Member's Blog

Blogs

Written by Malek Friday, 24 March 2017 23:16

Business School stats

Written by Malek Wednesday, 22 March 2017 23:59


Written by Malek Thursday, 19 January 2017 01:24


Written by Malek Friday, 30 December 2016 00:01

passports

By

If you have citizenship in Sweden, you have a great deal of traveling power — Swedes can fly to 158 countries without ever showing a visa. This makes international travel cheaper and easier than it is for citizens of many other countries, like those of Afghanistan, who can enter just 24 countries without a visa.

These stark differences are revealed in the Passport Index, which ranks countries based on the number of nations where residents can go without purchasing a visa in advance or on arrival. The global financial advisory firm Arton Capital compiled government data from 193 countries and six territories to create the 2016 ranking. The US makes the top 16.

16. The United States — 155 countries
15. Japan — 155 countries
14. Norway — 155 countries
13. Belgium — 155 countries
12. The Netherlands — 155 countries
11. Italy — 155 countries
10. Denmark — 155 countries
9. Singapore — 155 countries
8. The United Kingdom — 156 countries
7. South Korea — 156 countries
6. Spain — 156 countries
5. Switzerland — 156 countries
4. France — 156 countries
3. Finland — 156 countries
2. Sweden — 157 countries
1. Germany — 158 countries

Written by Malek Thursday, 22 December 2016 09:59

Elevation Burger 6

As 2016 comes to a close, the restaurant industry is prepping for a new year.  To succeed in 2017, chains will need to stay on the cutting edge as trends like automation and menu transparency continue to gain traction. Restaurants will also have to take on greater competition from smaller chains and independent restaurants.

We spoke with restaurant industry experts Catherine De Orio, an executive director of the culinary nonprofit Kendall College Trust, and Shilen Patel, co-founder of the consultancy Independents United, to see what restaurants chains they are looking out for in 2017. 

Here are seven chains poised for a breakthrough in the new year, according to De Orio and Patel

Click Read More to view list

Written by Malek Saturday, 10 December 2016 20:39

Peter Thiel

by Jessi Hempel, Backchannel

Jesse Leimgruber has 22 employees, and every last one is older than him. He tells me this over coffee at a downtown San Francisco Starbucks that is equidistant from his company’s coworking space and the one-bedroom apartment he shares with his girlfriend. Leimgruber is the CEO of NeoReach, a digital marketing tools firm he started in 2014 with his brother and a friend; they have raised $3.5 million so far, and last year they did over a million dollars in sales. He is 22.

Leimgruber is one of 29 people who make up this year’s class of Thiel Fellows — the crazy smart youth paid by Peter Thiel to double down on entrepreneurship instead of school. Leimgruber has dramatic eyebrows, longish hair, and the kind of earnest perma-grin that creeps across his face even when he’s trying to be serious. He speaks with the authority of a three-time CEO who has learned a lot on the job, explaining a challenge particular to fellows like him: “A common piece of advice is, don’t hire your peers; They probably aren’t qualified.”

Welcome to the 2016 version of Peter Thiel’s eponymous fellowship. What began as an attempt to draw teen prodigies to the Valley before they racked up debt at Princeton or Harvard and went into consulting to pay it off has transformed into the most prestigious network for young entrepreneurs in existence — a pedigree that virtually guarantees your ideas will be judged good, investors will take your call, and there will always be another job ahead even better than the one you have. “We look for extraordinary individuals and we want to back them for life,” says executive director Jack Abraham. He speaks with the conviction of a man who sold a company by age 25, has spent the entirety of his professional life in the cradle of the upswing of the technology revolution, and only just turned 30. With no irony, he adds: “We consider ourselves a league of extraordinary, courageous, brilliant individuals who should be a shining light for the rest of society.”

This is not what Thiel endeavored to build. In 2010, when he set out to take down higher education by plucking kids from the ivory towers of the Ivy League and transporting them to San Francisco, he had his eye on teenagers. In a hastily conceived plan that he announced at a San Francisco tech conference, Thiel said he’d pay $100,000 to 20 people under the age of 20 to drop out of school for two years, move to the Bay Area, and work on anything they wanted. His goal was to jumpstart the kind of big tech breakthroughs — walking on the moon, desktop computing — that he believed the contemporary Valley lacked. He also meant to prove that college was often counterproductive; it required kids to take on debt while laying out a set of overly prescriptive options for their futures. A college diploma, he once said, was “a dunce cap in disguise.”

Written by Malek Wednesday, 30 November 2016 02:19

Amazon Shipping

By Adam Levy The Motley Fool

A lot of investors look at Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) and see a company with unparalleled distribution capabilities or a market-leading cloud computing service. What I see, though, is the place people go to shop online.

While that might sound completely obvious, it's an advantage that's hard for competitors to overcome. In America, 55% of online shoppers begin their product search on Amazon.com, according to a recent survey from BloomReach. I'm willing to bet a large percentage of shoppers end their product search on Amazon as well.

That influx of shoppers leads to more product creators and merchants wanting to get their products on the virtual shelves of Amazon so their items show up in shoppers' product searches. That inimitable shopper behavior is at the core of one of Amazon's three pillars: its Fulfilled by Amazon program.

Written by Malek Sunday, 27 November 2016 02:17

travel hacks vector_2016