Saint Sal - Latest Comments

Re: What can Google Campus teach us about @paulg’s perspective on startup hubs?

Eze — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 07:14:53 -0000

Thanks for the kind words Sal. Campus is a great opportunity for us to come together as a community, and add to the density of network that is still a bit lacking in London. We have all the components, but we've never put them together consistently under one roof!

The fact that Campus spreads over 7 floors filled with startups will get us to critical mass, but it's up to us, the startup community, to contribute to the community.

Eze

Re: A Visual Language For Finance

Jordan Elpern-Waxman — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 20:59:20 -0000

I would represent the convertible note, pre-conversion, as increasing the value of the company. This gets into the market cap vs enterprise value debate, but I'm a firm believer that the value of a company - as distinct from the value of its equity - is its EV. EV represents the amount of assets that you as a business owner/operator can leverage to accomplish your goals.

This would of course add a layer of complexity to your visual language, but if you are aiming this at entrepreneurs and not just VC-backed or aspiring VC-backed entrepreneurs whose businesses lack tangible assets, then straight debt is an important financing option that shouldn't be overlooked.

Re: A Visual Language For Finance

Jordan Elpern-Waxman — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 20:52:29 -0000

"Of course, this could be do with a weakness in how I wrote this post as well,"

Visuals can be hard to communicate in writing. That's why they're called visuals :-)

More concretely, I think any time you introduce a new language or symbology it requires a lot of explanation or practice before you can use it fluently. With something this simple you can probably provide the explanation in person w/ voice overs and direction interaction, it's going to be tough to do this in a single blog post. I bet you could do a great job of this in a book however!

Re: A Visual Language For Finance

uh — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 18:24:17 -0000

lol

Re: Concentric Circles Of Community

jansn — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 08:31:16 -0000

Great post on igniting a social / entrepreneurial support structure. It really brings me back to when I started out as an entrepreneur (wich I still am). The peer mentoring is a very strong part.

Last weekend we had meetup of the Dutch Lean Startup Circle. We ended the meetup with a round circle to provide people with some quick feedback on their most pressing startup problems.

It resulted in a good discussion on all parts of startups. I think 2-3 entrepreneurs are now solving some problems in their startup because of that small round circle discussion.

Re: Concentric Circles Of Community

Michael Lachapelle @mike_lach — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 07:56:06 -0000

Sal, thank you for a very enlightening look at realtionships. It really struck a note with me. I admire and like your thinking here.

Re: A Visual Language For Finance

Fardeen Rahaman — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 02:48:08 -0000

Hi Salim, appreciate if you could please post the implication of valuation caps and related conditions as you had mentioned above in a similar visual approach. Would really be looking forward to it.

Re: A Visual Language For Finance

Vipergtss — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 14:20:25 -0000

Great post. I've looked for something like this as a framework to visual accounting.

Re: A Visual Language For Finance

Salim Virani — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:09:37 -0000

Interesting - what were some of the use-cases that came to mind?

Re: A Visual Language For Finance

phpguy — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 07:20:45 -0000

I took this as more of a diagramming tool to be used in explaining processes. Maybe a UML for fiance

Re: A Visual Language For Finance

Salim Virani — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 06:54:30 -0000

Thanks for your feedback. First of all, this was intended as a communication tool, not a programming language. I wonder if this was a conflation of the word "language," or if I'm missing something about the relationship between these visuals and writing programs?

That said, each time I've used this, it has been in conversation, not in writing alone, leading to greater understanding quite quickly in most cases. A lot of people didn't "get" what a convertible note was without the visuals, and two people who had actually signed convertible notes said they learned something specific about them from this.

This leaves me with a few hypotheses:
1) This won't work in writing alone, only to augment conversations.
2) The visual aspect of this confuses dominantly numerate people.

Of course, this could be do with a weakness in how I wrote this post as well, but at least exposes some assumptions I've had here, and gives me a way to improve it. So thanks again for the feedback!

Re: A Visual Language For Finance

j_meissner — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 05:47:48 -0000

As I write code for finance corporations of any kind I can only tell you how useless that will be. They need fast programs. Period. No visual language will do the job that an optimized machine program can do. I can only hope you didn't give this advice to your customers, you mixed up presentation with execution. Use google docs.

Re: A Visual Language For Finance

phpguy — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 23:54:13 -0000

I got it, Id rather just have you explain it to me :-)

Re: A Visual Language For Finance

dp354 — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 22:01:21 -0000

All the squiggles and goofy diagrams were completely useless to me, in fact they made things worse than plain text.

Re: What’s the difference between HTML, XHTML, CSS and PHP?

Psd To Xhtml-css — Tue, 24 May 2011 01:04:28 -0000

This is very informative, thank you for posting the tutorial!

Re: A good reason to shave your head.

Marc — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:03:25 -0000

Well done!
I probably have less to donate :)

Re: A good reason to shave your head.

Rahim. — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 16:15:20 -0000

Good times!

Re: A good reason to shave your head.

Sonja — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 22:41:07 -0000

SO proud of you Salim! You've done an amazing thing for kids....with sexy results!! xoxo

Re: A good reason to shave your head.

Windy van Druten — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 14:41:08 -0000

thank you! love you, salim! ❤
oh and you look good in anime red..

Re: The Walmart digital signage network boasts impressive results, but is it too good to be true?

digital signage — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:57:55 -0000

waltmart digital signage is giving best result in all over western part of U.S.

Re: The Walmart digital signage network boasts impressive results, but is it too good to be true?

digital signage — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 02:41:43 -0000

walmart digital signage result is best then any network prevailing in the market.