Category Archives: Success Stories

This is the dark side of things you have to know. Starting a business for the first time is not for the weak-hearted. The fact of the matter is, lot of darkness is behind every startup story, people hate to share or talk about it. Here is a list of some must-know dark topics:

• Expect no one to support you and everyone to ridicule and demotivate you. If you get any support, be thankful for it. People are stuck in the job mentality.
• There is no prestige in it. Heck, even when your daily income is more than the whole cabinet of minister’s salaries combined, they will still think of a minister as someone better than you. Heck, a low-level section manager has more prestige than you. Never get sucked into showing off your wealth for respect, it’s futile.
• Everything that will go wrong will go wrong. Have a plan B as good as plan A.
• Never share your failures with anyone. There, I told you, the crowd is dying to hear it. Share only your success because it will also reflect on your future investor’s opinion about you.
• You have a 50/50 chance of failure, no matter how good your plans are. So be prepared to fail, for success, no other preparation is required.
• Never take a debt it will slow you down, try again if you failed.
• Never ask friends and family for investment or loan. You will probably lose it, and they will distract you from doing your thing. Don’t burn bridges.
• Try to do your first business in secret until you succeed. Because people don’t trust a person who fails a lot. Neither the investors whom you may need in the future.
• Do something you enjoy because everyone is motivating you and this is the only way to stay motivated.
• Be kind to your employees but don’t try to be their friend, they will use you. Besides, when they screw up, you will need to fire them swiftly.
• Make time for your family, friends, social life and hobbies, otherwise you will exhaust yourself. Remember that you are the cornerstone of your business and it will fall when you do.
• Be really careful to your customers because bad reviews cannot be deleted from the internet.
• Everyone wants a piece of your new income, from your mom to your friends, even after they ridiculed you. Do not help anyone. Remember airplane’s emergency instructions, help yourself, then help others. Don’t help anyone on account of your business. Learn to say NO.
• Again everyone wants a piece of you, from your staff to your suppliers, to your customers, even the government. Protect yourself from disclaimers to contracts.
• Never cheat your way into anything, sooner or later it will bite you in the ass. Your enemies and competitors will use it against you. Be as ethical and legal as a proper person should be.

You better learn now, than learn it the hard way.

Welcome to the world of business, may your journey embark fruitfully.

You have to keep an open mind to this as it may sound counter intuitive but it actually works. So be patient and be attentive to details and read between the lines.

Are you really mentally ready for this?

Here are my fool proof 27 points for a startup.

1. Do not take loans.
2. It’s an emotional roller coaster so be ready and enjoy it do not give up. You will lose a lot of hair but hey, bald is in fashion.
3. Do not take loans.
4. Make the 20% of product features that are responsible for 80% of your value first. With your own god damn money.
5. Do not take loans.
6. The remaining 80% of features of your products, add them later organically one by one.
7. Do not take loans.
8. Talk to people and ask their opinions on stuff you know nothing, Jon Snow.
9. Do not take loans.
10. Build a distribution network and channel partners. More sustainable than just advertisement and it is an asset to add to your company value. They are kind of your subscribers the more you have, the surer how much you will earn, and you can plan your scaling around it.
11. Do not take loans.
12. When you need investors don’t ask for money for your salary, it’s a waste of money. Ask for features and growing distribution network.
13. Do not take loans.
14. Keep innovating and don’t bother with cat fights with your copycats. It’s a waste of time.
15. Do not take loans.
16. If you are a technical guy step down from being CEO and get someone who knows how to run a business to do it for you. It also will make the investors trust you more. Don’t fight the CEO over authority, only vision.
17. Do not take loans.
18. Investors want to see a team that knows its shit. Not your buddies.
19. Do not take loans.
20. When you want investors to get professional help to evaluate your startup and to tell you how much shares to offer. Residuals 1% for my 1 billion idea is a waste of the investors. Do not waste time on investors, they talk just like your ex gossiping about how small your wee wee is.
21. Do not take loans.
22. Focus on your business process and do not change it every day, it frustrates your employees and customers and your distributor and channel partners. When you want to change split a operate line with new offering and gradually change. If it works, don’t fix it.
23. Do not take loans.
24. Make your business unique, no one wants to invest in another clone.
25. Do not take loans.
26. Don’t try to fight multi-billion dollar companies. Investors will think you are an idiot. Instead, fill the gap these companies don’t cover, and they might actually buy you. They are potentially investors too.
27. Did I mention do not take loans? DO NOT TAKE LOANS.

ITF to become “the world’s first fintech bank”
http://www.bankingtech.com/1042542/itf-to-become-the-worlds-first-fintech-bank/

A new bank, Into the Future (ITF), is gearing up for launch in Hong Kong and Singapore. Among its investors is Jim Rogers, an American businessman based in Singapore and the co-founder of the Quantum Group of Funds (which he started with George Soros).

“Fintech is obviously going to change everything,” Rogers told International Investment at the recent unveiling of ITF.

ITF has applied for licences in both jurisdictions and hopes to open for business next year. It has established correspondent banking relationships with the Bank of Communications Shanghai and Bank of Communications Hong Kong.

It is also in the process of acquiring a bank in Vanuatu. Its founders are Lim Hui Jie and Ignious Yong.

MapD partners with IBM Power Systems
http://www.bankingtech.com/1042452/mapd-partners-with-ibm-power-systems/
Analytics platform MapD Technologies has partnered with IBM Power Systems to enhance its analytical performance, writes Julie Muhn at Finovate (Banking Technology‘s sister company).

MapD has optimised its MapD Core database and MapD Immersive visual analytics client to take advantage of IBM Power Systems to target the speed at which SQL queries can be performed.

Running queries on IBM Power Systems S822LC for HPC servers versus x86-based servers offers an SQL querying speed that is up to 1.3 x faster than recent benchmarks. On average, the updated queries show a 65% acceleration over the original, benchmarked SQL queries. Upgrades such as these help users analyse billion-row data sets in real-time.

“We are bringing new performance capabilities to a broader audience only available on IBM Power Systems,” says Ashish Bambroo, VP of business development at MapD. “IBM Power Systems are optimised for the kind of compute-intensive applications where MapD’s technology excels. By harnessing the advantages of IBM Power Systems, we can provide our enterprise customers with more options for tackling the toughest workloads.”

To increase the speed, MapD is leveraging IBM’s Power CPUs and Nvidia Tesla P100 graphics processors. The Power processor CPU works together with the NvidiaA Tesla P100 GPU, accelerating CPU-to-GPU analytic pipelines up to 2.5X. This acceleration bolsters MapD’s platform that uses GPUs to query and visualise billions of records in real-time. The company’s GPU-based platform performs from 75 to 3,500 times faster than traditional CPU databases.

MapD was founded in 2013 and is based in California, US.

Mastercard takes blockchain mainstream with API
http://www.bankingtech.com/1042382/mastercard-takes-blockchain-mainstream-with-api/
Mastercard has tested and validated its blockchain and will be opening access to it via a set of three APIs published on the Mastercard Developers website.

The APIs include the blockchain core API, the smart contracts API, and the fast pay network API, writes Julie Muhn at Finovate (Banking Technology‘s sister company).

Mastercard will pilot the blockchain for use in the business-to-business space, implementing it to increase speed and transparency in payments and decrease costs for cross-border payments. The blockchain solution aims to offer a new way for consumers, businesses, and banks to transact. The company describes it as the “key” to its strategy of providing payment solutions that “meet every need of financial institutions and their end-customers”.

Mastercard’s blockchain operates independently of a digital currency. As Justin Pinkham, senior vice-president at Mastercard Labs told Forbes, “We are not using a cryptocurrency, and we are not introducing a new cryptocurrency, because that introduces other challenges – regulatory, legal challenges. If you do a payment, then what we can do is move those funds in the way that we do today in fiat currency.”

CECL: managing implementation through collaboration
http://www.bankingtech.com/1017272/cecl-managing-implementation-through-collaboration/
The accounting standard Current Expected Credit Loss (CECL), which requires banks to calculate expected credit losses and incorporate resulting provisions into its P&L statements, necessitates a flexible, adaptable technology solution that will enable closer collaboration among finance, risk and reporting functions.

Will Newcomer, VP of product and strategy, and Bart Everaert, market manager, risk and finance, Wolters Kluwer in the Americas, examine what a suitable technology solution for banks impacted by the standard looks like.

The deadline to CECL, the equivalent protocol from the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) for predicting the extent and impact of credit impairments, is determined by a business’s fiscal year, whether it is a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filer and whether it meets the definition of a public business entity (PBE). It will be the first day of the fiscal year beginning after 15 December 2019, for financial companies that have publicly held equity and that meet the definition of a US SEC filer (1 January 2020 for calendar-year entities). All others will have a year after that to get the job done.

That means the leaders of institutions that adhere to US GAAP will have to start thinking about the changes they will need to make between now and then to their technology and their activities overall. If they run global enterprises that answer to the FASB and IASB in different jurisdictions, moreover they are likely to find that the race to implement IFRS 9 has been merely the first of two heats.