Daily Muse co-founder and startup advisor Kathryn Minshew has started (and re-started) her share of startups and has the battle scars to prove it. In this 99U talk, Minshew shares the remedies to commonly made startup founder mistakes. Chief among them? The “Gollum Syndrome” where founders treat their companies as “their precious.” Just launch and iterate, says Minshew, because “An ugly baby is better than no baby at all.”

Alexis Ohanian has founded reddit, Breadpig, and hipmunk but he’ll be the first one to tell you: “I still don’t know what I’m doing.”
When creating our next great work, we can be held up by failure, or by worrying what the world will think, but Ohanian urges us to remember that it’s hard enough to get people to care about your success. The web allows us to fail and fail fast and we should embrace this dynamic. And when you do eventually traction, treat your customers like royalty. “Your first 100 users are magical,” he says.

Interesting thoughts by Helge Tennø,

As creatives, we often believe that as our talents improve, our salary will increase. However, your skills alone will not necessarily lead to more income. To really maximize your talents, identify the psychological reasons why clients do or don’t decide to use your services.
In this insight-packed 99U talk, best-selling author Ramit Sethi reveals how he went from practically begging his readers to pay for a $4.95 e-book, to charging thousands for online courses and consultation by putting himself in the shoes of his customers. Think of the unspoken concerns of your customers, he says, and master the language used by your clients. For example, people don’t want to “increase core strength” they want a six pack. By master the psychology of language and tapping into what your customers want, you can give them what they need and become indispensable.

Appearing by telepresence robot, Edward Snowden speaks at TED2014 about surveillance and Internet freedom. The right to data privacy, he suggests, is not a partisan issue, but requires a fundamental rethink of the role of the internet in our lives — and the laws that protect it. “Your rights matter,” he says, “because you never know when you’re going to need them.” See below how the NSA responded to Edward Snowden’s TED Talk

from JWTIntelligence