Recruiting Animal

How To Find Your Calling

From: Betashop Quartly (edited)

Find Your One Thing.

- the one thing you are most passionate about.
- the one thing you have a realistic shot at being the best at.
- that is also an untapped market opportunity.

Only Do Your One Thing.

Everything else is a distraction. Don’t do side projects. Don’t take unnecessary meetings. Anything that distracts you from executing on your One Thing is just that, a distraction. Say no to everything that does not contribute to your One Thing.

Be Ready To Change Your One Thing

Wisely, Betashop tells us that if you don't get traction with your One Thing after a year make a hard stop and find another One Thing. He did, moving from a social network Fabulis to online retailer Fab.com

Comment:

This one thing is really three things and some are hard to come by.

1. Everyone has something they like doing.

2. You don't have to be the best to be successful but you do have to be good.

3. Then, you have to find people who could use your one thing. And, you have to be a confident sales person to sell it to them.

So, this is good advice because it makes the path forward seem clear and simple. But it isn't a cakewalk.

Here's another one thing.

All you have to find is one person:
- you find attractive
- with a great personality
- who really likes you

See what I mean?

I should acknowledge that Betashop is talking about startup companies not individuals so one's own weakness could presumably be fortified by the skills available in a team. And he advises founders to hire people who do certain things better than them. But, still, the founder has to be good at something, too, so the program does have a personal orientation.

 

It's Hard To Be Small

From: Max Nisen (edited)

Before Coke bought Honest Tea, they had to fight for time on bottling lines.

Seth Goldman:

When you are a small upstart company you have to scrape for everything and you have to shout for everything.

I don't mean that in a bad way but nobody is going to give you what you want just because you want it badly. 

We got to be pretty good at nagging and the squeaky wheel does get the grease.

I don't want to use the word 'harass' the co-packer but we would marshal all of our persuasive powers.

The Promise of Shale Oil

From: Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post (edited)

The US has a lot of shale oil.

Citigroup says that in 5 years the US could eliminate all oil imports from the Middle East and other hostile suppliers.

It has already halved its oil imports from 2006 levels.

The International Energy Agency says that by 2017 the U.S. will become the world’s biggest oil producer.

By 2035 it will eliminate almost all oil imports (including from Canada).

Fracking Creates US Recovery

From: Time For Britain To Get Fracking, Standpoint, April 2012, Patrick Heren

The economy of the United States is rebounding on the back of a manufacturing-led boom fuelled by cheap gas.

The American revival is in its early stages, but already manufacturing is being repatriated from China: an astonishing development after decades of offshoring.

Holier Than Thou Hypocrites

Is making money helping others wrong?

Kelly McParland says The Toronto Star is quite ready to turn its own employees into victims while it makes money posing as an organization that cares about them.

Having worked there for a short time I understand that its obsessive search for victims and automatic alignment with any left-wing crank out there is as much a business model – a search for profits – as it is adherence to the famous Atkinson principles of which it boasts.

You think the Star sympathizes with struggling salaried workers? Try being on the other side when it negotiates a contract, lays off staff or tries to squeeze senior people into quitting so it can replace them with cheaper youngsters.

Here's where Kelly goes wrong. If the paper can't make a profit it can't defend victims. So the employees have to bite the bullet. The same would be true for a charity. It makes sense to me.

Myth of US Decline

From: Myth of Decline, Danny Gross, Newsweek, Apr 30, 2012 (edited)

In the fall of 2008, the US suffered its deepest longest economic contraction in 80 years. Its markets were cut in half.

The numbers: Annual deficits over $1 trillion, 8.75 million jobs lost, $4-per-gallon gasoline.

Declinism quickly emerged as the chic intellectual pose.

All agreed that the U.S. had a very slim hope of recovering from  self-inflicted blows.

In fact, March 2009 marked the beginning of a recovery.

Pick Your Market Wisely

From: GlobalPost - Google scared this 27-year-old entrepreneur - Matt Lynley March 28, 2012 (edited)

Aaron Lavie, CEO of Box:

In 2004, there were no adequate sharing and storage solutions on the web.

That's why we started Box. It was meant for all use cases and completely all purpose.

It was meant to serve everything from a student to a consumer and for enterprise. We launched the company, we started to get traction.

And then the industry and the market changed.

Rumours of Google Drive started to pop up. It had just been rumored but we realized that these bigger companies could subsidize online storage for consumers to the point it would be free.

That makes sense. If Apple is selling devices, having information stored online makes it easier to sell devices to access it.

With all this competition in the consumer space, it was going to be too difficult for us to differentiate.

But in the enterprise space, competition and customers are sort of defined a little more differently.

There is a much deeper value for innovative solutions, a much larger budget for innovative solutions.

Enterprises want more agnostic systems that work across all platforms and we frankly thought we could build a better collaboration and content management offering.

So we decided to focus our entire company, all our marketing and sales, on the enterprise space.

Even if Google hadn't been getting into online storage, we would have gone into enterprise around the same time anyway.

The market sizes are dramatically different, consumers spend a fraction of a fraction of enterprise spending on software.

If you think about the spend difference and the size of market difference, then enterprise is a really attractive market.

 

Big Box Stores Kaput

Source: Big-box retail in mid-life crisis, National Post, March 31, 2012

Best Buy is closing 50 big stores and opening 100 smaller stores.

Meaning: the era of big-box retail dominance is coming to an end. Here's why:

1. Boomers no longer have kids at home - don't need to stock up on food and packaged goods.

Their kids are marrying later and delaying having their own children.

Meaning: fewer are buying houses that need to be updated and furnished.

2. Shoppers are buying online.

Amazon.com is grabbing market share from Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target.

 

New Era In Oil Coming

From: A world awash in Oil - Lawrence Solomon, National Post (edited)

The Middle East will attract scant attention in the future because the rest of the world will also be awash in oil.

Until recently, many thought the West was running out of gas. Then new technologies emerged to extract gas from shale and other rock formations.

Thanks to fracking, the US has become the world's largest producer of natural gas, creating a massive glut that has more than halved the price of natural gas.

The oil story is following a script. The US has the world's largest store of shale oil and it will soon be self-sufficient in oil.

Although shale oil technology is still in its infancy, much of the US shale oil can be developed inexpensively.

Israel has 250-billion barrels in one basin near Jerusalem alone. This is an amount comparable to Saudi Arabia's reserves. It expects to develop its oil at a cost of US$35 to US$40 per barrel.

Should the world price of oil drop to this level today's Middle East energy exporters will have been bankrupted and their autocrats ousted.

 

Fracking Will Change World Economy

From: The Financial Post - Vladimir the Great by Lawrence Solomon (edited)

Until recently, the US was the world’s largest importer of natural gas.

It is now becoming a major natural gas exporter, thanks to new gas fracking technology that has unearthed vast new supplies.

The US remains the world’s largest importer of oil.

It may soon become an exporter of oil, thanks to oil fracking technology that could make the U.S. the world’s largest oil producer.

China, now a major importer of oil and gas, has the world’s second largest known potential for frackable hydrocarbons, which it is now developing.

Poland, Ukraine and Great Britain also have vast reserves of frackable hydrocarbons.

This will give Europe self sufficiency in energy.

Also, European countries on the Mediterranean have only begun to exploit the vast deposits of conventional oil and gas that lie beneath the sea bed.

These immense new sources of oil and gas would flood international markets as would major new finds of conventional oil and gas in Africa and South America.