realize what you do every day is much scarier. Let’s face it, failing your company and losing your life savings or investors money is much scarier than falling from a high cliff with a bungee cord.

7. Your friends circle becomes more entrepreneurial, because you find less in common with people who are not. I’m not trying to elevate one lifestyle over another, but the truth is you probably have much more subjects to talk about with your friends who are entrepreneurial or at least are working independently. Partially because most of your life and subjects you talk about evolve around your company and being entrepreneur.

8. Your passion is contagious and attracts people who need recharging. When you live an entrepreneurial life, you live it fully and with passion (most of the time), because you know once your passion ends, your company does too. You probably produce more energy than you realize and other people could benefit by simply being around you or talking to you over a coffee. Spread it with generosity.

9. You feel like a superhero once in a while. When you are building your path and things happen as you plan them, sometimes it feels like magic. You feel like you are having special powers that make things work, and it doesn’t matter if you imagine yourself as a Superman, Batman or a Wonder Woman. I personally love the image of a flying Chinese martial arts warriors, style Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon J

10. You recognize other superheroes and attract them to you. In our world superheroes don’t wear capes, they look just like others. But only someone who is fully alive can spot another human being with similar traits in the crowd, even if they don’t wear the superhero cape. When both meet, the magic is multiplied.

Thank you all my readers and friends who follow my thoughts here. Your support plays tremendous role in what keeps me fully alive, everyday.

As always, would love to hear about your experiences via comments or tweets @yuliz.

Let me start with a personal lesson: for the majority of my entrepreneurial life I’ve been focusing on “making history”. My It Things is priding itself in being the first ever user-generated fashion magazine democratizing this highly hierarchical industry, Style Coalition was created to bring together independent fashion publishers and promote better industry standards and ethics. All have large, “history making” goals.

It wasn’t until last year, when we run out of money from our seed round, I realized that our focus better be shifted from making history to making money. It was a wake-up call that made me stop repeating “I’m not a sales person” and instead finding my own way to sell (which did not include cold calls), and eventually turned my business profitable. It’s still far from making millions most startups dream about, but the revenue graph keeps showing exponential growth. And it happened only because I shifted my focus from making history to making money.

I simply had no choice, because the worst thing I could imagine happening was me quitting. When I see other people and startups quit, it makes me wonder what would happen if from day one they were focusing on making money, and not creating the next Google, Apple, or AOL, in worst case…

There is something about the startup culture that makes us dream big, and it’s definitely a positive thing, but it also has a catch, because it causes us to overlook opportunities for creating real (maybe not huge) revenue channels since the very early stage.

To make things worse, the phenomenon is definitely widely encouraged by the VCs with the following statements and rules:

“If you are not planning to be a 500M dollar company in 5 years, you can’t even seek venture capital.” How many companies you know are in that range, AND got there within 5 years?? Yet this is what we keep hearing, and that’s why we ignore small revenue opportunities early on – after all they aren’t going to help us make it to half a billion… The truth is, they do help you build a business and have clients for the days when the money runs out and your investors run away…

“You have to have a 5 year plan.” Having a plan has great advantages, and definitely ensures you get somewhere, but a 5 year plan is totally useless exercise these days, when technologies change not every decade, but every year. By focusing on a 5 year long “big dream” we are missing everyday opportunities, which might be small, but very real.

“You need to target at least a billion dollar market.” This statement alone leaves lots of niches untouched, and encourages innovation only in certain areas. This also creates trends and over saturation in the same space. Do we really need Foursquare AND Gowalla? While competition is a healthy thing in a capitalism environment, I tend to believe that if half of this innovation was channeled into “non-trendy” niche markets our lives could be improved much more.

“You have to be a leader in your space.” This world is full of successful businesses that are not brilliant or revolutionary, or talked about in press every day, but they do a great service. They make their founders happy, and generate revenues sometimes as big as those of the “leaders”. If every business was a leader in their space, we would live in a world without competition, and eventually innovation.

“You have to solve a problem.” Does Apple solve a problem? Even though not having an iPad is a real problem for some of us, the truth is most of us simply doesn’t care.

“You have to have patented or proprietary technology.” In the age of open source and the fast paced development environment it’s almost silly to think that technology alone will make your company a success. After investing lots of resources in the top technology you might find out that your vision was wrong or your business model had major flaws. Building a technology that can be monetized from day one forces you to think about what can actually sell versus what could be cool to build and make history.

I believe these are the main points that mislead many startup founders on their way. I keep seeing startups shutting doors, founders going back to old corporate jobs and dreams crushing only because the money in the bank run out before they made it BIG, made history. While in fact, if they were focusing on revenues from day one, many of them would be running today perhaps medium sized, but their very own profitable companies.

Unless you can afford to make history, maybe you should try to make money first…

Leave a comment or reply @yuliz.

After reading the NY Times article on Why are so few women in Silicon Valley? and all the reaction posts talking about the importance of women support groups and women-only venture firms, I have to express my opposing point of view, with only hope to provoke some thought among women and inspire them to take a risk.

The problem with women organizations. With all the good intentions of supporting women, these groups make more harm than good by accentuating the issue and essentially separating women from men. I truly believe that the only way to change the current imbalance between male and female forces in the tech and entrepreneurial communities is by encouraging women to become more active within those communities, and not by creating their own, women focused groups. Our energy should be spent not on “supporting” and “empowering” each other, but on the active integration within the male-dominated groups.

The role models issue. We keep complaining about lack of female role models – what’s wrong with male role models? Most of my business skills I learned from men and I am honored to have them as my mentors. As long as a person can inspire you and give a solid advice, it shouldn’t matter if it’s a male or female. Why do we need to see other women making it happen in order to convince ourselves we can do it too? Look at successful men around you and ask yourself why can’t you do the same?

Who to blame? I truly believe we have no one to blame but ourselves. Sure, there are stereotypes and I’m the first to confess about pitching countless VCs and not being given a real chance by most of them. You know what was the only thing I wished after every VC meeting I had? I wished they’ve seen more female entrepreneurs before me. That would make my job so much easier. Perhaps if they were used to seeing women founders they would be less outraged by the fact that I was wearing a dress and not a suit.

What can you do?

Perhaps if more women applied to speak on the panels at tech conferences, there would be more great female speakers.

Perhaps if more women joined groups like NY Tech meetup, the startup community would be more balanced.

Perhaps if more women thought they can build a successful company without having a male co-founder there would be more female founders.

Perhaps we are just too afraid to step out of our own comfort zone, while it’s so convenient to blame the glass ceiling.

Perhaps we are too afraid to admit that the only people we can blame for the male-dominated startup community are ourselves and our girlfriends. We are the ones who are guilty for not aiming high enough, not believing in ourselves and for allowing men to convince us in our own stereotype.

There is no better time than now to prove this stereotype wrong.

Leave a comment or reply @yuliz.

One thing I learned growing up during a communist regime and witnessing it collapsing during my teenage years, is to question everything. When every single belief you were taught by your mentors proves to be wrong, it alternates your way of thinking. And even though sometimes I wish for having happier childhood memories, I realize it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Why? Because it taught me to never trust the path someone else built for me, and create my own.

Some call it non-conformism, others call it self-discovery. No matter how you define it, this quality is the most essential for an entrepreneur. Realizing that everyone else’s path simply doesn’t play any role in your own development is crucial for breaking free of rules and stereotypes that may stand in your way.

This might be the reason entrepreneurship is never taught in academic settings, and there are no 10 easy steps to become a successful entrepreneur. Everyone has to build their own path, and in order to succeed this path has to be different from anyone else. This is the only requirement. When you are ready to put aside every way of living you were taught so far, only then you are able to fully live and create. Your way.

Make an experiment. Take some of the rules written by an authority on the subject teaching you how to achieve X. Now research for examples that prove the total opposite. I’m sure you’ll be surprised.

For instance, look at some of the rules of creating a successful startup. Paul Graham has plenty in his very insightful but full of stereotypes article. Now take this specific statement:

“When and if you get an infusion of real money from investors, what should you do with it? Not spend it, that’s what.”, writes Graham. Advice like this couldn’t be more generic. I don’t need to do a full research to come up with plenty of startups that succeeded by aggressively taking over the market. It really depends on the company and timing needs to be carefully considered.

Now my favorite part is when Graham describes who is the best candidate to start a company:
“So who should start a startup?”, he writes. “Someone who is a good hacker, between about 23 and 38, and who wants to solve the money problem in one shot instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life.”

The only thing that’s missing here to make a full stereotype is perhaps adding a “white single male” to the list. Mr. Graham, how about “Who should start a startup? Every human being who has achieved a freedom of thought”? I like that better.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Paul Graham is a very smart man and I do find lots of his articles inspiring, but I make sure to filter it through my own lenses and question everything. Just as I did now. I bring him here as one example of someone who’s very well respected in the entrepreneurial community, but might lead you the wrong way if you don’t question his advice and make your own conclusions. Something you have to constantly do as entrepreneur.

There will be always people with different opinions than your own, and your biggest test is to trust your vision in a way that no one can affect it. The only person that can change it is you, and only after you proved to yourself otherwise.

So the question is who do you look up to as an entrepreneur? If every single source of authority is questioned, who leads you on your path?

Here is the tough truth: YOU. Entrepreneurship is a lonely business, no matter how many business partners or employees you have. At the end of the day it’s all you. If you feel the need to have a strong co-founder, it means you are not ready to discover your path and take responsibility. Maybe not yet.

As tough as it sounds, there are however few things that I found helpful along the way of my personal entrepreneurial path:

Create support system. Be constantly involved in a community with other entrepreneurs, online and offline. This defuses a bit of the lonely feeling, when it appears every once in a while.

Be constantly inspired by other people. Find people with a vision, who can communicate their thoughts in an inspiring and uplifting way. Be careful with people who preach or think they know the right way. There is NO right way.

Surround yourself with optimists. Don’t listen to anyone who ever used the word “over-optimistic”. Optimism is your drug of choice as an entrepreneur, and can be used in unlimited quantities. No one has ever died from optimism over dose, but people do die from depression all the time.

Don’t think about money as your only fuel. Your imagination is the real fuel. You just need to use it to attract the money.

Replace problems with challenges. I dislike the word “problem” because of its negative aura. The word “challenge” makes me excited. We might be still talking about the same thing, but the approach to challenge is more playful.

Worrying is praying for the worst. I borrowed this from my yoga teacher, and it’s one of my favorite quotes I’ve ever heard. Worry is one of those lies that make you believe that imagining the worst case scenarios in your head makes you “prepared”. Wrong! It only increases their probability.

Stop doing check lists. Especially those that tell you what you need in order to build a successful company/ raise money/ make money / get buzz/ attract users, etc. Here is my problem with check lists – they always have unchecked or missing items. Because once everything is complete, there is no more need for a check list. The truth is you are complete, as you are. At every single moment you have all that it takes to make things happen. When you do a check list and find missing items, you create excuses for why things are not happening.

Think about it.