Golden Rule According to

1. Surround Yourself With People Smarter Than You Chris Albrecht, CEO, Home Box Office, George Steinbrenner, owner, New York Yankees

2. Remember Who You Are, Not What Brad Anderson, vice chairman and CEO, Best Buy

3. Make Hiring a Top Priority Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft

4. If You Think You Can't, You're Right Carol Bartz, CEO, Autodesk

5. Make Your Customers Your Sales Force Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com Reinvent Yourself. Repeat. Alex Bogusky, executive creative director, Crispin Porter & Bogusky

6. When People Screw Up, Give Them a Second Chance Richard Branson, founder and chairman, Virgin Group

7. Check With the Wife Po Bronson, author, The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest and What Should I Do With My Life?

8. There Can't Be Two Yous Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway The Customer Should Always Be Happy John Chambers, CEO, Cisco Systems Don't Be Interesting -- Be Interested Jim Collins, management consultant; author, Built to Last and Good to Great

9. He Who Says It, Does It Simon Cooper, president and COO, Ritz-Carlton Treat your customers like they own you, because they do. Mark Cuban, co-founder, HDNet; owner, Dallas Mavericks

10. Educate and Obey Your Conscience Stephen Covey, business consultant; motivational speaker; author, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

11. Get Out From Behind Your Desk Jim Goodnight, CEO, SAS

12. Learn to Give Back Michael Graves, architect and designer

13. Only the Paranoid Survive (Now More Than Ever) Andy Grove, former chairman and CEO, Intel

14. Once a Day, Take Some "Beach Time" Mireille Guiliano, CEO and president, Clicquot; author, French Women Don't Get Fat

15. Believe in Something Bigger Than Yourself Carlos M. Gutierrez, U.S. secretary of commerce; former chairman and CEO, Kellogg

16. Never Bow to Precedent Gary Hamel, business consultant and author

17. You Can't Cheat an Honest Man Phil Hellmuth, poker world champion

18. Don't confuse luck with skill when judging others, and especially when judging yourself. Carl Icahn, billionaire investor

19. Conventional Wisdom Is Always Wrong Paul Jacobs, CEO, Qualcomm

20. Make Deals With People, Not Paper Penn Jillette, magician, author, and producer

21. Get Your Timing Right Ray Kurzweil, inventor and entrepreneur

22. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Competitor's Success Geraldine Laybourne, chairman and CEO, Oxygen Media

23. Business Can't Trump Happiness Shelly Lazarus, chairman and CEO, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide

24. Don't Trust, Just Verify Steven D. Levitt, coauthor, Freakonomics

25. There's something bad in everything good and something good in everything bad. Michael Lewis, author, Liar's Poker, Moneyball, and Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life

26. Share and Share Alike Scott McNealy, founder and CEO, Sun Microsystems

27. Get Face Time With the Customers Anne Mulcahy, chairman and CEO, Xerox

28. Choose Your Mistakes Carefully Craig Newmark, founder, Craigslist

29. Maximize the Compromises Hans-Olov Olsson, chairman, Volvo Cars; senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Ford Motor

30. Whatever a Man Soweth, That Shall He Also Reap Dick Parsons, chairman and CEO, Time Warner

31. Never, Ever Forget That You Are a Servant David Neeleman, founder, chairman, and CEO, JetBlue USA
Jim Press, president, Toyota Motor Sales USA

32. Learn to Trust Your Gut Paul Pressler, CEO and president, Gap

33. The Next Big Thing Is Whatever Makes the Last Big Thing Usable Blake Ross, co-creator, Firefox

34. Be a Problem-Solver Hector Ruiz, CEO, AMD

35. Loyalty Counts as Much as Smarts Srivats Sampath, founder, McAfee.com; CEO and president, Mercora

36. Hard Work Opens Doors Ivan Seidenberg, chairman and CEO, Verizon

37. Be the Person Who Steps Up George Shaheen, CEO, Siebel Systems

38. Those Who Don't Know Their Own History Are Doomed to Repeat It Ram Shriram, angel investor and Google board member

39. What Gets Measured Gets Managed Stan Sigman, CEO, Cingular Wireless

40. Quit Taking, Start Giving Russell Simmons, co-founder, Def Jam Records; founder, Rush Communications

41. Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail. Eliot Spitzer, New York state attorney general

42. At the Height of Success, "Break" Your Business Ed Zander, chairman and CEO, Motorola

43. Business Is Not About Ideas, It's About Initiatives Sergio Zyman, marketing expert

Passion and Persistance
David Hornik's is one of my favorite VC blogs and his posting on Tim Westergren who founded Pandora (Savage Beast) is especially inspiring.
Passion has always been talkd of as the most important ingredients for entrepreneurs (Passion creates Vision and vision creates success), and I think Passion has to be necessarily complemented by Persistance to create success stories. It's fascinating to read Tim's committment to create Savage Beast, and the way he went about founding the company all along.

Carwale.com

We have built the model on the lines of autoweb/autobytel (and numerous others worldwide). Though I respect what they have done and created the revolution in automotive trading, I'm sure this revolution has a long way to go.

A real intermediary (info/ service cybermediary) shold be able to match the best available vehicle for a user at a given point. So in acse of used cars, the internediary will take customer prefernces (exhaustive) as inputs and will compare all possible vehicles available, including the cost of acquiring those given the time & place of delivery , and will deliver the best match possible.

Next it will recommend the best possible match for associated transactions like Finance/ Insurance/ Accessories and Service, therefore making the transaction complete. At the end, customer will get the BEST possible deal.

If I stretch the model further it should be possible to recommend the user that given his prefernces, what advantage/ losses s/he stand to gain if the buying decision is delayed by a time period.

I happen to read about Riya.com, I think it's generation 2 of photos.com. This is I think is applicable to so many existing business models, including google.

What I learnt running a start up?

Two things.

1. We need to Plan & execute but still remain Open: To put it simple, we should decide where we want to go (Focus, Plan) and start moving on the road that lies ahead. (Mostly, only the mountain is visible and the road is not even clear till one starts moving towards i)At the same time we need to keep asking ourselves " Is this where we want to go? Is this the path I want to take?", as we get answers, we have to make adjustments. Opposite to this, one may remain still, not moving untill deciding on the best path. I learnt that it's a wrong thing to do.
2. Decide and then JUST DO IT: It's difficult to know which decision is right. Simply put one rarely have all facts in hand to 'Take the Right Decision' , but one can definitely works all the ways possible to make one's decision right. At times, when we decide things are clearer and one can weigh the odds against evens. But, very often things are 50:50 or 51:49 and then what is important for an entreprenuer is to take an option and get all the energy, team and resources in doing it. The team shpuld look at options, ways and strategise to ensure that the option THEY CHOSE becomes the right option.
   

What kills good ideas and visions is too much of thinking, too much of calculations, half heartedness and weighing pros & cons while one is executing it.