A great idea executed awesomely - Newsle

When I see certain products I think that making a startup is not that hard at all. Newsle makes it look really easy. Smart idea + great execution. How hard can it be, right?

Wrong. Then I start watching all the hard decisions that have been made in order for the product to be where it is now and I go: “wow”.

The idea is a very smart one: keep track of news that mention your friends. With the clutter and noise on Facebook and Twitter, this makes sure that you see the real news about each of your contacts so you can know what they’re up to, congratulate them or just place it in the back of your head for future reference.

The execution is awesome. In one month a lot has changed and now the product looks pretty sweet.

They have a challenging time ahead, but kudos to them for being on the right track and solving a problem.

I will be speaking at PGI conference in Viareggio.

I’ll be in a panel talking about young generations and startups, wait for the official agenda and post on theStartup.eu. http://www.pgi.vc

Learn to program!

Everyone thinking about starting a web project should read this awesome post by Brad Feld. (And start following his blog, of course).

Working in an early stage fund, I see WAY TO MANY founders (or complete teams) that have no clue how to implement their vision and that will rely exclusively on HIRED programmers or, way worse, OUTSOURCED development.

I majored in Computer Engineering, had quite a lot programming courses, but feel I didn’t learn anything useful there. The major learning part happened at home when I was trying to build the stuff I wanted.

I started fixing sites and scripts in PHP and then moved on to learn Ruby on Rails. Trust me, being able to craft your vision into a tangible prototype gives you an awesome feeling, and it’s a great starting point for a full fledged development process.

I would prefer 10 times a philosophy major that spent all his evenings learning how to code than a CS major that isn’t curious enough to dig down into something and understand how it works.

DO NOT CONSTANTLY TRY TO FIND A TECH COFOUNDER. Every founder should be technical. So, LEARN TO CODE.

“But a team has to be diverse”, you would argue. Point, but the differences should be in personality, passion and prior experience with a good balace of coding, marketing and operations.