8 posts found under,

Entrepreneurship

Update The response to this post has been powerful, and we've had many requests for tools to help. I've created a free site which helps with calculating early retirement in a variety of places around the world: nomad saver Welcome This series presents a clear evaluation of the main rat race escape options, along with their merits, timeframes, and chances of success. It contains relatively few attempts to sell you things. There will be plenty [...]

This post explains how to add Taxamo to your Stripe subscription payment process so that your website can comply with new EU VAT regulations. For those who already know what these regulations are and why they suck, you can skip down to the "solution" section below where I go into it. For those who don't, let me explain/vent. Explanation Basically, this new law impacts everyone who wants to sell digital services to customers in the EU. It doesn't [...]

I was number 10 of 24 pitches. It was Friday night, and I was at Microsoft Research in Beijing. I was a little bit nervous, but I had done the necessary preparation: I’d practiced my 2 minute pitch 4-5 times in front of the mirror before I went to sleep everyday for the past week. I’d videoed it too. I was ready not to rise to the level of my expectations, but fall to the level of my training. I applied to Beijing Tech Hive after talking with the [...]

So last week I registered a Limited Company in the UK and it turned out to be really easy. I had always assumed it would be more complex…with no real factual basis for this assumption other than a vague suspicion that it would probably involve an accountant, and would therefore be expensive and time-consuming. I was wrong. Here’s what I did: Note: I am not an accountant or lawyer! Please do not interpret the following as anything other than my ow [...]

In his essay ‘How to get startup Ideas’, Paul Graham talks about “living in the future”. When you look at successful startups in hindsight, the idea seems so obvious. Skype: Of course people want to have free video calls over the internet; Airbnb: Of course people want a network of cheap accommodation across the globe; Hailo: Of course people want to be able to easily order a taxi. But a few years ago these things didn’t exist. Someone had to re [...]

It’s rare that I read an essay on Paul Graham’s website and don’t feel inspired or enlightened. There is much, much wisdom in his writing. For those that don’t know, Paul Graham is the co-founder of Y Combinator, a venture capital firm which is basically the Harvard of start-ups. He also seems like a decent chap. In this post I would like highlight a few key ideas from his essay “How to Do What You Love”. If you get a chance, I would read the ful [...]

I recently read a post on Paul Graham’s blog which dissects the concepts of success and determination. He puts forward a very simple yet powerful model for what he considers the most important contributor to success: determination. The engineer within me loves to use models and analogies to explain difficult concepts and apply them to the real world. But a couple of things always need to be kept in mind with models: Models can be simplified to a [...]

Think about how often you use the internet. Now think about how much you really understand about websites. Unless you are a web designer/developer or studied Computer Science, the answer is probably “not very much”. Isn’t that quite a big thing to know nothing about? But hey, I’d be lying if I said my main motivation for learning more about how web pages are built comes from wanting to shun ignorance just for the sake of it. There are numerous ot [...]