Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is a ton of trial and error. Last week, I met a serial entrepreneur and he summed it up really neatly - "A successful entrepreneur is by definition a summation of failures". It got me thinking of a couple of questions.

1) Are entrepreneurs those who've failed a lot?
2) How do you recover quickly from a failure?
3) What allows the entrepreneur to take such huge risks?
4) Do some entrepreneurs strike it lucky and succeed early because of the right timing?

These were just a couple of questions that raced through my mind. Some of which I knew how to answer. What got me thinking more is (2). How do you recover quickly from a failure? Entrepreneurs can have extremely good news and feels like they are on top of the world but only later that evening realize that the company is in deep trouble and might go bankrupt in the next month. It's not a game for everyone. It surfaces the full spectrum of human emotions.

And it got me thinking more. Just this afternoon, I watched a video about Usain Bolt and it struck me when the Usain's coach said, "Usain's unique quality is that he can recover from failure really quickly". He displayed his ability to recover quickly in the 2011 World Championships when he false started the 100m race and was disqualified but went on to emerge triumphant in the 200m race 6 days later.

(Do watch his video if you have the time. It's inspiring.)

His incredible ability led me to think if risk-takers/entrepreneurs are wired differently. And the classic problem of nature vs nurture emerged in my head again.

But I am dead sure it can't be nature. Your brain can be wired a certain way when you are born but with will, you can change it. The right attitude was the key.

Aha! Epiphany!

That was it!

Attitude was the answer. Having the right attitude to approach failure prepared you for it and allowed you to get over it quickly so that you can move on the success. Remember, success is sitting ahead and not behind the failure.

Take failures with a pinch of salt, understand and learn the mistakes you made, move on with stronger force (since now you are smarter after your failure).

And I decided to come up with my own definition of successful entrepreneurship. In fact, not just entrepreneurship, but success in life in general.

Navjyot Singh Sidhu tells a story about Sachin Tendulkar and illustrates Sachin's determination with an example:

So the name of the game is: Persistance. 

"Practice on days you want to. Practice on days you don't want to". This motto and and attitude is deadly because it is statement that you will never give up and will get what you want no matter what it takes. 

What are you thoughts about it?

Clash of culture and personal character

I've been thinking a lot about the relation between culture and personal character and I've noticed various similarities. When we are growing up, culture defines our personal character. Your personal character is the amalgamation of the culture at home, at school, at religious school and etc. And once we grow and our personal character has solidified, our personal character contributes back to the culture. It is a cycle; first we receive and then we contribute back.

How will you be able to contribute back to the culture though? You definitely need to be part of the culture to be able to contribute back to it. How do know you are truly part of a culture though? A lot of people form friend circles but is the culture within the group of friends the one that suits you? How can we find out? Culture by definition refers to the shared values, beliefs and norms of a specific group of people. Clearly, if you do not share and values, beliefs or norms, you don't belong to that culture. However, everyone has similarities. It is all about the degree of similarity then and everyone has their own personal cutoff where they identify themselves as part of a culture or not. If we have grown up with most people similar to us, we will instantly realize that we do not belong to a culture with whom we share less similarity. However if we have grown up with most people no similar to us, we feel part of both the original culture we grew up in and also part of any culture that seems equally or more similar to us. As such, the latter group fit into more groups.

However, a lot of people lie to themselves when they are exposed to a new group. The need to be socially normal forces the individual to believe that he is more similar to the group's culture than he actually is. This may lead to short term happiness but in fact leads to creating shallow relationships with everyone in the group (since they are always lying). It is like building a tower with sticks as opposed to bricks. It will fall off at the slightest perturbation once the tower is ready.

And this brings me to my point, the culture is an extension of your personal character. If the culture doesn't reflect who you are (once you have grown), then you are going to feel very uncomfortable and not in place. Do you have to feel bad about it? NOT AT ALL. Just keep looking for the right culture.

Hence, being in a positive culture is essential from young. It decides which cultures you will be part of when you grow up. (Ever figured out why elite schools are elite? It is the culture. You - or your parents in fact - are paying to be part of a "good" culture). 

Productivity requires focus

Many of us face this problem - how do we get more work done? I've been thinking about this for a while and tried to find ways to get things done. Three years ago, Paul Graham wrote an essay about a similar problem - manager vs maker schedule. Thinking back, I realize part of the answer lies in his essay. Recently, I also watched a TED talk by Jason Fried talking about exact same problem.

So how do we really get more work done?

Firstly, figure out which category you belong to. PG mentions the two categories explicitly - the manager and the maker. A maker is someone who is doing the real ground work; you could be a coder, a civil engineer, an artist, a dancer (you need to create performances), etc. A manager for the most part is the one managing the makers; you could be a product manager, a CEO, a stage manager. For me, the fundamental difference is specialization. A manager is less specialized in the ground work (although he most likely has a good idea of it) and is often the glue of the company. In other words, they need to communicate a lot  (like really A LOT) to keep everyone on the same page. They are the drivers of the work.

However, this fundamental difference clashes with the role of that of the maker. A maker is highly specialized and is absolutely focused on building out that application or laying out the railway tracks. He is dealing with problems on the micro-level. He is the smallest unit of the large problem the business is trying to solve (his work can't be broken down into smaller problems). If the business were problem that can be solved recursively (say matrix multiplication), then the makers are the leaf nodes of the recursive problem (they have no choice but to multiply the numbers out explicitly and return the values). 

The makers are the heavy-lifters of the company. For them to do the heavy-lifting, they need a ton of time to firstly, figure out how to do the heavy-lifting and secondly, actually execute the heavy-lifting and if they fail at the heavy-lifting, they have to restart and iterate using another execution plan. This process inherently takes up a lot of time. It requires a lot of thought to be given to the problem at hand. Without the long stretches and constant questioning for a better solution, the engineers are not going to make any huge breakthroughs in solving the problem. If they context-switch too often and try to "multitask" their productivity is going to drop. It has been proven scientifically that humans work better when focussing on just one work at a time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_multitasking). Inserting meetings into the maker's schedule is a disaster for the maker because he is going to lose his focus. When he returns to work on the problem again, he has to more or less start from scratch.

Managers have to understand this. The best gift a manager can give to the maker is time - not a free lunch or iPad. That said, I'm not saying makers should spend more time alone. Makers should spend more time on the problem instead and this could be in a group setting where everyone else is a maker as well.

For a student (like me), I have to attend classes, work on projects/homeworks and revise for all sorts of tests. I often view classes as "meetings" which is why I try to clutter (around 2-3) classes together and have them in the morning. This way, I have the rest of the day free to work on projects/homeworks that require long stretches to complete. The only break I get in between is lunch/dinner and that's the only time I prefer to socialize and invite friends to hangout with (even then, I limit the time I spend so that I can get back to my work and crunch out another 4-5 hours). 

For me, being a student is often like being an entrepreneur. We are both the manager and maker. We have to go to classes and have to complete projects. An entrepreneur has to communicate with investors/their teams/marketting/business development/customer development and at the same time build the product out as well in the initial stages. I've heard tons of entrepreneurs out here in the valley who do similar things to what PG suggested in his essay - go to office on the manager schedule and come back home to work on the maker schedule.

So here's what I think about increasing productivity in the company. 

Firstly, everyone within the company should realize who they are (manager or maker?). They should also identify and categorize everyone in their immediate circle. This is pretty easy. Managers should meet with the makers less often (once a week is good enough! that too, make it a standing meeting). If the managers need to discuss personal problems to act like a good manager - DO IT ON THE WEEKENDS AND TREAT THEIR FAMILIES LUNCH. I'm sure the engineer won't mind and the manager's reluctance to do it on the weekend will make sure these meetings don't happen that often. 

Secondly, makers should hangout with other makers working on the same if not similar problem. This increases creativity within the group and doubles the productivity. Make sure the makers are extremely comfortable with each other if not they start becoming conscious of every move within the group and lose focus on the problem. Stuff like lunches and coffees should be used wisely to remove this friction between the makers. The same goes for managers - the managers main work should be figuring out the problem at hand and communicating it to the makers (don't try to solve the problem on behalf of the maker if you're not going to solve and execute the whole problem yourself and stick through with it till the end). Managers can do this with other managers. However, there are times where both managers and makers have to come together. At this point, both should level up/down to a medium ground. In projects, I have noticed that this often comes in waves. For example, in a 5 day work week, 1 day could be dedicated to all the meetings and communications stuff - both the manager and maker meet on this day.

Figure out what works best in your organization and stick with that - do keep not that makers are the solvers of the real problem at the end of the though and managers should be sensitive of their time and only disturb them when absolutely necessary. 

With this, I hope organizations and people can increase their productivity. I'll continue to add on to this as more ideas pop.

The Facebook Timeline doesn't work for pages

So recently, Facebook has started to push the timeline UI to pages as well and I have to say that it just doesn't work. As much as I am a fan of the UI and the concept of the timeline itself, the same principle do not apply to product pages. In case you do not know what I am talking about, I am specifically referring to company pages set up on Facebook like this:

Facebook timeline page for Starbucks (searched through google to get this pic but is exactly the same as the real Facebook page they have so I decided not to take a screenshot)

When Timeline was initially launched, it was based on the claim that when I visit my friend's page, I want to know as much about them as possible. I want to know them as human, get to know their likes, interests, hobbies, what they did 10 years ago, how they developed over time and what not. This works well with people however, the moment you change the page for people to page for products or companies, there are drastically different viewpoint you have to take.

Let's look at what makes a company interesting (and for simplicity, let's look at Starbucks as a case scenario):

1. The products they offer (coffee)
2. The retail stores they have.
3. Their CSR initiatives
4. They financial statements
5. The people who work there
6. The quality of service they offer at their stores
7. How the coffee is made
8. Loyalty programs

and etc....!

Out of this list, easily 90% of it can be customized for every person visiting the page so when I visit a Starbucks page, this is what I really want to see:

1. The products they offer (and if I like a certain type of coffe in my likes, they should try and use that information and customize the page to promote that particular coffee to me)
2. The closest retail stores based on my current location.
3. If I were an investor, maybe include a link to Bing Financials (since Facebook and Microsoft have a partnership) - however, Facebook may not be the right platform to promote financial materials released by the company so this can be excluded from the feature list.
4. My friends who have worked there in the past and photos of them working there.
5. Some general metrics about the quality of their coffee/service compared to competing products.
6. Maybe some information videos on how coffee is made.
7. The number of points I currently have in my loyalty card (and if I don't have any, how I could sign myself up for it)

As you can see, the second list is a lot more personal (exactly what Facebook is about). There is definitely much room for improvement in this iteration of Facebook's offerings!

Apple has lost its touch. Steve has indeed left Apple.

Just last thursday, Apple announced their latest iteration of the cash-cow : iPad 3.

And if you did not know what it looks like, here it is:

Yup, it is exactly the same as iPad 2. Well, it was a bit surprising that Apple did not renew the design but oh well, the iPad 2 design was already minimalistic and it was harder to make it simpler. Also, it was harder to make it thinner given that the electronics within it are already crammed from surface-to-surface. 

Never mind about the debate about on whether it was even a real update or not. My focus in this post is to bring to attention to the actual event on March 7th itself. 

Basically, the launch according to me was a catastrophe. 

Firstly, Tim Cook compared the apps running on the iPad to Android Tablets. Well, Apple has so far never resorted to such tactics (or at least while Steve was around). Why would they want to compare themselves with Android? They know that their OS is light years ahead of Android's in terms of user experience so by comparing it, they essentially admit that they are threatened by Android. In other words, they debased their own product.

Secondly, they went too technical in their presentation:

Stop and watch at around 27:30. They showed the formula a = 2 tan_inverse(h/2d). OH MY GAWD!
This is a sham. 90% of the people watching this probably understand the formula but who really cares? Also, they gave a window for competitors to compete with since the technicalities of how they define retina display can be quite grey. For example, Samsung can debate that their table is also retina display if you assume the average distance from eye to screen to 40 inches instead of 30 inches. You see, the value 30,40 is quite debatable when consumers look at it even if there is research that shows 30 to be the average. Fact is, consumers likely don't know about that research or the way they came up with 30. You see what I mean?

Thirdly, their promotional video (not the TV ad one):

At around 1:50, they go into quite a bit of technicality about the engineering challenge they had with retina display. Seriously guys, no one on earth understand why you need to elevate the pixels to prevent the signals to the screen from mixing up. NOT A SINGLE PERSON GETS THAT.

Well, if apple really wanted to release a video about the technical breakthrough a made (understandable as the executive staff might want to boost their engineers morale), they could just make another video explaining the technology. That would be completely fine. Why did they have to mix up both the advertising and technicalities in the same video? This way, the technicalities get so little air time and no one really understood the impact of their engineering.

It is sad to know that Steve has gone. Along with him goes the eye for perfection in every detail. Steve understood his audience well and knew how to address their "un-asked" questions.

Yahoo Hackathon

Just yesterday, I had my very first hackathon hosted by Yahoo @ Wozniak Lounge.

The hackathon was to last overnight but obviously i couldnt last THAT long without sleeping and I also had to consider that I have a midterm coming up on Tuesday.

I entered Woz at around 6.15ish and it was totally against what I expected. Normally, Woz lounge is a very clean and organized and prim and proper type of place. This time round, BAM! Laptops and iMacs and desktops all over the room. There was literally insufficient space to move around. I never expected such a huge turnout.

Nevertheless, I saw a familiar face from CS and Math class to I went to ask him if he had any project and if i could join his team. He and 2 other members planned to make a game using python (leveraging pyGame). I thought it was interesting but little did I know what was coming up.

pyGame took forever for me to install and when I tried to run the sample game that utilized pyGame, it said "pyGame module not found". Wasted another 2 hours on it and I was still getting the same error message. Finally, I decided that I did not like this project and left the group (I felt really bad but I din want to waste my night also!).

Then, I started to mess around with Facebook API. I was always curious on how to get data through the Facebook API. Thankfully, I had a small breakthrough in this and managed to get my user id on facebook to show up at least.

At this juncture, Kush entered. The previous week, we had lunch together and decided to implement a game using the Corona SDK. Corona SDK's promotional video was mind-blowing. The physics was so easy to implement that it almost seamed too good to be true. As such, we decided to build using the Corona SDK.

We left the Woz Lounge and came back to my room. (It was around 10pm by now). We started working through the Corona tutorials till around 12+. Confession: Corona SDK has been the easiest-to-use interface and implementation that I have used till date. By 1.30, Kush and I had a partial game running. WE MADE HALF A GAME IN 1 HOUR!!!

Both of us were exhausted and thought that we had done enough work for the night so we decided to go off to bed (and I also din want to stay up till too late as it would mess my system up and I may not be able to prepare well for my midterm on tuesday.)

That's all for now!

It has been a long time since I last posted and a lot has happened since.

From Feb to Sept, my life has basically changed.

Here is a list for myself to keep track of what I have done so far since Feb:

1. Won Special Mention at SAFMC - nothing great, is equivalent to a sympathy award
2. Learnt iPhone programming and released ITCrowd.
3. Got OpenCV to work on iphone and making an app using that now. All code was copied to get opencv to work.
4. Watched a ton of movies and went out with friends almost everyday
5. Released Flypn.com which can be considered my first 'start-up'
6. Travelled half-way around the world (that's right, I am in Berkeley, California, US)
7. started doing homework in school (trust me, i got a lot of it)

hmm... photos will be coming up soon. so have fun till then! I hope to be able to make it a routine to blog every week at least.

2011 New Macbook Pro Release

It has been slightly over 24 hours since Apple refreshed their premium line of notebooks (Macbook Pros). First comments: OMG for the utterlyinsanelyhyperlyextracool hardware upgrade. A Quad i7 in a laptop? Dude. Seriously, DUDE?

PC's will need to play catch up for a while. Also, they made it so incredibly affordable. The 13-inch entry-level Macbook pro is available from SGD 1648/- (1498 if you are a student) and you get a free wireless printer rebate with every purchase of a mac (if you actually bother filling out the forms to get it for free).

Check out CNET and other websites for proper reviews. Meanwhile, I am feeling really sad about my outdated and about-to-be obsolete Macbook pro.

The multitude of wealth

Why are some rich people not happy? Obviously, wealth isn't the only thing that makes us happy. My father always talks about the different types of wealth but lately, I got an email from an anonymous source(most likely it was spam email that evaded google's filters) describing 7 types of wealth. 

1. Inner wealth

2. Physical wealth

3. Family wealth

4. Career wealth

5. Economic wealth

6. Adventure wealth

7. Impact wealth

I won't deny that money isn't important in life but it surely isn't everything that your life has to be about. The other types of wealth can also make one successful, stress-free and satisfied with life. 

Inner wealth is associated with your outlook of the situation around you. Do you think positively or negatively? Thinking positively can greatly enhance your life quality. However, many of us feel (at least I felt like that when I was young) that positive thinking was just small talk. There wasn't really any science behind it. Turns out, I am wrong! Positive thinking affects your subconscious mind and works in the same way as hypnotism. Think of it this way, if you think positively all the time, it is equivalent to hypnotizing yourself to believe in the specific positive outcome. 

Next is physical wealth and as the adage goes " Health is wealth". Would you be happy if you had everything in the world except that you were bed ridden? I would be swearing and cursing out loud!

Family wealth is really about emotional support. Nothing feels better than family love and care. After all, they are the only ones you can trust who will be there for you no matter when you ask.

Career wealth is about attaining a sense of fulfillment while economic wealth is about earning money. Economic wealth is not all you want. This reminds me of an anecdote: You don't want to spend 50% of your adult life earning money and the remaining 50% on spending on healthcare bills!

Adventure wealth is about meeting new challenges and overcoming them - could be in your day to day life or in your lifetime!

Finally, we have the impact wealth. Many adults like to complain about how they can be easily displaced by any other employee. This is where impact wealth plays a part. Do you want to leave a mark at your work place or just go there and perform the job you are assigned to like a robot? Similarly, many of us want to do something for the society at large. 

With this, it is about time for me to sleep and sorry for updating after such a long time. I fell sick last week and was busy with SAFMC before that. 

Adios!

Ripping apart my Dell and meddling around with Gumstix

So over the past few days, I have meddled around with a numerous electronics. Microcontrollers, IMU, breakout boards, CMOS sensors, range finders and a couple of other stuff. I started to wonder, if all these electronics are so small, why is the laptop so big? Below are a few pictures to give you a perspective of how small things can really get and why there really is no reason for laptops to be so huge.

The Dell's internal electronics. I have removed the CD drive and battery and LCD and keyboard and touchpad and whatever other peripherals you can think of that are directly accessible to the consumer. The large silver metal casing you see right beside the intel chip is the PCMCI slot. Surely, that is taking a lot of space and no one ever - EVER- uses a PCMCI card now.  

The intel chip. This chip is directly beneath the wifi and bluetooth card. See the next picture. 

I have added the wifi/bluetooth card here and removed their antenna.

The fan with the heat sink. I have removed the heat sink here to make it clearer.  

The top part of the laptop. The LCD and the upper casing.

This is a Gumstix Overo Fire board with a Gumstix Summit expansion board. It comes with all the ports you can see in the picture. Do not be deceived by it apparently large looks. To get a perspective of exactly how small this board is together with the expansion board, check out the last picture. It literally comes with everything the macbook air has.  

I have separated the gumstix fire board and the summit board here. The fire board goes over the summit board (using the 2 70-pin connectors you see on the summit board)

Just to give you an idea of how big is the laptop.

There are a few reasons why the laptop is so much bigger. 

Firstly, the laptop has a separate GPU for processing graphics. And since there are so many components, there is obviously a larger power management board.

Secondly, the laptop uses a hard drive instead of a memory card(like on the gumstix). In the macbook air, you will recall that they use flash memory for storage which is essentially a fancy way to say that they embedded multiple memory cards onto the main board. In the process, they save a lot of space, a lot of weight and also a lot of energy (the hard drive actually spins as opposed to memory cards). 

Thirdly, you have stuff like PCMCI card slots, a CD drive and a ton of ports (some of which no one use today). The CD drive surely is heavy.

In comparison with the Macbook Air, one reason why the Dell isn't able to last so long on battery is because: 1. the battery requires a casing and 2. the Dell uses a Li-ion battery as opposed to the Li-Polymer battery in the Macbook Air. Li-Polymer batteries have a significantly higher power density and thus for the same weight and same number of cells, the Li-Polymer battery is able to provide more power. 

On a side note: if you are interested to know more about the SAFMC project and gumstix and electronics in general, you can visit my team's project page here.