Accidental Billionaires | The Facebook Story

Posted by Gabriel on Dec 17th, 2009 | no comments

Just finished reading the Accidental Billionaires book and I have to say that it is an excellent read, but it is also a great story of the importance of having legal protections in place when forming a partnership.  I can tell you from my own personal experience that partnerships can be extremely rewarding and other times can destroy the closest of relationships.  Sometimes, simply going through the exercise of drafting a contract about how your duties and profits will be split can reveal everyone’s intentions.

As for the book, I highly recommend it.  Ben Mezrich has written another fun and exciting biography about rare genius that inspires people to want to go out and invent something special.

Popularity: 66% [?]

Outsource to India (not a chance)

Posted by Gabriel on Dec 7th, 2009 | no comments

I was working on a tech solution that I had hoped to outsource. So I called a tech company in India that had a long list of Fortune 1000 clients. I also called a company based out of Chicago.

If you know me, you know that I am very open minded about outsourcing. I want my tech work done right but at a fair cost. Tech is global so the workforce is global and I don’t have a politically protectionist bone in my body. That being said, my experience with India is getting worst by the day. The tech support call centers are bad and the IT solutions are subpar.

The Chicago company I called had a human with a real phone (not voip) who understood what I wanted to accomplish and did a proof of concept for free over a web meeting. The Indian company pushed for a sale over the phone, when I demanded a proof of concept they insisted on being paid.  Their product proved inferior and they wanted to be paid more for it then the company based out of Chicago.

Don’t get me wrong, I dealt with a call center in the Philippines that was great a few weeks ago, but for intelligent technology solutions you still find affordable and capable people in the US as compared to abroad. You may be able to hire someone in India or elsewhere for half the price of the US but sometimes you end up getting a non-working product that gets thrown away.

I can now laugh (knowing that it’s true from my own experience) about a friend who was building a classified website with a company from India. He had been working for a week describing what he wanted when finally the voice on the other end of a voip phone asked “What exactly is a classified?”. My friend told me that he almost pulled his hair out. If there was a question about what a classified ad was then why didn’t someone ask about it the first day.

Outsourcing is great, but just make sure you look at all the options and request a proof of concept before buying in.

Popularity: 51% [?]

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-12-06

Posted by Gabriel on Dec 6th, 2009 | no comments

• Just went to the Atlanta aquarium. Very nice exhibits and lots of fun. #

Popularity: 38% [?]