Carlos’ Ten Commandments for Entrepreneurs

Posted by Carlos Icaza

For a number of years I have been invited to give a series of talks at Florida International University’s School of Computing and Information Sciences and at the University of Miami’s College of Engineering. Both schools asked me to elaborate on my experiences as a software engineer at a Fortune 500 company and about what it’s like to start a company in Silicon Valley.

This past Tuesday, (November 2nd) I was invited to FIU to chat about what I thought was going to be about the challenges of going mobile and how Ansca — with its Corona SDK — solved the problem of platform fragmentation with iOS and Android devices. With FIU being far removed from Silicon Valley, I figured the students would benefit not only from listening to my “pitch” about Corona, (salesman hat on!) but also about the mobile landscape, in general.

To my surprise, FIU, announced the event under “Entrepreneurship” and the title of the session was Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. Usually, the sessions last about an hour: a 30-minute talk and 30-minute Q&A. Curiously enough, the session on Tuesday went on for almost three hours! We started at 6:30pm, and I answered the last Q&A question around 9:40, as the maintanence workers were about to lock up.

Unfortunately, nobody had an SD card big enough to record the entire 3-hour session. But luckily, I had done a presentation on entrepreneurship before where I shared my experiences as an entrepreneur — from having an idea to closing $1.5 million in Series A funding from Merus Capital.