Criterias to review a job opportunity

Entrepreneurs review business opportunities, VCs review investment opportunities and talents review job opportunities. Let's focus on the last one as we're all often concerned by it.

I've identified 4 factors in order to drive a job acceptance decision.
They're for sure relevant to me, as probably to any passionate individual trying to do great things.

1. Opportunity Impact :

Is the company on the right strategic opportunity?
Is customers satisfaction good enough to enable growth?
Does the company have enough cash to run?
Does your role give you the opportunity to make / activate a difference.

2. Passion
Do you have passion for what's the company is trying to deliver?

Are you a natural customer of it or of its ideal execution?

Will you feel proud of its brand?

3. People
Will you find the right emulation within the company?
Do you have a strong desire to actually work with 75% of the people you met during the interviews? Is there a clear learning opportunity?

4. Money :
Does the offer meet your financial requirements to achieve your personal plans?

Accept the offer the job if you can reply positively to all those points, meaning that they are satisfied already, can be turned as satisfying by you or your boss (his focus day to day focus should be clear to you).

Hope this will help you as it helped me,

Spotify free offer. It's "over"

Awaited. logic.

Probably under investors preasure, Spotify needs to demonstrate that they can convert prospects into paying customers. Today they restricted their free offer to 20 hours streaming per month which seems like a trial only option.

http://www.spotify.com/uk/get-spotify/overview/

Advertising supported music is dead
Advertising supported music is well dead as predicted by all experts. With the imminent launch of a streaming version of iTunes, things are getting more and more serious.

Will the Unlimited offer be successful?
If the Premium offer is fairly convincing for iPhone and android users, I have huge doubts about the unlimited offer forcing free users to pay 5 pounds per month to continue what they were doing before (now with an ad free experience). We'll see, after all, 5 pounds is what I dreamed the pricing to be before I got my iPhone and went for the Premium offer.

Let's see what comes out of this :)

Btw today there is yet another big band giving out their full album streaming for free on Myspace.



Have a cool week,

Gregory

The unsexy truth behind online music revenues

It's kind of crazy to see how it's turning really tough to generate fair money by selling your record. This study shows what the online music industry (in his current state) has to offer to an artist and it's not really sexy... Look at how many millions of Spotify streams you need to generate in order to get 1000 dollars...




Spotify is not gonna make people pay for the music itself
Recorded music doesn't worth that much. It's a free thing for people. Spotify, last.fm are definitely not gonna change that. The old business model of the music industry is clearly dead. And I don't even think they actually are trying to. Spotify is making people pay for a great listener experience which is different.

What's the role of the record now?
This doesn't mean people are not ready to pay, it just means they won't pay for the music itself. The remaining role of the record is just to build a fans base that will turn profitable with other business models.

MUSIC RECORD = FANS BASE ACQUISITION TOOL

Some artists do earn more money than this
Just as an example: Did dJs every tried to get their salary mainly selling records or streams of their records?
Not really, they offer their remix for free and play them in clubs, like a lot...

"Being a DJ, next to video game tester is probably the most easiest and overpaid job on the planet" James Murphy - LCD Soundsystem

By the way, this month 2 great bands, LCD Soundsystem and MGMT launched their new album on their own website, making it available for free, integrally. to everyone. This even before making it available on Spotify...

10 entrepreneur mistakes I'll try to never reproduce

I knew 2010 was going to be a creative year and it seems I didn't lie to myself (so neither to you). I'm glad of few things I did well in the past but I also made loads of critical mistakes.

If I sometimes naturally avoided those errors, I still wanted to note them so it's always clear in my mind as I did make some of them twice or more. So here are some of the biggest errors I did while developing products and leading entrepreneurship projects. You can check the "Experience page" on gregorytalon.com to know more about what I did, acomplished, failed...

But for now let me give some lessons to ... myself!

1. Thinking too much about the potential versus current delivery.

You've got a vision, it's great Gregory, you know what you want your thing to become in the next years, but hey! Get real man, do you have what it needs? Not missing any resource? It's not about how many ideas you have, it's about how many you deliver.

2. Choosing the coolest language for my application (in that case, Ruby on Rails), which means taking the risk of not finding enough developer to deliver.

Activating a cool and talented developer is cool Gregory, securing your long-term product delivery is what you need.

3. Thinking that a developer can deliver in a timely manner just on his free time.

Even for the alpha version, your lead developer can't efficiently work on several codes within the same day Gregory. Find a solution for him to dedicate at least 3 full days a week on what you want him to develop.

4. Planning too optimistically or sometimes not planning at all.

Things always take longer than expected. Own your delivery, don't ask your developer to be accountable.

5. Thinking I can build a very ambitious product without any financial backing (and negligible personal capital investment).

Stop dreaming Gregory. Your development team needs to live just like you. Profitability will also take time to come.

6. Not being totally fearless

Doubts are fortunate, fear must be forbidden.

7. Trying to deliver the perfect thing on day 1

Start simple; iterate fast, you did it well few times.

8. Pushing bugs and issues back to the next day.

The longer you wait, the longer it will take to fix.

9. Not having a price.

This one is always a tough one cause your model always evolve in the first 2 years but make sure your business model is clear and ready to evaluate before dreaming your product roadmap.

10. Being too romantic about business & start-up dynamic.

Be 100% rational. Solve problems.

I think that's it.

Hope it will help you too,

As you know I'm also a musician, I play drums for several artists including a rock band called Dead Pirates. Let's a have watch of Wood, the first music video directed by Simon and our band leader / famous illustrator, McBess. We'll be playing in Roma for Bangart.it Magazine end of May, so I wanted to celebrate!

Gregory

2010: Relaunching Gregorytalon.com

Happy New Year to all of you. I'm starting 2010 on the right path and I wanted to let you know that I'm relaunching my personal site. I think 2009 was the less creative year I had this decade following an intense entrepreneurship project fail in 2008. 2010 is only one month old but already a lot different.




4 reasons to relaunch http://www.gregorytalon.com

Believe it or not but gregorytalon.com is a core asset to my career for 4 reasons:

1- Its production process helps me formalizing where I stand today and where I want to be tomorrow.
2- It delivers a clear and easy to read positioning story to its targeted audience.
3- It helps me to stay in control of my personal brand online including my seo results typing “Gregory Talon” in Google Search (not that I have anything to hide, but I realised that I would probably dismiss 80% of candidates after seeing their facebook profile so let’s show something smarter first when it comes to me)

and the more important that makes this relevant:

4- It generates numerous exciting opportunities per year.

On top of that it's a real pleasure to do. I don't even have to deal with 50 individuals during 18 months in a matrix organisation to deliver a new product experience. (day to day life at Yahoo!)




A polarizing & differentiating asset:
Running your personal brand online has always been quite polarizing. Some will criticize you. Some will think it's clever and brilliant. Some would say you're doing too much...
To me, creativity is just about performing actions that others wouldn't dare to perform.

This asset has been a core self-marketing tool that generated interesting opportunities for me the last 5 years. This is actually the 4th version and to me the smarter one to date. It's the landing experience of other actions I perform to get my objectives completed. It's just here to ensure the perception of my professional profile and to help me converting opportunities into actual exciting experiences.






As you know music is really important to me, so I wanted to "celebrate" this launch sharing this Spotify playlist with you. It's made of 30 tracks that influenced my music culture from Soul to Electronic music passing by Jazz, Rock and even some Fusion (hear music for musicians).

http://open.spotify.com/user/8bitsboy/playlist/4aLFYBlTFVSLDRRWiZtgMk

Hope you'll enjoy it.




Are you running something similar and want to share results?
How do you manage your professional identity online?
Did your personal site / blog generated profitable opportunities?


I'll try to allocate more time in 2010 to my blog, I didn't deliver much here in 2009. Still it has been a good SEO tool to keep "leopards" calling you ;)

Here is a track called "Leopard Tree Dream" from Giorgio Moroder. Probably one of his best tunes.