Today I started listing to the great Lecture “7. Disruptive Technology and International Markets” on iTunes U, here. I’m about 1/2 way through the series. All of this series has been good, from my perspective it’s better than a similar one from Y-Combinator.

Key points I took from this lecture by Gilman Louie :

  • Divide life into 4 year ‘tickets’ - Count them! I count 12 from 21 to 65. The tickets can be anything you want to achieve. Why 4 years ?
    • Before 4 and you are not giving it enough time to make progress (Giving up too soon).
    • More than 4, and you are wasting your ticket on a dead end.
  • Make things up and see the world as it can be - if you do that you can’t be a realist.
  • Take advice, but don’t always act on it - If the idea was well understood it would already be out there. (This has come up before)
  • Don’t have employees if you can avoid it!
  • It must be disruptive. Consider that increments can and will be predicted or developed by a major corp.
  • Types of disruption.
    • Enablers. Make an new market.
    • Catalysts. Speed existing things up.
    • Morphs. Bring independent technologies together. Cloud is great for this.

I have no idea how to watch this without the dated and depreciated iTuneU app - that’s a shame.