I create stuff and work as a VC. Aim for game-changing things.
Co-founder of Aaltoes and Startupifier and a couple of companies.
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Printing multiple PDF's in excel with VBA
I noticed there are no really good resources for learning VBA on the web, so I'm sharing some simple code snippets.
I have created a workbook with about 50 automatically updating sheets, and I need to print them as pdf's. So I quickly created a VBA script to do this.
What this code does is that it prints sheets nr 9-39 with the filename "MyFile_" + [name of the sheet] in the folder where the workbook in question is located.
Code:
Public Sub printPrivateInvestorPDFs()
Dim FilName As String
For Count = 9 To 39 Step 1 Sheets(Count).Activate FilName = "MyFile_" + ActiveSheet.Name ActiveSheet.ExportAsFixedFormat Type:=xlTypePDF, FileName:=FilName + ".pdf", Quality:=xlQualityStandard, From:=1, To:=3, OpenAfterPublish:=True Next Count End Sub
For getting help with VBA problems, I found this user group really helpful: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/excel-macros
Beautiful explanation of economical changes and where the world lies now
Here's a beautiful explanation of the underlying changes of current unemployment, restlessness and what needs to be done to get the economy into a new "golden age". I don't want to comment more on that, everyone needs to watch the complete video.
Forget creating one "corporate look" for your company
You might think that the logo and look of a company isn't such a big thing. I disagree. A first impression is always important, and I also think that companies should take the time to create a good and representative "front" for their company. If they don't, I expect them to be a muddle on other issues as well.
I was thinking about this one day, that brands should take more liberty with logos and colors. A brand is of course not about logos and colors, but about what you do. However, people tend to spend a lot of time on logos and colors. Most companies have rules about what background their logo is allowed to show up on and how much space there should be around it...
I really think that's a wast of effort and counterproductive. Forcing your brand into a mold will always, always just make it seem boring after a while. All brands stagnate, that's because they're not given the chance to evolve. Not on the business side, and definitely not on the design side.
Burton Snowboards does it really well, each year, they have new logos. They also re-use old ones. You can sort of have a personal connection to one of the old logos. And they're not set on a couple of colors. It makes their brand much more flexible.
Workers at Burton have more artistic freedom. You're not in this huge machine where everything has to be standardized.
I think more people should do it like Burton does it instead of focusing on their "color palette" and what background it's ok to show their logo on. You'll still be able to get your brand message out, it's just going to be more exciting...
Will web startup valuations fall because of Facebook?
I'm certain that G+ will be able to take some market share from Facebook. For some use-cases it's just better, and people are switching to G+ from FB.
If now this becomes a real battle and FB is not seen as "the social network" of the future anymore, its already hyped-up 80b valuation is going to go down, a lot. We used to see FB as a future money printing machine. They just had to be able to scale up their revenues a little, and no one could ever slow their growth.
What if that's not the case?
We've never really seen a possiblity of such a rapid decline before in these valuation classes. In just weeks, millions of people can completely switch product from FB. The switching costs can come down to zero, if for example it's easy enough to find all of the same friends on G+ as we have on FB.
Now, if this is shown to be true, that a 80b valuation can suddenly drop down to say 10b, I think we'll see a decline in investments in web startups and valuations will go down. It's just a risk no one thought was really there.
The undeniable logic of photo-sharing in G+
Just thinking that I can snap a picture and easily choose to only share it with my closest friends. And the picture stays private without anyone having the right to distribute it. It's a game-changer for me.
It's something I know that was missing, but it's a huge thing to change, actually doing it and getting people to use it is difficult. Many startups have tried but failed. I'm really happy Google did it, they were probably the only ones who could make that happen.
What's going to happen to diaspora now?
I want to gather the best resources for technology in learning
My Blog About Learning
The Admob data IS relevant to Nokia
Paths to Entrepreneurship: Part 1. Get started
(Cross posted from the Aaltoes blog: ) Forget what you've read, entrepreneurship is not about getting a great idea and then working very hard. It's a dangerous simplification of entrepreneurship, and actually very few successful companies are created that way.
In this post I'll describe 3 of the more common paths to successful entrepreneurship that we have identified in Aaltoes. The goal is to be able to provide some guidance on what to concentrate on in case you are a student and interested in becoming an entrepreneur.
3 Paths:
1. Be at the forefront of technological development
Some of the more known entrepreneurial success stories are based on a group of students that have acquired specific technological knowledge and gone on to create great companies. Stories such as Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and F-Secure have been created in this way. So if you're very good in a field which is not very developed yet, and few people are very good at, you have a good chance of creating something that is possible to commercialize.
I think IT is already too big and developed, but you never know. (Update: I wonder why I thought that, right now I don't think that way at least...) The problem is that you can't really focus on bio- or nanotech in your own backyard because you'll probably need a cleanroom and some pretty expensive equipment...
2. Find a problem and be able to create the solution.
A lot of web startups are being formed these days, and the ones that survive are the ones that fulfill a market need. In case you do identify a market need, you also need to be able to create the solution. And market it. The reality is that any web startup that wants to get traction these days needs to have a massive marketing budget to be able to break into the market. That of course requires investment, and unless you've already created a company as described above, or worked as a director for a big company, you will not get it. Not for a web startup. Web startups are good examples of companies that are created to solve a problem, but they're not really difficult to create or duplicate and the Intellectual Property (IP) is difficult to protect. There is a huge number of developers around the world capable of doing the same thing. And there will be someone solving the exact same problem that you are. The one with the best connections and best knowledge will win, which is probably the one with the biggest marketing budget as well (or not, ouch, just look at Color...)
There have also been examples of teams that have identified a problem, for example mobile email (back in the days...) or created an application for an industry in which they got experience from during a summer job. In these cases, the difficulty becomes finding a great team which is committed to creating the product. It can be a good opportunity while you are studying since you might not need any income from the project. So focus on solving problems and creating the team that can solve it.
3. Be a researcher or connect with research
If you're a researcher, you will get paid and have resources to be at the forefront of technological development. It is probably easier to become a researcher and create something new than to be at the forefront of development yourself. For business students, the real opportunity is to network with researchers and find an interesting technology to commercialize or jump on board early in the companies development.
These are the entrepreneurial paths I think are the most realistic for students to become entrepreneurs. It's a lot about being active in the entrepreneurship community and networking and creating a great team. You also need to know where you stand. If you're not developing new technologies yourself and don't have a lot of experience in an industry you have very little possibilities of developing your own idea into a startup.
Aaltoes was created to help you start in one of these paths:
1. Attend our networking events and connect with other students that are interested in solving problems. Maybe you can find someone with great technological skill or the business visionary you need to commercialize your skills. Getting a committed team before you even now what to work on can also be valuable.
2. Attend our Technology Safaris and connect with research that you can commercialize as part of a team.
3. If you already have a solution to a problem but lack the skills to make it happen, join our Pitching Evenings and get your project jump started.
One of the points I want to make is that companies are not created by a group of business students thinking about different ideas. They might come up with a new sort of consulting company or a new way of distributing school books, but the ideas will be constrained by their experiences and knowledge. In addition, even if they can identify a good problem to solve, it will most likely require more financing and resources than they will be able to gather. Anyways, probably the most important thing to do is to create a great team which has the required technical skills to pull something off. "entrepreneurship is not about getting a great idea and then working very hard" Entrepreneurship is about solving problems or using new technology to solve problems and having a great team that can execute. Riku
