One of my favorite business gurus, Naval Ravikant, shared some very cool tips on Twitter that I felt were worth sharing here on my blog:

Wealth vs Money vs Status

Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.

Ethical Wealth

Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.

What should you avoid?

1. Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.
2. You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity — a piece of a business — to gain your financial freedom.

Basic Rule of Getting Rich

You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.

What should you do?

1. Pick an industry where you can play long term games with long term people.
2. Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity. Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.
3. Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
4. Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.
5. Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you. Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now. Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools. Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.
6. Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage. The most accountable people have singular, public, and risky brands: Oprah, Trump, Kanye, Elon.
7. Leverage :
   “Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” — Archimedes
   Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).
   8.1 Capital: Capital means money. To raise money, apply your specific knowledge, with accountability, and show resulting good judgment.
   8.2 People: Labor means people working for you. It’s the oldest and most fought-over form of leverage. Labor leverage will impress your parents, but don’t waste your life chasing it.
   8.3 Products: Code & Media. The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.
   Types of Leverage
   * Permissioned Leverage: Capital and labor are permissioned leverage. Everyone is chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you. Everyone is trying to lead, but someone has to follow you.
   * Permissionless Leverage: Product (Code and media) are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep. An army of robots is freely available — it’s just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it. If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.
8. Learn Foundational Skills: Leverage is a force multiplier* for your judgement. Judgement requires experience, but can be built faster by learning foundational skills. There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes. Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers. Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.
9. Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.
10. Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work.
    [Read Point 3 again].
11. You should be too busy to “do coffee,” while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.
12. Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.

Parting Note:

There are no get rich quick schemes. That’s just someone else getting rich off you.

Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.

Foot note:

*Force Multiplier: In military science, Force multiplication or a force multiplier refers to a factor or a combination of factors that dramatically increases (hence “multiplies”) the effectiveness of an item or group, giving a given number of troops (or other personnel) or weapons (or other hardware) the ability to accomplish greater things than without it.

I recently made it to DCxBerlin and took some notes on a good talk by Mads Singers on recruitment.

Needs

Focus on the needs of each person you’re interviewing. What is the role, skill set and type of personality you’re looking for? If you hire people for a role they like doing, it’ll be a success. 

Essentials

Be very clear on the essential qualities and tasks that you can’t live without. Don’t make the mistake of falling in love with a prospect and consequentially waiving away the essential qualities that you were looking for as not that important after all.

Description

Take a look at the Empire Flippers job descriptions as they are some of the best around. When recruiting your job is to sell your company. Be realistic but talk about your company, who are you, what’s your culture like. Make it very clear that it’s a tough job. You don’t want to be selling a “relaxed, work from home job”. Better to make it sound tougher than it really is than the other way round.

What to look for

Where to look

The best people are already employed. Networking is absolutely key. The bigger your network is the more likely it is that you already know the person you want to employ. Knowing someone means you already have a good idea what you’re getting.

When contacting people on Linkedin they tend to hire one of those people’s contacts rather than the person they originally contacted. If you’re approaching someone from a competitor, you don’t need to be afraid of being seen as a poacher. You can ask: “hey we have a cool job opening, would you happen to know anyone in this field who would be a good fit for this?”

What to look for

Focus on personality and culture before skillset. You can always train the skills but the mentality is much more difficult to train and is the sum of the person’s genetics and life experiences which is very very had to change. A good rule of thumb is 10% skills, 90% personality. Unless you’re looking for highly specific roles like a programmer; there you want skills.

Focus on full-time as it costs less to train and they are much more likely to be looking for other jobs and eventually leave.

How to ask

Use job posting sites and sites like LinkedIn. If you want to hire from competitors you could ask those people whether they know anyone who would be interested in the job.

The Last Steps

Sorting candidates

Make sure you have a good pile of candidates so you can have a full choice for filtering and choosing. Check for trust and honesty. Job hopping is a no-no. People who have lived in several countries are favored.

Interviews

Ask everyone the same questions. Ask stuff that helps understand who they are. Ask about their weaknesses. Try to understand if they’re telling you the truth or bullshitting. What you’re looking for is whether this person can be honest or not. Another good question is: “Do you prefer working by yourself or in a team? Many candidates stumble on that one.

Hire the right one

People hire the best person if they’re not good enough. This is one of the biggest mistakes in recruitment. Don’t hesitate to avoid hiring any of the candidates if none of them make you excited to work with them.

Let people know that they were not suitable for this job but leave the door open for them to apply for future jobs, if that’s what you want.
“We don’t think you are a good fit for this company” means don’t apply again.

“We don’t think you are a good fit for this role” means we might have another job that is indeed suitable.

Bonus trick:

Call previous companies they worked for, especially those ones they didn’t list any references for. The ones referenced are usually going to provide a glowing review, so they are not very helpful.

I have recently started researching a post about payment gateways for WordPress businesses, especially those based outside of the United States and still without access to the top payment gateway – Stripe.

Stripe is unfortunately not yet available in Malta, and many other WordPress businesses have the same problem.

Luckily, I stumbled upon a post today by someone who has already gone further with his research, so I’ll just link to his post below. If anyone has further notes to add, I’d be happy to take the conversation further.

AYNUR NURIEV: The Best Payment Gateways for Startups

Many online businesses use 2Checkout to collect payments for their products, as an alternative to PayPal or other payment gateways.

If you’re one of the many online businesses that sells in USD but has its local bank accounts in another currency (such as Euro) you will be losing money every time you transfer due to exchange fees from your bank.

A better alternative would be to set up a TransferWise Borderless account then link it up to 2Checkout as your bank account, using the USD account details provided by TransferWise in your Borderless account. Note that 2Checkout only allows one active bank account at a time, so if you already have a bank account set up, you will need to remove that bank account and add the TransferWise one.

If your team is using Apple software and you want them to use some particular paid software, you are going to face an important decision.

Should they download the software using their personal Apple ID or the company one?

In practice, it is much easier for everyone if the employees use their own Apple ID. The question is, then, how will they pay for the apps?

One option is for them to pay using their own funds and then claim reimbursement to the company.

An even cleaner way to do it is for the company to buy a gift code for the employee using the exact amount of credit needed to buy the app. This is delivered instantly, and the employee can then buy the app on his own Apple ID using the credit applied.

My favorite site for buying these credits is StartSelect.