Simplicity, life experience and the story behind success

Mike wants to tell you a city legend...

Once upon a time, there was a team of four humble guys living in a small mountainous country and working hard to create something different, something unique, something magical, like never before... They were artists, animators, architects and engineers.

Throughout many years they were struggling with no electricity and gas, with no food and with lots of depression in a country challenged by a tough history.

But they never gave up and kept dreaming about magic, something which should be easy and simple, but at the same time, interesting and engaging...

One late evening, one of the friends was playing with his kid and showing shadow puppets in a dark room where a candle was the only source of light. And all of sudden, he has been flashed with Eureka effect. He put his kid asleep and rushed to his friends to share his idea and excitement. Next morning they rolled up their sleeves and started bringing it to a reality.

And...

On 8th of June, 2015 Shadowmatic got a prestigious Apple Design Award at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2015. 

Shadowmatic is an imagination stirring puzzle where you rotate abstract objects in a spotlight to find recognizable silhouettes in projected shadows, relevant to the surrounding environment. The game combines stunning visuals with relaxing and captivating gameplay. It features 9 rooms, each flavored with unique concept, atmosphere, and music.

The bottom line of the story - Never give up, struggle or as Steve Jobs said, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." 

Teamable.Me - The new way of smart recruitment

Mike was thinking about recruitment processes in StartUps vs. recruitment process in Tech mogul companies like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle or new school Google, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook or Twitter.

Indeed, hiring and/or recruiting nowadays in one of the most challenging problems to overcome. Especially if you live in San Francisco, where every another guy is in tech.

How the companies starting to growth the small team.

First step is to read a couple of good books, good because they are really useful, and also good, because they are trendy, which mean all around already read them.

Books like: Zero to One (which is by the way really good book)

Second, you are trying to find right people, because you know that "proper execution is one of the key factors of successful startup".

And here you have million dollar question: HOW???

Well, let's discuss couple of possible scenarios

1. Recruiters - Possibly, but here is the problem, since recruiters are not always very tech knowledgable, the most common sense for them to look for keywords like web crawlers do :), which means, depends on your CV/resume your candidate can be selected even if s/he has a average skills, but perfectly (Harvard style)  shaped cover letter and CV. (BTW, who gives a shit for cover letter nowadays, it's always, Yeah, I was dreaming about this job, I'm looking for new challenges and other blah blah blah)

2. Find them yourself. And that's a better way to find exactly those people you are looking for, but... here is another unanswered question: how reach them?

Introducing 

TEAMABLE.ME

Teamable is transforming the network of your employees and friends into a big pool of talents.

Using ML and DL the application connect people to work with people they want to work.

Teamable helps companies hire faster and smarter by leveraging their collective employee networks and making it searchable.

So how it works? It's simple like "2 + 2" Let's say you need a someone who:

a. knows Ruby and/or Python

b. lives in San Francisco

c. has particular title

d. name starting with ...

e. connection of friend A or Friend B or Friend C

Application is finding right people with exact skills you are looking for, as well as indicating list of people who can possibly suggest that people to you upon your request.

But that's the only first part of the Teamable Application, second part is even more exciting to Mike, because he is struggling with finding right team composition every time when starting new projects. (like always and everywhere, everyone wants to have champions and gorillas in own team) 

Imagine, you work for big company which has lot of projects. And every time you have upcoming project, you are asking yourself "How should I find best core team"?

All these challenges are applicable not only for Tech industry. For example, you are planning to start shooting new movie in Hollywood, and you need best camera guy, best lights engineer, best audio engineers, best make-up artist, etc. 

Having existing pool of available resources is not enough anymore, so Teamable will help you to match the name of the best people taking into consideration key factors such an:

1. Years of experience,

2. domain of expertise, 

3. Last projects involved (like background check for projects:) )

4. Success Rate from involved project

Mike strongly suggest you to check Teamble.me which will be big help for your HR and Resource Managers. 

How UBERization of Technology can raise a quality of providing service

Last two weeks Mike has been traveling to Yerevan, Armenia. 

First of all, Mike would like to share some historical and tech industry related information about Armenia as a brand maker.

For those who have never heard about Armenia (it's AR-ME-NIA, not Romania, not Albania, it's ARMENIA) - it is a mountainous landlocked country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia with own huge cultural and historical heritage. Also, Armenia is a first country in the world who adopted Christianity as a state religion in 301.

As from product/brand creating perspective you probably know a lot of Armenians by origin, but more famously as representatives of other countries, like:

1. Andre Agassi - Tennis player (USA)

2. Garry Kasparov - Chess Player (Russia)

3. Charles Aznavour - Singer (France)

4. Alexis Ohanian - Entrepreneur (USA) 

In a few words it's a really interesting country that's full of discovered and undiscovered (yet) talents and amazing people.

As a part of a tech world (small yet, but still growing) Armenia is involved in tech with startups as well as tech leaders (Cisco, Oracle, VMware, Microsoft)

Mike was amazed by startup guys, who passionately promote their own ideas and beliefs.They try to make positive changes or as someone said about Alexis Ohanian, "Make the world a bit less suck."

There are several very successful startups like: 

Teamable.me - Next Generation recruitment platform, using B2B SaaS model, and

PicsArt.com - Last Year was named as an official partner of Google, during the Google IO 2015

There are more, but Mike will inform you about them next time, so be patient and you will get a cookie :)

A particular startup Mike wants to share about is called ggTaxi, which is an Armenian based startup, that's doing doing pretty much like Uber, but with taking into consideration national, cultural and economical aspects. If Uber is giving a chance to everyone to make extra money by driving their own vehicles, ggTaxi is using service of professional taxi drivers, who want to join the company in order to drive a cab under an umbrella of the company.

And here ggTaxi is solving more important problems than just giving an ability to drive and earn money:
1. ggTaxi is creating a competition among taxi drivers, who are forced to constantly improve the quality of the provided service. (clean cabs, faster services, no noisy music, etc)
And it's not about the price, because ggTaxi has the same prices as any other cab in Yerevan and generally, it's cheap.

2. Second, ggTaxi is against tips, which became an integrated part of our society in USA. It's ridiculous when you see on your bill options to tip 12% 15% or 18%. Why? why? why? Tips should be my natural will for good service, not an obligatory part. Back to ggTaxi driver insisted to give back 300 Armenian drams, which is less than dollar. Still money for Armenian reality but another perception of mindset change.

3. Last, but not least, ggTaxi has direct line of customer support, and they are glad to hear your concerns,  feedback and improvement requests.


In other words startup is a social influencer.

Teamable.me next time...