DPL Reading List – October 23, 2015
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
Nine Common Things That Start-up Founders Tend To Underestimate Or Overestimate – “When you’re in the midst of building a company, it’s hard to fully assess the significance of various activities and decisions- particularly for first-time entrepreneurs who don’t yet have the wisdom learned from prior mistakes. As an investor (who was also once a first-time entrepreneur), I have noticed several key areas where founders either overestimate or underestimate the value to their company.”
Entrepreneurs: Read This Whenever You Feel Like Giving Up – “Here are 58 powerful quotes that have kept me focused and moving forward as an entrepreneur since 2001.”
12 Hackneyed Phrases To Delete From Your Emails – “Of all business emails, the most important are sales emails, which begin a sales process by connecting a seller to a potential buyer. With voice mail making cold calling impractical, sales emails are the primary way that most companies develop new business. Unfortunately, most sales emails fall flat because potential customers don’t bother to open, read, or respond to them. However, you can increase the likelihood of getting a response by avoiding the following trite and ineffective phrases:”
4 Lessons On Great Logo Design From Siegel+Gale – “What makes a logo successful? Ask a dozen different designers, and you’ll get a dozen different answers. But how do you quantify a logo’s excellence, or lack thereof? If you’re Siegel+Gale, you organize a study of 3,000 respondents in the U.S. and U.K. to try to put some actual stats on the problem.”
The Blind Deserve Tech Support, Too – “People with disabilities actually make up about 15 percent of world’s population, according to estimates by the World Health Organization, or about 1 billion people. That’s a potential user base that Bahram says rivals the largest spoken-language groups. ‘Nowadays if you were a company like that, you would just never even consider hard-coding everything in English. You would write everything as localizable strings, because you know that the first thing you are going to do is go sell into 100 other countries.’ This is just leaving money on the table.”
Bedtime Problems Boost Kids’ Math Performance – “Over the course of one 9-month school year, students who do bedtime math gain on average the equivalent of a 3-month advantage over their peers, researchers report online today in Science. The approach even works if the parents have math anxiety and generally shy away from discussing math with their children.”
When Amazon Dies – “At the root of that chaos would be the immense loss of media, and the wholesale disappearance of works—not just from personal collections, but altogether. ‘At the start of the 22nd century, we are going to find ourselves in a situation with huge gaps in knowledge and culture. Because none of these companies will be around.’”
