Category Richart Ruddie

Here is the guide to making it as an entrepreneur:

1. NEED – Talk is CHEAP

Saying that you want to be an entrepreneur makes you into a wantrepreneur. Those that will truly make it are willing to give it all up to gain success. Whether it’s food, sleep, friends, and girlfriends thats what the most successful do to get there. The will to be broke & be lost while sacrificing what others take for granted with their 9-5 job is a key element. If you think sleeping on the floor, waiting to have children, and living off of “ketchup & mustard” sandwiches sounds crazy than I think you’re crazy because thats what is the mentality needed to make it.

2. Be one of the BEST

From good to great. You don’t have to be the very best but you should certainly strive to be and let all of your clients or potential future clients know that you are the best there is. If you are passionate about your business it will show through to your clients and the people you work with and that will help to increase conversions. Passion & Effort creates some of the best. One of the greatest examples I like to reference is Kobe Bryant who would sleep for only 2 hours during the NBA Finals and be totally focused on shooting free throws in the gym before game time. His effort led to a remarkable performance which led to winning the NBA Championship. With business more effort in one area does not always translate to success but more often then not does correlate.

3. Good Help is Hard to find but you have to find it.

If your willing to pay for good help once you can afford it thats great but there is nothing better then getting young passionate individuals that are excited to grow with you.

4. You can’t do it alone.

That is true. Get the help as mentioned above but if you are raising capital and need your ducks in a row then you need help from the following:

a. A lawyer

b. Accountant

c. Adviser

A lawyer to make sure you don’t sign bad deals that hobble you forever. It stings to pay certain law firms big bucks even if it is on a deferred basis but this can save you millions in the long run.

An accountant can help you get your finances in order and lower your taxable income and divert expenses when favorable to do so. Accountants can help you maximize the bottom line of your business.

An adviser is the hardest to get. Sounds like the easiest but finding somebody who has been down the road who is ready to guide you for free or pay is not as easy as you would think since everybody has a different vision.

4. Money

It can’t buy you love, but it can buy you visibility. You need to be seen and if you dont have money it’s hard to get press…unless you have a truly awesome product or idea.

In todays world the biggest site aggregators are the buzzfeeds, digg.com, techcrunches, and viral social sharing that goes on at facebook, twitter, and pinterest. So how do you get ahead in todays world? Well having money to create a great product and attacking viral campaigns on these parasite platforms. Look at Candy Crush. They worked on a pay per download basis & got some master affiliates behind them to send massive amounts of downloads until it went viral and you saw everybody sharing their candy crush scores. There are tons of other examples but in today’s world to make it you need passion, drive, effort, a worthwhile product or idea that you can then promote and go on a mission to spread the word. Fake it to you make it works well too.

5. Backers

Look at onlycoin.com they came up with a multiple credit card in one idea. The idea had been done before but never executed with backers until 2013. They did a viral crowdfunding campaign and it went boinkers. People watched the video and believed in it and loved it. They shared it and backed it. Backers are what you need.

6. Sustaining Growth

That’s the hardest thing to do these days. Having a big hit, sustaining and growing. It’s easier said then done.

7. Learn from your mistakes and learn from those who have tried beforehand

I think it’s best to quote Bob here: “We live in a country where no one can admit they’re wrong. If you’re not willing to question every choice, do it differently next time, you’re never going to make it. Three years ago, almost everything I’ve said above would be different. You could go viral by your lonesome, social networking worked. But times change. You once used your aforementioned BlackBerry and were thrilled to get your e-mail on the run, now it’s all about apps. People hate change, but those who are willing to do so win.”

We live in an ever changing world (thanks Paul McCartney). You will be a dead dinosaur if you don’t adapt to the changes and get with it. Advertising is rapidly moving more and more to mobile and the newspapers who are just now realizing that nobody reads the paper anymore and they went online and now they are steps behind mobile platforms. Be on the cutting edge and take chances because you will fail at some things, you will make mistakes but learn from them and grow stronger not bitter.

8. Trends Change Faster now then Ever

Yes people will always love the Dallas Cowboys and electronics but the players continually change and you need to understand whats popular today will more than likely not be popular in tomorrows world. It’s similar to my SEO business. I can rank you for any term today but I can’t guarantee that it will rank next year with the same strategy. Trends are just that trends. Hey is anybody still wearing Jncos and playing with pogs?

9. Get in with the Who’s Who Crowd

Having friends that are writers at the New York Times and editors at the Huffington Post goes a long way when your trying to make it. An entrepreneur can gain serious traction from just one major publication. Once your in and they like you any of your future endeavors can at least be presented.

10. Talk to Everybody

I have a habit of talking to anybody and everybody. Not knowing who you are speaking to is part of the fun. The most powerful man in Los Angeles and I crossed paths at CES and he was probably thinking who the fuck is this kid in a hoodie in my private showcase room acting like he owns the place. All strangers you talk to tout your entrepreneurial venture and see what synergies are there because you just never ever know.

11. Referrals Rock

If you build it they will come. Do a great job and they will come back for more and tell their friends. Anything worth doing is worth doing well so don’t slack off the benefits of doing the right thing far outweigh the drawbacks.

12. Stickiness

Learn to stick around. Make sure people are happy and stay in their face. Emails, Texts, follow ups, sponsored facebook posts. It works if you want to stay sticky but it costs you Dinero.

13. Be nice.

It’s the key to making it. If you’re a jerk, no one’s going to want to work for you, go out of their way to promote you. Constantly say thank you and go out of your way to be appreciative. Everybody loves compliments, not just the act.

14. No Woulda Coulda’s

It’s the most annoying thing in the world to hear people say they were going to buy $500,000 worth of bitcoins at $10.00 but they didnt. If you did you wouldn’t be here to tell us about it. We don’t care about what you could have done. We all zig when your supposed to zag it’s part of the entrepreneurs lessons inspired above. The mistakes you make create strength in your abilities to succeed down the road as long as you have learned from them.

15. It’s not over till it’s over

Enjoy the ride because there is a lot of turbulence on the way. When you think its over it may just be beginning and when your on top of the world with no end in sight the end could be a lot closer then you think. Too many examples both ways to go over but don’t take anything for granted and stay on top of your game, stay focused, and don’t lose sight of the prize.

This post was inspired by Barry Ritholtz and the Lefsetz Letter

There are so many great quotes in the world but what about this one?

“The best revenge is massive success”

Is this true? Sometimes yes. In the end revenge should be getting what you really wanted.

“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.”

This often happens with successful business stories and manic businessmen. Mark Cuban is famous for letting people know that you worry about your baby and nothing else till success hits. Even if that means ketchup and mustard sandwiches.

“Writing is thought crystallized on a piece of paper, which can then be reviewed.”
“Never revisit the past, that’s dangerous. You know, move on.”

If you have read the book funes the memorious then you may know that not revisiting the past is extremely tough and thus the result of Funes demise in the fable.

“I’m for whatever gets you through the night.”

“I’m gonna live till I die.”

-Frank Sinatra

In the end: “Whatever makes you happy”

I do all sorts of fun projects. My idea is if an idea has merit then it should be made. Every so often I start on something and totally forget about that idea only to come back months later and see that the idea worked! So I checked on my “Official EDC Las Vegas Facebook Page” to see how everything was going since I have abandoned the page only to see to my smiling surprise that I have an additional 3,600 new likes to my facebook page.

So how did I get a lot of fans? Well it all goes back to an announcement of the EDC orlando in November of 2012. I created the first fan page and it grew from there. I interacted with the visitors and SEO’d the page up from some of my other websites that I owned at the time. I saw Cedric Gervais and Tweeted at him asking which Lana Del Rey song he had played and the next thing I was posting each and every DJ’s twitter handle online.

Then came the EDC Vegas page and a small interaction thanking all of Orlando and welcoming everybody to come out to Las Vegas for the show and the rest is forgotten history. Until yesterday at least.

People always want to know what it takes to be successful. While this may be one of those questions that is often asked by those who are not successful but strive to get there and yet there seems to be only a small portion of those willing to tell the truthful story of how they really achieved their success.

Everybodys path is unwritten and its what you make of it. To obtain success I have been lucky enough to be incredibly unlucky. Wait? What the heck did I just say? I have been lucky enough to be unlucky??

Yes that is correct. What this means is that winning is a result of trying that much harder because I know that luck and superstitious beliefs are not on my side. I do not play the lottery and entered a raffle the other day with 10 tickets with only 30 tickets sold my odds of winning where rather good but yet the guy who bought 4 tickets right before the drawing won 2 of the 5 prizes besting my 0.

This was when the epiphany happened about my luckiness. In any success story you hear about luck coming into play but yet the real answer is that you keep on trying and work hard and it will seem like you are getting lucky but yet in reality it’s the payoff for your hard work.

Another cliffnote worth mentioning is that those who are lucky in the beginning often up end failing. Why is this? While a psychologist may be able to give the most efficient answer it comes back to beginners luck and gambling. Those who lose the most win in the beginning and believe that they have a skill to which they later realize after losing a lot of money that is was just luck.

If you have read Steven Levy’s book “In the Plex” than you may have recalled a segment where he mentions how Google truly came to prominence when people would start to do searches and see just how relevant the results were compared to Lycos, Hotbot, and Altavista when they searched for University they knew they said Euereka Harvard University is at the top.

This made sense since Harvard is the most notable University in the world and would more than likely have more citations and mentions than other university websites. So without further adieu this search engine experiment is listing the top 100 Colleges and Universities according to the search engines as of July 4th 2012:

Google

1. Harvard University
2. University of Phoenix (yes you read that correctly)
3. University of Washington
4. University of Chicago
5. University of Arizona
6. University of Utah
7. University of Virginia
8. UT Austin (this is not their homepage but a list of all universities in the country)
9. University of Cambridge
10. University of Oxford
11. Yale
12. University of Cincinnati
13. Memphis
14. Oregon
15. Stanford
16. UCLA
17. University of Michigan
18. UCL
19. UC Berkley
20. Wisconsin-Madison
21. University of Edinburgh
22. University of Minnesota
23. University of Florida
24. Duke University
25. University of Maryland
26. University of New Mexico
27. University of Missouri
28. Notre Dame
29. University of Pittsburgh
30. Penn
31. University of Rochester
32. University of Southern California
33. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
34. University of Arkansas
35. UC Santa Cruz
36. University of Delaware
37. UC Bolder
38. University of Wyoming
39. UM (Miami)
40. University of Kansas
41. Nevada Reno
42. University of Louisville
43. UC Davis
44. University of South Carolina
45. University of Akron
46. University of Iowa
47. Cornell University
48. UGA
49. NYU
50. UMASS Amherst
51. University of Hawaii
52. Indiana University
53. UCONN
54. University of Vermont
55. University of Alaska Fairbanks
56. University of Portland
57. University of Houston
58. UC Irvine
59. University of Denver
60. Purdue University
61. Florida State University
62. CSU – Fort Collins
63. Johns Hopkins
64. University of Scranton
65. UI Chicago
66. Princeton
67. University of Kentucky
68. SUNY Buffalo
69. Wayne State
70. University of New Haven
71. University of Dallas
72. University of Maine
73. Texas A & M
74. UMASS Boston
75. University of Southern Mississippi
76. University of New Orleans
77. Washington University in Saint Louis
78. University of Nebraska Lincoln
79. University of Idaho
80. Washington State University – Pullman
81. San Francisco State University
82. University of South Florida
83. UT Dallas
84. University of Dayton
85. Portland State
86. Carnegie Mellon
87. UC San Francisco
88. University of Alaska Anchorage
89. The University of the Arts
90. Vanderbilt University
91. UNC Chapel Hill
92. UNLV
93. SUNY Albany
94. Idaho State
95. Arizona State
96. American University
97. Columbia University
98. University of Toledo
99. Utah State
100. Boston University

Interesting notes about Googles list of the top 100 universities is that both Brown and Dartmouth (ivy league schools) were left out of the rankings. Perhaps they need to work on their SEO or that they belong at the bottom of the rung below a San Francisco based art school, Rochester, and Santa Cruz?

Yahoos Top 100 Universities

1. University of Phoenix
2. Harvard
3. University of Florida
4. University of Washington
5. Texas
6. Stanford
7. Michigan
8. Ohio State
9. Virginia
10. Yale
11. Duke
12. Utah
13. Texas A & M
14. University of Arizona
15. University of Houston
16. University Kansas
17. Wayland Baptist
18. USC
19. UGA
20. University of Arizona
21. Purdue
22. University of Maryland
23. Washington University – Saint Louis
24. University of New Mexico
25. Delaware
26. Iowa
27. Wyoming – Laramie
28. Notre Dame
29. Pitt
30. Rutgers
31. IU Bloomington
32. Ohio University
33. UC San Diego
34. Texas Tech
35. University of Miami
36. University of Akron
37. UNLV
38. Florida State
39. UMASS Amherst
40. Boston University
41. University of Kentucky
42. Penn
43. Oxford
44. Syracuse
45. University of Buffalo
46. Memphis
47. Ole Miss.
48. UCF
49. SUNY Buffalo
50. Northwestern
51. UC San Diego
52. Illinois Urbana
53. Cal State Long Beach
54. University of Cincinnati
55. Devry University
56. Binghamton
57. UNC Charlotte
58. Colorado State Fort Collins
59. Michigan State
60. Depaul University
61. University of Oxford
62. Carnegie Mellon
63. Temple University
64. Mizzou
65. NYU
66. University of Nebraska – Lincoln
67. Kent State University
68. University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
69. George Washington University
70. Georgetown
71. Fordham
72. Colorado State
73. University of Alabama
74. University of Dayton
75. University of South Carolina
76. University of Idaho
77. Virginia Commonwealth
78. University of British Columbia
79. Indiana University
80. UC Riverside
81. Edinboro University
82. University of Louisville
83. Vanderbilt
84. Columbia University
85. SMU
86. Northern Arizona
87. Lehigh
88. Iowa State
89. University of North Dakota
90. University of New Hampshire
91. University of Maryland Baltimore County
92. Park University
93. University of Rhode Island
94. Central Connecticut State
95. Wake Forest
96. Lander University
97. Cornell
98. San Diego State
99. University of Wisconsin Stevens Point
100. Shippensburg University

(Note I had to change my VPN location to the UK to get unfiltered results)

Bing/Microsofts Top 100 Universities

1. University of Florida
2. Harvard University
3. Phoenix
4. University of Washington
5. Stanford University
6. Michigan
7. Virginia
8. UT Austin
9. Yale
10. Duke
11. Utah
12. Washington University
13. University of Maryland
14. Texas A & M
15. University of Southern California
16. University of Kansas
17. University of Houston
18. The Ohio State University
19. University of Chicago
20. University of South Florida
21. University of New Mexico
22. Purdue
23. University of Arizona
24. University of Georgia
25. UC Berkley
26. University of Denver
27. UT Knoxville
28. Wyoming – Laramie
29. University of Pittsburgh
30. University of Delaware
31. Notre Dame
32. Ohio University
33. Indiana Bloomington
34. University of Miami
35. UC San Diego
36. Texas Tech University
37. University of Akron
38. UNLV
39. FSU
40. University of Oxford
41. Carnegie Mellon University
42. UMASS Amherst
43. Boston University
44. Penn
45. Seton Hall
46. Washington State
47. Ole Miss.
48. University of Memphis
49. University of Kentucky
50. Depaul
51. University of Baltimore
52. Emory
53. UCLA
54. Princeton
55. UW-Madison
56. SUNY Albany
57. UNC Charlotte
58. University of Oregon
59. University of Minnesota
60. University of Leicester
61. Liberty University
62. University of Cincinnati
63. Auburn
64. UC San Diego
65. University of Central Florida
66. Kent State
67. Cal State Long Beach
68. NYU
69. Nebraska – Lincoln
70. Temple University
71. University of Calgary
72. UW – Milwaukee
73. Binghamton
74. Colorado State – Fort Collins
75. Georgetown University
76. George Washington University
77. Mizzou
78. Virginia Commonwealth University
79. University of Alabama
80. Fordham University
81. University of Dayton
82. University of Idaho
83. University of Maine
84. Louisville
85. University of South Carolina
86. Northwestern University
87. Michigan State
88. Edinboro
89. UC Riverside
90. Vanderbilt
91. University of Cambridge
92. Southern Methodist
93. Northern Arizona
94. Iowa State
95. University of North Dakota
96. UNH
97. Devry
98. Wake Forest
99. University of Rhode Island
100. Cornell

Here are some of my favorite books feel free to share your thoughts or feedback on any you think may be worth reading:

• The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
• Freakanomics – Steven Dublin
• Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
• In the Plex – Stephen Levy
• The Design of Everyday Things –
• The Millionaire Next Door
• From Good to Great
• Trading in the Zone
• Margin of Safety – Seth Klarman

This is going to be one of those rants that will quite possibly cause many people to be rather irate with me. Luckily I don’t care because it’s a point that should be made. Living in south Florida and traveling the world in my spare time I come across an eclectic set of people from all sorts of diverse backgrounds.

Recently some rather interesting set of events transpired which led me to this article.

If you are ever with a significant other and he/she gets rather angry one day because a work emergency comes up and it needs to be attended to than take the following paragraph into consideration.

In life you need a balance between work and social time. I am very fortunate to have the benefit of more leisure time than almost all of my peers. However, if something that is going to make a big difference on your bottom line comes up and taking care of the matter will have a substantial impact on your future life and more importantly your childrens life than a significant other who gets mad at the situation is no good because they are saying I care more about myself, my life, and me than I do about our future and the kids that may blossom into your life one day.

In part of my experiments that I like to run on Google it’s intriguing to find an opportunity to create a resume for myself that is not created for an immediate response or job offer but rather as proof to the skills that I have developed over the years. In this case and scenario I am taking my main website: RichartRuddie.com and the words “Connected Entrepreneur” and creating a resume that will hopefully impress the Matt Cutts of the world.

As my good friend Marc put it “thats a great fucking website, you are making the point that you are the connected one and you don’t need to be out in a suit & tie trying to impress people because you have the innate ability.”

So here is to experiments and results!

Everyday I am learning something new and expanding my businesses. There are still quite a few people that I admire that I would love to get their overall insight and advice on life from.

Here are my picks for people I would like to meet over the next year:

1. Mark Cuban – Shares the same favorite Ayn Rand novel as I do and now that I am on a successful tech run this would be one of the best people to get advice from.
2. Stephie Cohen – SAC prefers his privacy, is brilliant, and is one of the most successful traders of all time
3. Barry Ritholtz – Fusion IQ and Brilliant Economist who must not sleep often because he writes a ton of columns daily
4. Ken Griffin – Citadel wiz kid who was brave enough to leave his window cracked in the freezing winters in Cambridge so he could trade.
5. Mario Armstrong – Impressive tech consultant who is also from Baltimore, Maryland.
6. Brade Callen – Internet Marketing mastermind
7. Edward Thorpe – Forget Winslow this is the statistical genius that really understood the true definition of Hedge Fund.
8. Donny Deutsche – Used to have the Show the Big Idea on CNBC. A true marketing genius and a genuinely good guy.
9. Robert Herjavec – If you watch the Shark Tank than you understand that this is a truly genuine and smart businessman.
10. David Einhorn – If you ever read this David I challenge you to a heads up poker match
11. James Simon – Talk about the future of the markets and the world would be appealing