:Michael Anuzis

I love being an Entrepreneur in 2011… As some of you may know, I’ve been working on an entrepreneurial startup for the last 1.5 years on the side from my day job (which I also love, by the way!)

A year ago, my partner and I planned on launching a quick/dirty version of our site in “two weeks” to test the concept. We had no idea that after we actually sunk our teeth into it and decided to develop it right it’d take us closer to 1.5 yrs… In this post, I want to share some lessons learned along the way, some things I love about the business, and some things I love about being an entrepreneur in 2011.

- I love that we’ve taken the time to hire a solid development team. We recently interviewed 10+ development companies via e-mail, interviewed the best three via Skype, decided to hire all three for a test project for two weeks, and planned to keep the one with the best balance of communication, code quality, progress made, professionalism, etc. — compared to our first two developers who were hired with practically no interview, this last due diligence definitely paid off.
- I love that we hired a Quality Assurance (QA) professional who helps identify bugs, documents them, tracks their resolutions, and verifies they were fixed. My partner and I used to do this ourselves with our first developer: we’d spend hours documenting all the bugs and we’d receive a list back from our developer marking everything as “FIXED”. We’d go to verify and see that 33% were fixed, 33% were re-developed incorrectly, and 33% were marked fixed but left completely the same… this was extremely draining and hurt our momentum significantly… having a QA professional help with this has been a complete lifesaver.
- I love that my partner and I can manage the development effectively in 30-60 minutes/day in the evenings, with 2-3 hour deep-dives on the weekend.
- I love that our team is global and efficient. We have 6 people in 4 time zones. (me in Japan, my partner in the states, our QA professional in Shanghai, two developers and a project manager in SE Asia)
- I love that our PM has a great attitude, is available almost 24/7, speaks fine English, is professional, but still throws in winks and smiley faces in the daily reports. I also love that he works free, and is complimentary with the development team.
- I love that our QA professional absolutely crushes things. She is freaking amazing at finding bugs and documenting them with screenshots, steps to reproduce, expected behavior, actual behavior, etc.; when we first hired her for a 2-3 hour test to see what she could do, she found and documented 8-9 bugs, one of which was a critical security vulnerability that could have put us out of business had we launched without catching it.
- I love that the developer who won our hiring contest fair and square is based out of SE Asia. The per-capita income of their country was under $2,000 in 2009… we paid our developers more than twice that last month alone. I love globalization, and the thought that these intelligent folks acquired the skills necessary to compete in the global market place and leapfrog the local economy…
- I love that we’re paying our QA professional and developers fairly… it’s stellar to be working with true professionals from around the globe for such reasonable, win-win rates.
- I love we adopted Redmine to manage our project, track all our bugs, feature requests, development roadmap, etc… we used to use various spreadsheets/etc for this stuff, but Redmine is actually designed for the purpose… I also love that Redmine is free.
- I love that we use SVN for version control (also free). There are obviously tons of benefits to using version control, but believe it or not we were using FTP a couple months ago and whenever we wanted to move code from development into production we’d have to mirror all the files at once and it’d take an hour. Now we can move only the updated files and it takes just a few minutes.
- I love that we won our first customer a few months ago, and did so in a theoretically profitable way (I won’t elaborate!)
- I love that although our website wasn’t completely ready for launch at the time, we were able to service the customer effectively, and are now working to further automate things.
- I love the fact Gmail and Skype enable free webcam chatting with my partner in the states, and staff in other countries.
- I love that oDesk.com tracks our team’s Work Diary and takes screenshots of their screen a few times per hour so we can verify that an hour billed is actually an hour worked.
- I love that my employer was open to my starting an unrelated side business, and that when I went to HR to ask about it they were willing to approve it in writing (that says something great about the times we live in).
- I love that my partner and I were able to start everything without seeking venture capital funding. Yes, we’ve had to make major investments, but it has been do-able.
- I love that free & open source development frameworks like CakePHP, Kohana, CodeIgniter, etc. are available to help us retroactively improve the quality/stability of our code and implement MVC for a reasonable development expense.
- I love that building a company like this is equally as fun and even more satisfying than playing video games.
- I love that sites like TechCrunch.com, VentureBeat.com, Techonomy.com, TED.com, Quora.com, etc., have an absolute explosion of exciting business innovation available on a daily basis that serves as an endless source of inspiration.
- I love that in addition to my current business, I have 5+ other ideas I’d love to turn into businesses some day that are likely to be ridiculously more lucrative and exciting (although significantly more challenging to execute).
- I love that the pace of innovation is accelerating to an almost unfathomable rate.
- Although at this point we are still far from making back the money we initially invested, I am confident and hopeful that over time we will, and then I’ll probably love that too.

Well, that’s more than 20 things I love about being an entrepreneur in 2011. Times are good indeed.

NOTE: I have intentionally not revealed what our business is, and don’t plan to. Please don’t bother asking, and if you somehow find out, please don’t share it broadly. We’re trying to keep a low profile while we scale up since we don’t have the investment resources to scale as fast as other companies might. My intention for writing this post was to share my positive outlook on entrepreneurship in 2011, share a few lessons learned, and perhaps inspire others to try something similar. Thanks, and good luck!

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It’s been about a year since my last post. I’m heading to Beijing tomorrow for an intensive go study program. I understand twitter and facebook are blocked there, so I may post a few updates on this blog again.

For those interested, the go study program I’m enrolled in is 5 hours/day, 6 days/week for 2 months. The primary teachers are 9dan amateurs from Beijing University. Professional go teachers will be joining as well. You can read more about the program at www.experience-go.com

The program lets you choose whether you want to study 4, 5, or 6 days per week. It also lets you choose 1 or 2 months. I thought I’d be among the select few hardcore enough to choose the 6 days/week for 2-months option, but according to one of the coordinators that’s actually the option that most people chose. It sounds like I’ll be among good company with a similar love and intensity for go.

It sounds like they plan on taking us sight seeing for a couple days while we’re there, but I’ve honestly never been much of a tourist so don’t expect many photos.

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S.Korea’s top online math tutor, Woo Hyeong-cheol, makes $4 million/yr via online instruction.
S.Korea’s top online English tutor, Rose Lee, expects to make $7 million/yr via online classes.

Excerpt from Reuters:

Woo is not affiliated with any institution that is part of the official school system, but the 46-year-old math instructor is considered one of the best cram school tutors in education-obsessed South Korea, with his Web-based classes as well-known among test-taking teens as top-rated TV dramas.

“School teachers are concerned about creating moral people. We focus more on getting the students better grades in a short amount of time. That’s why we are needed and popular,” said Woo, who commands a salary higher than almost all of the top baseball players in the country’s professional league.

Woo is among a group of about a dozen instructors raking it in because they are thought to be the best at raising scores.

Reminds me of my ‘06 post ‘The Obsolete Classroom: Rethinking Education in the Information Age’

We’ve still got a long way to go before our education system is efficient, but it’s good to see strides being taken.

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If you’ve ever made a loan on Kiva you’re sure to enjoy this video.
If you’ve never made a loan on Kiva, you’re likely to enjoy this video.
This is the best Kiva video I’ve seen yet (and I think I’ve seen all of them). Enjoy!

A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan from Kieran Ball on Vimeo.

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What if the ambitious youth of developing countries had a better understanding of banking, finance, and physics than the typical adult in the developed world? We’ll see examples of such individuals emerge within five years… despite a lack of properly resourced educational institutions in their area.

What will they need?

1) Affordable/ubiquitous internet access (ETA 2010, see my last post)
2) A device capable of streaming online video (MIT’s $100 laptops may not be cheap enough, but mobile phones are proliferating all over the developed world… throw Android into the equation and we’re gold.)
3) Free educational videos covering all topics from basic kindergarten/first grade math up through calculus, linear algebra, finance, physics, etc.: Khan Academy

Access to high quality education is no longer a luxury for the affluent. It’s exciting to imagine the world of opportunity that will open to the coming generations of children & entrepreneurs in the developing world as the playing field levels…

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Had an idea this morning for a huge social impact in Africa. To bring you up to speed quickly I’ll summarize three articles as background in 1 sentence each:

1) By late 2010 high-speed internet access will be cheap/affordable across most of Africa: http://www.o3bnetworks.com/press_quickstart.html?mod=2_1571_leftbox

2) Small pockets of people doing SMS messaging to inform farmers of fair market prices are helping to improve the income/economic efficiency of their regions:
http://whiteafrican.com/2008/12/01/tanzanian-farmers-and-their-sms-empowered-market-spy/

3) Ushahidi, an innovative African web startup that “Crowd Sources Crisis Information” has been hugely successful: http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2008/11/11/ushahidis-volunteers-rock/

Imagine a site that crowd-sources fair pricing information – the same info currently exchanged on a small/unorganized scale via SMS messaging. A site as simple as Twitter could be used with success today, but a site designed for the job that tracked pricing information simultaneously across thousands of products would bring market efficiency incredibly fast.

It’ll be amazing to see the explosive pace of innovation coming out of Africa in the next three years.

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By now everyone knows Kiva.org is my favorite website on the internet. It’s where I go when I’m feeling great, feeling down, or feeling average. It’s pretty much perfect at all times.

I know I’ve written about Kiva many times in the past, but today feels special because it marks my one hundredth loan… sometimes it blows my mind to think about the amazing impact we can make as individuals…

The ability to take $1,000 and have a volunteer team distribute it to 40 different entrepreneurs in developing countries all over the world. To think of the entrepreneurs who don’t have the collateral to take out loans alone, who form groups and hold each other accountable to succeed together. Once the 40 entrepreneurs pay back their first $0.62 each, it makes another $25 which can be re-loaned immediately… to think this entire operation was started only 3 years ago… to think of it’s explosive success… to think it’s all been made so simple that I can manage my 100 loans from the comfort of my home in less than 5 minutes per week… is there anything cooler on the planet?

I don’t know… but Kiva sure amazes me…

Anyway, if you’ve read this far then you probably deserve a reward. I’m giving away $250 in free Kiva gift certificates to the first ten people who request one in the comments section. I did this once in the past with good success. The only thing you have to promise is to loan the money through Kiva at least once before withdrawing it for yourself.

My hope, of course, is that you get addicted to Kiva as well. There’s no need to promise that, though. I expect it will happen naturally.

If you don’t mind, I’d also love to hear comments or see links to the business you decide to support. Thanks!

By the way, if you’re curious: my lender page.

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Haven’t blogged for months, but I update twitter.com/anuzis daily in case any stalkers need more frequent updates. In the mean time, here’s a few snippets:

1) Started a 2nd side business which put www.learnfromaninja.com on the backburner. The new business is secret for now. It’s more lucrative but less philanthropic. Social impact neutral. Once it’s up and rolling strong I’ll be able to focus more on LFaN without worrying about over-commercializing the lessons.

2) My 401k dropped 55% with the economic downtown and I couldn’t care less. How’s that for Buddhist non-attachment? That said, I’m investing more than ever now. FYI – Warren Buffet just moved 100% into U.S. stocks. Combine this with Obama’s win & the timing seems right for alternative energy.

3) Helping as a judge for Project 10 to the 100. What a great time to be alive!

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I didn’t know there was another Mike Anuzis… Apparently he died in World War II… His name is engraved on a memorial in Georgetown, Illinois. I’d like to visit one day to pay my respects.

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What a clever idea – allowing gamers to leverage their skills to help solve protein folding: http://fold.it

Excerpts from the site…

Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research.

What big problems is this game tackling?

Protein structure prediction: As described above, knowing the structure of a protein is key to understanding how it works and to targeting it with drugs. A small proteins can consist of 100 amino acids, while some human proteins can be huge (1000 amino acids). The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom. Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans’ puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.

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