Robbie Abed's Personal Blog

Mark Suster has a killer bio on his blog:

1. It tells the story of what he used to do
2. He tells everyone he was successful at it
3. He tells everyone what he is doing now
4. He tells everyone he is from LA without even telling them (the skyline)
5. He tells everyone what he looks like

Robbie Abed is a Ox entrepreneur who has gone to the dark side of starting a company. He created rawdesignr in 2008 after selling his soul to large consulting companies for 8 years. He focuses on building mobile apps for startups & passionate executives. Read more about Robbie

Everything is great except the “0x” part of it. That just makes me look stupid. But, let’s talk more about the “number x” type statements that we see. Does this mean that Mark was part of 2 startups that were successful? Does it mean that he was part of 2 startups, and maybe only 1 was successful? I guess in that case, I”m a 5x entrepreneur. I’ve tried 5 different times, but none I can classify as uber “successful” or had an exit.

Does this number really matter? If he was a 5x entrepreneur, does that make him a better investor? What about Dave McClure from 500 startups. Look at this quote from Dave McClure in an interview from GigaOM.

“It’s because I f8cked up. I was Billy Beane. I spent 20 years in the Valley and didn’t make it. Then I discovered I was a lot better at helping other people make it.”

So in a sense, Dave McClure is 0x entrepreneur but is still a successful VC.

I’ve read the stats about first time entrepreneurs vs. serial entrepreneurs and the serial entrepreneurs are statistically more likely to create a better business then first timers. That’s clear. Dave McClure has taken a very similar but very different VC path.

This is why I love entrepreneurship. There is no right answer. Forget the stats. Make your own. Mark motivates me in a very different way that Dave McClure does.

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For the record, I hate talented people. Especially the people that you don’t think are talented, but really are. Those people are the worst.

I’m not talking about the “I can juggle” type talented people. I’m talking about the “You did what? How in the **** did you do that” type of talented people.

Whenever I find out that someone is more talented & crazy than me, my reaction is to tell them “I hate you”. In my opinion, these are the types of people that really enjoy their lives. It’s my natural reaction to hate them when in reality, all I am is jealous.

Let me introduce you to Todd Jones (aka Tall Todd).  

He’s really tall and wears suspenders wherever he goes. He also runs a company called Every Last Morsel [twitter]. Every Morsel Allows you to buy groceries from your neighbors backyard.

I like him. He’s a nice guy who happens to be into farming & gardening. A few days ago we bumped into each other and started talking. I then find out he runs 1/2 a mile in under 2 mins and runs a mile under 5 mins. OK, cool. You’re tall & track and field guy. Then he told me that he biked across the US. Alone. Which also included hitch hiking in the winter.

Below is an embedded map of his journey.

The last and first time we met you were living a farm house with your husband and the both of you were experimenting with a new lifestyle; as was I.  I had only been on the road for two days when you were kind enough to invite me into your home, and my nomadic existence would continue for nearly five months thereafter as I rode my bicycle across the country.

The events that transpired during that period of time were much different than the expectations I held in Ohio.  There were unforeseen hardships and mishaps, pains of body and mind I had not previously known — I often questioned my purpose and motivation for enduring such travails.

However, there were also moments of inexplicable delight and satisfaction, wonderment and awe. Though I had no constant companions throughout my journey I certainly did not accomplish my achievements alone. The many kind people I met along the way provided me with a sustenance of spirit that inspired me to persevere, and the humble generosity of so many would-be strangers inspired my faith in humanity.

From Chicago I traveled East to Boston, South through New York to Washington D.C., Southwest through Appalachia into Tennessee, then West to Los Angeles. I crashed my bicycle in Virginia, ran out of money in Arkansas, and had to hitch-hike through most of the Southwest. I finally completed my adventure in December.

I remained in Los Angeles for six months, accepted an opportunity to lead students on a backpacking trip through the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming, which is where I spent most of the previous summer. Afterward I took a short tour of the states by plane, train, and automobile and finally returned to Chicago. I have decided to remain here for a time, the friends and family I left behind are happy to have me home, and I am happy to be home with a better understanding of what that word means to me. I hope this letter finds you in good health and high spirits.

How awesome is that!? Check out more galleries of the farm & the road on his facebook:

farm: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.780960980865.2418319.9400464&type=3&l=e58a93162d

road: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.613106782025.2269611.9400464&type=3&l=33b94b3615

I still do not back down from my original statement of me hating him. That goes for everyone else who is taller, more talented, and crazier than me.

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Yes, you heard that right. I have a new mission in life, and that is to bring music to every public bathroom in the world.

Here’s the deal. I hate silent bathrooms. Every little noise that happens is heard by everyone, and to quote my new favorite youtube clip “Ain’t nobody got time for that”.

Here is how I plan on bringing music to every public bathroom in the world. I want to create a device that can stick on to any bathroom wall and will immediately start playing music. I just need to convince these corporations / restaurants that this is a cheap way to bring music to your bathroom. It will be super easy, and we will guarantee a 100% uptime of music in the bathroom to prevent awkward situations:)

I will charge 5 dollar a month for the service and the device is free.

What do you think?

When is the last time you were buying something for someone and you thought to yourself “man, I don’t even really like this person”  or “this lady has been popping out babies for the past 10 years. I think she does it for the baby shower gifts.”

Why are we constantly buying things and hanging out with people we don’t like? It’s not like we hate them either. We just don’t like them. We would just prefer not to hang out with them.  When we have to hang out with them its more of a task them something we genuinely want to do. We get it out of the way.

It’s something I have been trying to understand for a long time now.

I have some theories:

We feel like we have to:  A lot of times we feel like we have to because it is a friend we have known for or it’s a distant cousin and they invite you over to dinner / lunch.

We want to please them: we’re too afraid to tell them that we actually don’t like them so we constantly pretend that we like them.

We are stupid people: I can’t think of anything else besides were stupid people with our priorities messed up.

What are the solutions?

Stop trying to please everyone: Ive realized that I’ve been trying to please the wrong people. You can’t be everything to everyone.focus on family and  close friends.

Live the life that you want to live not the life that society thinks that you should live. Don’t attend events for people you don’t like. If you don’t really like them STOP GOING! What’s the worse that can happen? They won’t think highly of you anymore? Newsflash, they never thought highly of you in the first place!

That’s all I have for today. Next time you are buying a cake from the grocery store for an event you don’t want to go to, I hope you think of me.

Move over Mark Suster & James Altucher, I have a new man crush. His name is Rand. Rand Fishkin and his company SEOmoz just raised 18 Million Dollars.

How convenient of me to declare him my new favorite person after his company just raised $18 Million Dollars. “So, how you doinn?”. But, really I’ve always liked Rand as a person and I’ve always had great respect for the company that he founded.

The reason he’s my new favorite person was mainly because of his last post about his company raising $18 Million Dollars. Here’s what resonated with me about his last post about his company raising money: It was real. It was so real that as a reader of the post, it felt that my own company just got funding. I felt like texting my wife to tell her that we got a ton of money from an awesome investor, but then I realized it wasn’t really my company – It was Rand’s.

This was not your normal “we just received a lot of money to better serve our customers” post. What Rand did so differently in this post was explain the story & his previous pitfalls of raising money. He told the story not to say “check out how hard we worked to get where we are”, but I genuinely believe it was to help his readers. The details that were in there including texts to his wife made it that much realer for me.

The best part about it was that you can feel the genuine excitement for the funding and what it does for his company.  This press release was equally as awesome as well.

Rand, if you are reading this: Thank You. I resonated with your post & it helped me better understand the funding process. Best of luck to your company.

I know I’m late to the ball game on this one, but Running A Startup is my new favorite website. It combines entrepreneurship & animated gifs. Trust me, it’s worth the click even if you aren’t involved in a startup.

Seriously, check it. It’s hilarious.

Today, Sunday April 29th will be a day that will live in infamy. A day that you hopefully live to tell your grandchildren over a fireplace chat. The rumors are true. Robbie is changing the way he operates.

No, he’s not pulling a George from Seinfeld and talking in 3rd person. Although that would be interesting, that’s not what he’s going to do.

(ok enough with the 3rd person. Robbie likes third person. ok, i’m really done.).

Today (Sunday) is a day filled with work. How is that different you ask? Well, today is the last full sunday that I work. Mark that as my famous last words. I work too much, and I can’t say that it has helped me increase business or made my life more enjoyable. The only thing that it has done is allowed me to appreciate how hard the work actually is.

My goal is to build a business that is bigger than me, not a business that is me. There’s a big difference between those sentences and what that means for me long term.

So, today I am wrapping up a bunch of projects that haven taken way to long to finish and am changing the way I operate.

Here is my proposed motto:

• No working after 6pm friday / saturday / sunday
• Less doing the work myself and finding the right people to do it
• Focus on building relationships and closing deals.

Here’s to a new life!

Ben achieved something at the age of 19, that I was unable to accomplish in 30 years of being on this planet. He was on inc’s 30 under 30 list in 2007. Since I am 30, that boat has passed for me. This blog post is a way to live vicariously through him.

I had an awesome opportunity to speak to ben over the phone and I was mainly curious to learn more about his company and how he founded this company at such an early age.

Let’s go over the facts:

• Company: BestParking.com
• Description: Compare All Parking Rates & Locations
• Founder: Ben Sann
• Age: 23
• Founded: 2004 (Founded the company when he was 16!)
• # of full time employees: 10

At the age of 16, he was doing what any normal 16 year old would be doing: Watching Seinfeld.

In one particular episode, George was fighting over a parking spot in the usual ridiculous manner. However, this episode is actually what triggered Ben to start the company.

At the age of 16 he knew how big the market was for parking and he decided that he wanted to carve out a niche in the industry. There was no easy way to compare rates of parking online, and he wanted to fix that. However, the problem was fairly monumental and deep rooted: There was no comprehensive data for parking prices.

So as a true entrepreneur, he hopped on a bike in New York City and starting taking pictures of rate signs across all the garages in NYC. It was a very, very slow approach. But the approach paid off as he started manually collecting a lot of data. He went to school at Washington State University, and at the age of 23 he started doing this company full time.

Things are going well for Ben.  He now hires over 43 biking messengers across the country to collect parking data on a semi-annual basis. They have information for over 7,000 facilities across the country. Over 300,000 people have downloaded their IPhone, Android & Blackberry Apps.

He also told me that he has made an official partnership with Garmin to include the parking data on Garmin GPS devices.

Best of luck to the future Ben!

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I knew I had to make a decision. I had 33,000 messages in my Gmail inbox. If I went them one by one, nothing would have gotten done. I needed to do something drastic. And that’s what I did.

So here’s what I did to get to inbox zero:

1. Starred the most important emails from today & yesterday.
2. Selected all conversations (including all 33,000). Pressed the archive button.
3. Inbox Zero.
4. Removed web ad clips from my gmail (don’t know why I had them there before)
5. Removed the Chrome Gmail Mail extension. The plan is to only check email once every few hours

This got me to inbox zero while I can still easily see the emails that need to have action taken on them.

Now comes the hard part to see if I can keep it up. It’s an exhilarating experience, and hopefully for the better.