Archive for idea

Decision fatigue and why Obama always wear dark suits.

September 20, 2012 at 6:28 am · Filed under idea, Leadership, Managment ·Tagged ,

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“Making decisions uses the very same willpower that you use to say no to doughnuts, drugs or illicit sex,” Baumeister says. “It’s the same willpower that you use to be polite or to wait your turn or to drag yourself out of bed or to hold off going to the bathroom. Your ability to make the right investment or hiring decision may be reduced simply because you expended some of your willpower earlier when you held your tongue in response to someone’s offensive remark or when you exerted yourself to get to the meeting on time.”

–Jone Tierney  

“You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

– Obama’s Way

Image courtesy:  Athena Currier

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Interesting thought on technology adoption

February 18, 2011 at 9:49 am · Filed under idea, Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

Cutting edge technology interests me only so-so when it’s in high-end military tech. And then a little bit more when it shows up in games and toys (games and toys are automatically incentivised to pursue new shit, so they’re good signals). But it gets super interesting when it’s used for trivial things, but it means that it has become a commodity that large numbers of people can deploy, and that everyday platforms are powerful enough to run it.

Suduko Solver

This very well differentiate a technologist, a hobbyists and an end user. While a hobbyist or innovator may like to toy with high technology end user is not interested in it until its  fun and social. Moore explained this chasm very well in his much acclaimed book Crossing the chasm. Startups are all about building product that  transfer technology  from hobbyist to mass market. Bill gates started Microsoft when computer were  expensive toys and had little memory for ‘software’ and no one had any idea about bloated OS. The key challenge is selection of technology ready  for transition and building a compelling  product around it. Playing with new tech as hobbyist or hacker might help you to pick the winners.

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Going to Startup Sat @Bangalore

January 7, 2011 at 3:22 pm · Filed under Entrepreneurship, idea, incubation, start-ups, unconference ·Tagged , , ,

This year  I have decided to attend  as many startup events and meet as many people as possible.  May be this will help me to find fresh ideas for my startup and  give me opportunity to  meet some really smart hackers and geeks  to work with.  I will starting with Startup Saturday which is happening tomorrow.

So what is a Startup Saturday?

Let me quote what organizers have to say  about it :

Startup Saturday is an initiative by Headstart to provide entrepreneurs in each city with a monthly community driven forum that is structured in agenda but open in discussions. A Startup Saturday provides a forum for entrepreneurs to discuss, present, network and learn from peers, prospective customers, adopters, partners and investors.

The fundamental idea is to have all parts of the innovation ecosystem interact with each other with high frequency and through rich conversation. We strongly believe that this would lead to faster evolution of the entire ecosystem.

Very interesting indeed.  So what should one expect at Startup Saturday?

Expect a Startup Saturday once a month on the second Saturday. Spend approx three hours spread across at least two interactive sessions and networking.

The first session is usually a demo. If you are an entrepreneur giving the demo, expect this session to be very interactive. Expect a lot of “whys” and “why nots” – a great way to refine the product and to figure out the areas which need more work and also the areas that are well covered. If you’re a participant, expect a window into another business that can give you ideas about your own business or insights into how to design your product. Expect a lot of debate where your question to the speaker may actually get answered/countered by another participant! In short, look out for a brain tickling discussion.

The second session is usually a talk. This is usually on a skill that is needed by an entrepreneur – sales, marketing, product management, VC pitch, VC management, PR, hiring people etc. It can even be a talk about a product/services that cannot be demoed. This is usually done by someone who has hands on experience and insights. Again expect this to be highly interactive.

Lastly, you’ve an opportunity to meet everyone else over snacks and tea/coffee and network.

Absolutely awesome. Right? So basic ideas is if your are a

a. Startup enthusiast looking for a platform  to meet similar minds

b. Early stage startup  interested in giving demo of your geeky new product

c.  A angel investor looking for new innovative business to fund

d.  Single founder of a startup  hunting for co-founder and team

e.  Successful entrepreneur/VC/Angel interested in  sharing  your experience

Startup Saturday is just the right platform for you.

I attended one meeting of Startup Saturday last year. It was a good experienced overall. Believe me, if you are into startups,  event like this make huge differences to your motivation. When you meet and talk passionate  peoples ready to change the world,  it give a huge  adrenaline rush.  Its like being part of mini revolution.

So whats agenda for tomorrows meeting

From event description it seems they are conducting a panel discussion on product vs services dilemma faced by every India startup.  I had the opportunity to listen one of the panelist, Mr. Sujai Karampuri , founder of Sloka telecom, in my last meeting. He was not only a candid speaker but also a thought leader . He is big evangelist of of product development. you can find his thoughts on this subject here. I don’t know much about other panel members. I think  this is the most beautiful part of  much meet ups. You get to know and meet so many unsung heroes  of the industry.

I think organizers  should have created a FB/Linked  group so we that we could make out who else are coming and their  motivation behind attending  meet up.  Planning for car ppoling could have been a big plus. Small session like  meet the co-founder or startup date post meetup could help startups finding talents. Surprising there is no ‘like’ button on event page . It would help in spread the words about event. Will discuss these points with team there.

In case you are planning to attend and  like to meet and discuss just give me a ping @889236683four

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Outliers need Will and Focus

April 1, 2010 at 6:47 pm · Filed under idea ·Tagged , , , ,

Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention. We know from experiments with subjects as diverse as obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers and Buddhist monks that people who can self-consciously focus attention have the power to rewire their brains.

Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons. This individual power leads to others. It leads to self-control, the ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses. If forced to choose, we would all rather our children be poor with self-control than rich without it.

It leads to resilience, the ability to persevere with an idea even when all the influences in the world say it can’t be done. A common story among entrepreneurs is that people told them they were too stupid to do something, and they set out to prove the jerks wrong.

It leads to creativity. Individuals who can focus attention have the ability to hold a subject or problem in their mind long enough to see it anew.

Source: Lost in Crowd

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Awesome speech !!!! Bravo !!!

September 28, 2009 at 7:05 pm · Filed under Discussion, idea ·Tagged , , , ,

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Economics of self-reproducing systems: George Dyson

August 3, 2009 at 4:39 am · Filed under idea ·Tagged , , , ,

The unlimited replication of information is generally a public good (however strongly music publishers, software developers, and other pockets of resistance disagree). The problem starts, as the current crisis demonstrates, when unregulated replication is applied to money itself. Highly complex computer-generated financial instruments (known as derivatives) are being produced, not from natural factors of production or other goods, but purely from other financial instruments. When the Exchequer splits the tally stick in two, the King keeps the gold and silver, and you keep one half of the stick. Derivatives are the equivalent of splitting off (and selling) further copies of the same stick—or the “clipping” and debasing of coinage that led Isaac Newton to spend the later part of his life reforming the financial system as Master of the Mint.

The result is a game of musical chairs that follows von Neumann’s model of an expanding economic equilibrium—until the music stops, or we bring in Isaac Newton, whichever comes first.

Source: ECONOMIC DIS-EQUILIBRIUM

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Michael Lewis on Liar’s Poker & end of Wall Street

July 29, 2009 at 12:47 pm · Filed under Discussion, Humour, idea ·Tagged , , , ,

I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, “I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it’s silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers.” I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.

Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar’s Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual.

source:The-End-of-Wall-Streets

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Against regulations

July 23, 2009 at 2:06 am · Filed under idea ·Tagged , ,

“The root cause was regulatory arbitrage at the banks. Regulatory arbitrage describes actions someone takes in order to avoid the affects of some set of regulations that might apply to them if they ran their business differently. Rather than buying some asset in a jurisdiction where it is taxed, you have a subsidiary buy it, or you buy an option, or you buy a company that already owns it. If one kind of institution can’t engage in a certain practice that looks like it’ll make money, then people will invent a new kind of institution that’s subject to different regulators which isn’t so prohibited.

Part of my long riff on the crash has been that practically every financial institution that exists now is the result of regulatory arbitrage of some kind. Consumer banks accept deposits, but their activities are tightly regulated in order to qualify for deposit insurance, so commercial banks don’t take deposits from consumers. Credit Unions have a different set of restrictions on their activities. Savings and Loans were restricted in the interest they could charge on loans, so when they had to compete on the interest they paid on deposits, they took excessive risks leading to the S&L crisis. Commercial bank investments are regulated and limited, so there are investment banks. Those have their own regulations, so we saw the rise of hedge funds which didn’t have to report to anyone except their investors.

“The regulatory arbitrage at the root of this crisis was that the consumer banks were restricted in what assets they can hold and what assets they can sell. So the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) they were selling stripped out the lucrative part of the loan repayment income stream and sold that for cash they could use to make more loans, while they ended up keeping the riskiest part on their books. Most of them found tools that appeared to insure against the remaining risks, but those were systemically flawed–all the banks relied on the same few institutions, and their back-up plans would only have worked if problems were isolated. When the crunch came it was general, and so all the back-up plans failed together.”

“Bad solutions attempt to forbid certain kinds of actions or investments, since they provide an incentive to find a new kind of institution that can exploit the abandoned opportunity. It’s better, when we detect a kind of transaction that is destabilizing in one way or another to find a way to allow it that makes its impact and extent visible and provides incentives to moderate the impact. That’s not easy, and it’s probably not the direction that regulators and legislators will want to go, but forbidding lucrative practices doesn’t prevent them, it drives them underground and out of sight.”

Source: Financial crisis: Regulatory Arbitrage

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Finding the right size

June 28, 2009 at 1:56 am · Filed under idea, Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , ,

You’ve seen that effect even in modern times. Twenty years ago, a few idiots in control of the world’s most populous nation were able to shut down the educational system for one billion people at the time of the Great Cultural Revolution, whereas it’s impossible for a few idiots to shut down the educational system of all of Europe. This suggests, then, that Europe’s fragmentation was a great advantage to Europe as far as technological and scientific innovation is concerned. Does this mean that a high degree of fragmentation is even better? Probably not. India was geographically even more fragmented than Europe, but India was not technologically as innovative as Europe. And this suggests that there is an optimal intermediate degree of fragmentation, that a too-unified society is a disadvantage, and a too-fragmented society is also a disadvantage. Instead, innovation proceeds most rapidly in a society with some intermediate degree of fragmentation.

Source: How to be rich by Jared Dimaond

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Isolation is innovation killer

June 28, 2009 at 1:46 am · Filed under idea, Uncategorized ·Tagged , , ,

“So these stories of isolated societies illustrate two general principles about relations between human group size and innovation or creativity. First, in any society except a totally isolated society, most innovations come in from the outside, rather than being conceived within that society. And secondly, any society undergoes local fads. By fads I mean a custom that does not make economic sense. Societies either adopt practices that are not profitable or for whatever reasons abandon practices that are profitable. But usually those fads are reversed, as a result of the societies next door without the fads out-competing the society with the fad, or else as a result of the society with the fad, like those European princes who gave up the guns, realizing they’re making a big mistake and reacquiring the fad. In short, competition between human societies that are in contact with each other is what drives the invention of new technology and the continued availability of technology. Only in an isolated society, where there’s no competition and no source of reintroduction, can one of these fads result in the permanent loss of a valuable technology. So that’s one of the two sets of lessons that I want to draw from history, about what happens in a really isolated society and group.”

Source: How to be rich by Jared Dimaond

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