May

1

Innovation lessons from Pixar

Filed Under changing the world, entrepreneurship, failure, fear, google, innovation, people i like, perseverance, things to remind myself | Leave a Comment

The McKinsey Quarterly has a really interesting piece on innovation at Pixar–the company who brought you Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Ratatouille. Keep in mind that Pixar was purchased by the Walt Disney Company from Steve Jobs, the turn around artist and saviour of Apple (Apple Computer, who brought you the iPod), whose company in turn have Eric Schmidt (the CEO of a small little company despised by the behemoth Microsoft) on their board of directors.

Google and Apple are both well known for being innovators in their respective core markets, and suffice to say that they both share some innovation DNA from the top–and Pixar, through its relationship with Steve Jobs would probably have benefited from some of the common DNA between the two. Here are some of the highlights of this article, in which Oscar-winning director Brad Bird was asked about how he managed innovation.

The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. There was a point during the making of The Incredibles where we had a company meeting. We have them about twice a year, and anybody can bring up concerns. Somebody raised their hand and said, “Is The Incredibles too ambitious?” Ed Catmull said, “I don’t know” and looked over at me. I just said, “No! If there’s one studio that needs to be doing stuff that is ‘too ambitious,’ it’s this one. You guys have had nothing but success. What do you do with it? You don’t play it safe—you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That’s what gets you up in the morning.”

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Apr

24

SDSIC Integrated Product Management and Development - A Case Study

Filed Under business, entrepreneurship, marketing, people i like, product management, project management, san diego, startup, strategy | Leave a Comment

Recently, I’ve been really fortunate to have met so many amazing people, that I can just learn from through osmosis, merely by just hanging around them (the converse is also true, which is why I am careful to stay way from people I don’t want to model myself after). Two days ago, I attended a San Diego Software Industry Council (SDSIC) event on Product Management where a real world case study was presented by Alan Kiraly, CEO of Enterprise Informatics.

When I last took Rod Whitson’s class on product management at UCSD, I particularly liked the real world case studies that we went over. It was definitely a plus that Rod actually had real world experience to draw from. Likewise with Alan, who is also an industry veteran. The other thing I like about an actual face-to-face event is the people interaction, the stuff that you learn that nobody will actually write in a book.

Here’s a couple of things I picked up from Alan’s presentation.

A solidified and well defined business processes can be quite the competitive advantage. Alan talked about how Enterprise Informatics use their own product for their SOWs “lifecycle” management (eating your own dogfood == awesome!). What I particularly liked about this really manages decision making. Once an SOW is defined, if the time is not right, it can be thrown out in the “parking lot”. At a later time, if the opportunity arrises, the SOW can be picked up, dusted off a little, tweaked and be reused by putting it on the development cycle train.

The obvious value here is in saving time and resource in planning. Planning and strategizing stuff takes time and .. well, brain power! Too many times have I figured a whole plan for something, shelved it, and then later when I want to revisit it, I have to redefine the entire plan from scratch again.

Transparency is good. Ok, so nothing really ground shattering here, but it’s nice to hear about real world problems when transparency is not advocated. In a global and diverse organization, with people working across various continents and different timezones, synchronizing work and expectations can be a challenge. I can surely relate to that–my team at work, consist of folks in California, Australia, Israel, China, France, and the UK.
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Apr

20

Y Combinator Startup School @ Stanford Univ. ‘08

Filed Under entrepreneurship, people i like, photos, silicon valley, stanford, startup | Leave a Comment

Jeff Bezos & me, Y Combinator Startup School @ Stanford

That’s Jeff Bezos, chairman and CEO of a small company called Amazon.com. And oh, the founder of a space company too.

At SUS, after each speech, the speaker usually has a 5-15 min Q&A session with the audience. The way Jeff handled his Q&A, and carried himself impressed me. He respectfully and politely provided a “good enough” answer when someone posed him the question in an attempt to pitch AWS head to head against Google App Engine.

What really impressed me though, was when someone asked him about some technical limitation imposed by the company on Amazon Web Services, an answer to which Jeff did not know, so he redirected the spotlight to one of his aides standing by the stage for an answer. The aide essentially gave a beat-around-the-bush type “politically correct” corporate cookie-cutter, investor-relations cover-your-ass type answer. Jeff cut the aide of in mid-sentence when he saw that the answer was practically rubbish, and said, “so basically, he’s not really answering your question” (referring to this aide) and apologized to the developer for not knowing the answer.

He then said the name of his aid so that the developer could follow up with his aide for a real answer. Jeff is obviously trying to woo developers to build on top of AWS. I tip my hat for his efforts to gain trust from the developer community. That burst of honesty, cutting through clutter .. was refreshing.

The videos at Y Combinator’s Startup School 2008 can be found here: http://omnisio.com/startupschool08

Picture taken at Kresge Auditorium, at Stanford University.

Fact: Did you know that Blue Origin does their computational fluid dynamics calculations on the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud? At first, I thought that was just corporate incest (and another sleazy marketing ploy) — but I was wrong. Blue Origin previously took 70 hours per calculation, and now they can get results in just 12 hours, quickly deploying (scaling up and scaling down) a massive fleet of servers! Talk about eating your own dogfood. Now that’s just plain good practice.

Update — Check out this video(s). In personal decisions, my methodical nature can confuse me. Some decisions are best made with the heart.

Feb

25

Fear of the defeats they will meet on the path

Filed Under failure, fear, passion, people i like, perseverance, quotes, things to remind myself | Leave a Comment

Anyone who fights for their dream, suffers far more when it doesn’t work out, because they cannot fall back on the old excuse: “Oh, well, I didn’t really want it anyway.” They do want it and know that they have staked everything on it and that the path of the Personal Legend is no easier than any other path, except that their whole heart is in this journey. Then, the warrior of light must be prepared to have patience in difficult times and to know that the Universe is conspiring in his favour, even though he may not understand how.
– Paolo Coelho

Feb

20

Ridiculously sick work ethic

Filed Under career, changing the world, did you know, execution, goal setting, passion, people i like, perseverance, things to remind myself, values | Leave a Comment

I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented. I’ve viewed myself as slightly above average in talent. And where I excel is ridiculous, sickening, work ethic. You know, while the other guy’s sleeping? I’m working. While the other guy’s eatin’? I’m working. While the other guy’s making love, I mean, I’m making love, too. But I’m working really hard at it.

You can look at the first six episodes of the Fresh Prince and I was so hell bent on not failing that I memorized the entire script. And you can see in certain shots they try to cut around it as much as they can, but I am mouthing the other actor’s lines.

Nuff said, this guy is my hero and role model.

More from CBS.

Feb

9

Randy Komisar

Filed Under business, career, changing the world, innovation, mentoring, passion, people i like, quotes, self improvement, stanford, startup, things to ponder about, things to remind myself, values | Leave a Comment

Randy Komisar, when asked in an interview about how he would ever make his mark at VC firm like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers when they have a track record of investment home runs like Google says,

It’s a high bar, there’s no question about it. But I don’t feel competitive against that. I mean I think that the goal for me is to help create great talent in great companies, and what I’m hoping that in the process, they create wealth and opportunities for others. That being said, trying to measure up against something like Google as an investment return, that would just make you anxious. I don’t feel very competitive with that. I just hope that I continue to do good work and contribute.

I think that’s great advice. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of benchmarking yourself against a rare one time astronomical success. It only makes you more anxious and cloud your judgement in decision making, spinning you into an uncontrolled perpetual fall downwards. The negative energy just feeds back into the system and snowballs.

I think I have fell into that trap of focusing on the wrong thing. I think the reason why I fell for that is because I am very competitive. It’s only natural that when I see someone doing better than me, that I only want to do even better–to win. I’m not a life-is-a-zero-sum game guy, but I am competitive.

I think the other reason is because sometimes I care too much about what other people think of me. And it is so easy for external parties to view you from the outside and say, “Why can’t he accomplish this feat? Someone else has already done it, and therefore it’s possible. If he can’t do it, then he must be a loser”. It’s easy to benchmark others against the best. Not so funny when others benchmark you the same way.

That’s exactly what happened in that interview. The interviewer asked Randy a question that same line of external judgement: “how do you think you are going to beat the record?” In my opinion, Randy’s answer was perfect, “Look, I know it’s difficult, but I don’t ask myself that every time I go to work, or in every investment decision I mae. I focus on what’s important really here: contributing, creating wealth and opportunities to the best I can” I think I would have bombed that test. I would have said something that displays my naivete like, “oh, that’s nothing–I’ll beat it.” Sounds Dilbert-ish.

Towards the end of the interview, Randy was asked what his recommendation was for people who starting out and looking for a profession. The interviewer asked if he would recommend his own career trajectory he took, for instance. Randy says,

You should question authority, question convention, question other people’s expectations. We live in a day and time when all things are possible for people who have the raw intelligence, energy, and dedication to reinvent things. And that includes reinventing themselves. The shame of it is when smart people conform to conventional expectations and miss out on the opportunities to live a creative life. Within that confine, almost anything can be a great profession and can be a good and purposeful life’s work. But first and foremost, it’s gotta be important to you.

Randy Komisar one of the mentors at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

Feb

3

Steve Jurvetson: Failure is the magic sauce

Filed Under business, changing the world, failure, fear, innovation, people i like, perseverance, quotes, things to remind myself | Leave a Comment

Failure is the magic sauce in entrepreneurship, it’s the magic sauce in innovation.

In the venture business, we look at thousands of business plans every month. The majority of them will fail, the majority of them will go out of business, but its the few that succeed that really change the world.

And you have to be prepared for that, as an entrepreneur, that on average, you’re going to fail. And not to take that too deeply, to realize that that’s okay, and luckily at least in America, there’s a culture that welcomes that; that says its okay to fail, especially in an entrepreneurial endeavor.

Embracing failure and failing early enough are positive aspirational goals. As venture capitalists, we often argue that we should often fail early enough to learn about new industries and learn to do what we do.

From an interview with Steve Jurvetson

Jan

26

Entrepreneurship Week 2008

Filed Under changing the world, ideas, innovation, people i like, stanford, startup, things to ponder about | Leave a Comment

At Stanford, nonetheless. Best youtube clip I have seen all week :) The star-studded cast in this short video clip includes the likes of, Tina Seelig, Ann Winblad, Steve Jurvetson, Randy Komisar, Guy Kawasaki, and many more. I had the opportunity of meeting Ann Winblad from Hummer Winblad Ventures. She’s so nice, knowledgeable, and totally driven. I like her.

I love this quote from Tina Seelig: “Entrepreneurship is an extreme sport. You gotta get out and do it!” Maybe that’s why I have a thing for this! :D Tina’s voice sounds familiar to me although I’ve never met her. That’s because her talk at STVP is one of my favourite that I listen to over and over from time to time. Tina is awesome, I hope to meet her in person one day.

Dec

18

Interview with Max Levchin, CEO of Slide

Filed Under people i like, startup, strategy, things to remind myself | Leave a Comment

Max Levchin is someone I admire. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, he is the co-founder of Paypal that was sold to eBay for $1.5Bil.

Here are some of my key takeaways:

  1. As an entrepreneur, you have to learn to define yourself as someone who runs a company. You know you’re really good at that if you dont think that much about what kind of company you are running (meaning, it’s second nature to you).
  2. After you launch something, watch the world respond to it. If they say it is no good, you must evolve.
  3. You don’t wait for the market to tell you that your product or idea sucks. You keep your ears close to the ground. Sometimes you must completely your strategy. Smell the opportunity.
  4. On reaching out to end-users: Being active in forums and the company blog is good, but that doesn’t scale. Satisfy your early adopter (your core base), then shift to metrics. Use metrics to drive all features. It’s important to measure, interpret the information, and feed that directly into product strategy. 10% of headcount at Slide is dedicated to measuring.
  5. Greatest fallacy: build products for yourself. Abstract yourself out of the equation. Startup founders are smarter and crazier than the average person, you can’t use yourself as the “normal” person this product is built for. Find out who you are building it for. It’s great if you are a part of your audience, but you may not necessarily be. If you are not, you must understand the audience really well.
  6. At Paypal, everyone on board understood the vision, and genuinely focused on customer needs. Build value, create something people want.



I found this cool interview of him, by iinnovate. Read more about Max on the New York Times.

Dec

13

You must want a big success and then beat it into submission

Filed Under business, career, changing the world, goal setting, passion, people i like, perseverance, quotes, regular reads, things to remind myself | Leave a Comment

I love quotes! And here’s a good one I picked up today from Marc Andreessen’s blog post today:

Marcus Loew, founding father of the motion picture industry and founder of Loews Theatres and MGM:

Ambition!

You must want a big success and then beat it into submission; you must be as ravenous to reach it as the wolf who licks his teeth behind a fleeing rabbit; you must be as mad to win as the man who, with one hand growing cold on the revolver in his pocket, with the other hand pushes his last gold piece on the ‘Double-O’ at Monte Carlo.

As quoted in Neal Gabler’s outstanding An Empire of Their Own.

On another note, today I learned that OLPC’s Linux-based operating system was available for download, and so I wanted to check it out for myself. It’s pretty neat. Now I know what my blog looks like when rendered on an OLPC:

times-jliew-olpc
Also interestingly enough, when I uploaded the above screenshot on Flickr, the admin of a group (on Flickr) for the OLPC: One Laptop Per Child group asked if I could use this picture, to which I said yes. Do check out their gallery for more pictures of this laptop.

Dec

1

When you’re at the very bottom, you can only go up

Filed Under backpacking europe, failure, fear, people i like, perseverance, quotes, self improvement, things to remind myself | Leave a Comment

I read this comment below today by Pistolette and have many times thought of the same thing. To digress, the blog post where I read this comment is a great one — I’ll write up on that in a separate post.

It’s been two years since Hurricane Katrina desrtoyed the homes of my entire family, but now we are more successful financially, mentally, and career-wise than we were before. I suppose its like the saying goes “it’s only when you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.” After a few days of moping around we quickly regrouped and simply felt happy to be alive. Every day since then I have lived strongly in the present, and have an awareness of things around me that I did not have before. We lost most of our fears, and learned to enjoy life through experiences rather than material things. Perhaps a record-breaking hurricane seems like an extreme case of happenstance, but I think it still qualifies. I see many people around me trying to endure life here (in New Orleans) with the same old attitudes and they are suffering so much. I choose to see the positive things the storm brought here, and as a result I am “lucky”.

Don’t you sometimes get tired of defending all that you have accumulated in life? Ironically, sometimes it’s the things that you have amassed that now holds you back from otherwise going in a much different direction than you would like to; effectively becoming “baggage”.

Recently when I was backpacking Europe alone, I met this shopkeeper lady in the beautiful city of Nürnberg, Germany. She used to be a school teacher, she was old(er), but very upbeat, positive, and energetic. We had more than a superficial “tourist to shopkeeper-that-sells-to-tourists” talk. Turns out, I found out that she had recently been through some difficult times and as a result lost almost everything, including her house and her significant other.

She smiled as she said to me enthusiastically, “I have lost everything, and now I can only WIN!” (now imagine that, in a thick German accent)

We bonded with a short conversation about life in general, after just 5 minutes. I guess we hit it off really quick. Her name is Christina, and I’ll never forget her (I hope I don’t). She was shy in front of the camera but I insisted that I wouldn’t leave without a picture. So here it is, and I’m showing it although I look like an idiot (my eyes are closed)

Picture 023

To go off slightly on a tangent, Christina’s store is one of those makeshift ones. It was among a few others set up on a broad pedestrian-only bridge. Here’s a scene from the bridge, across from her little store. Pretty, huh?

Picture 107

Nov

7

Be foolish enough to try make your dreams come true

Filed Under changing the world, innovation, passion, people i like, perseverance, quotes, stanford, startup, things to remind myself | 2 Comments

An entrepreneur is someone who dares to dream the dreams and is foolish enough to try to make those dreams come true. Innovative bottom up methods will solve problems that now seem intractable- from energy to poverty to disease. Science and technology, powered by the fuel of entrepreneurial energy, are the largest multipliers of resources we have to solve our many social problems.

– Vinod Khosla, founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, former partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, partner at Khosla Ventures

An interview of Vinod, from iinovate. I found this podcast by accident from browsing the iTunes store after purchasing my new iPod nano. I’m impressed by it, and I love having access to the audio and video podcasts on the go. It’s like having a small TV on demand wherever I go. Do watch the video clip below, and visit iinovate

Here are some of my notes that to me are the key takeaways:
Read more

Sep

30

Matisyahu - Jerusalem

Filed Under people i like, perseverance, songs, things to remind myself, values | Leave a Comment

I like this song by Matisyahu. The lessons it teaches include:

  • Never forget where you came from
  • Doing unethical things (like selling lies to the youth) is not OK, and one day it will catch up with you. There is a price to pay. I like to think of it as “deferred” payback.
  • I have to keep moving, doing my thing, no matter what life throws at me, no matter who tries to salt my game. There will always be haters who will always be there to bring me down and break my stride, but I have to keep moving. I owe this much to myself.
  • Make a promise to yourself, a vow, that you will never forget your core values, or you deserve to be punished*. Matisyahu talks about letting his right hand forget what it is supposed to do, and fire not coming out of this tongue as his punishment.

* I recently read about a good article on the power of vows. Here’s an excerpt:

When we make a promise, a subtle yet powerful shift takes place in our souls where intentions are housed. A vow is both a tool we employ in order to facilitate transformation within ourselves and an expression of will. Thus, to make an oath is to communicate to the universe and our deeper selves our commitment to the principles most important to us. Fulfilling a sacred vow—whether it is as complex as “’till death do us part” or as simple as “I promise”—challenges us, exercising our willpower and aiding personal growth.

When we speak a sacred vow out loud rather than reciting it in our minds or recording it on paper, our voices project our promises into the deepest reaches of the universe. It is important that we remember that a vow made with the sincerest of intentions has the power to carry on past our earthly lifetimes. A well-chosen vow encourages commitment and dedication.

A sacred vow, once spoken, becomes a part of your existence forevermore. Your view of the world around you may change, and your predominant thoughts and feelings will no doubt evolve with time, but the spirit in which your oaths were spoken will remain unaffected.

Your strength and character will inevitably be tested as circumstances make keeping promises increasingly challenging, but after you have shown yourself steadfast many times, your appreciation of the sanctity of vows will be cemented in your mind and soul.

Sep

27

Kara Swisher and I - at DEMOfall 2007

Filed Under people i like, photos | Leave a Comment

Kara and Jay at DEMOfall 2007

That’s right b!tches, that’s me and _the_ Kara Swisher, of the All Things D and Wall Street Journal fame.

I like Kara because she says it like it is. No sugar coated Web 2.0 craplets! Everyone else says the same thing, the “safe” thing to say, afraid of going against the status quo. Not Kara!

Bring on the tough love. For her authenticity and courage of not succumbing to the pressure to conform, I tip my hat.

Sep

23

Inadvertently choosing to be the status quo

Filed Under failure, fear, people i like, quotes, self improvement, things to remind myself | Leave a Comment

Some of you have the intellectual capacity to cut through complexity but are indecisive or afraid of being wrong. Can you wait until all the facts are in and the picture is clearer? Here’s the rub: You make a bet even when you don’t make a bet! That is, by not choosing to do anything different, you are choosing the status quo.
– Ram Charan

I’ve written much on this blog about change, about learning to be comfortable being uncomfortable, about not fearing fear, about not fearing failure, and about not settling for mediocrity and not defending the status quo. That quote above pretty much nailed all of the things I’ve written about, the qualities I strive for (or against) — but heavens forbid I become but do not see (so for the people who do know me, please do tell me when I am blindsided).

I am reminded of a blog post I just recently read about an interview with Sallie Krawcheck, CEO of Citigroup’s global wealth management. She talks about how a CEO often at times must make decision with imperfect information. At first, that may not sound like the right thing to do. Shouldn’t one wait until one has all the information?

Now that I think about it, if everyone had perfect information — then the best choice would probably be so obvious, and everyone would place their bet on the obvious best choice. Hence, making the best choice _would_ by definition, be the choice of the status quo. Status quo to me is pretty much mediocrity.

If you’re like everyone else, then you’re just an average person, the mediocre. So how do you break out of the pack and stand out? By beating the status quo. And to obtain results better than the average everybody else, it makes sense that one has to risk some uncertainty, for example, by making decisions with imperfect information. The adage, no pain no gain is true. Risk is proportional to reward. You risk nothing, you get nothing.

The quote above struck a chord inside of me, because after reading it, I start to realize that I have been just that person Ram Charan spoke of. I delay on taking an action for want of a more complete picture — and I implicitly without realizing it made the decision of NOT taking an action. Not actively taking an action is the easy way out for lazy cop-outs, and because inaction requires NO effort, it is usually the preferred choice of the status quo.

For my absolute hate of taking the mediocre path — I will now remind myself to the best of my ability, to be more proactive in making decisions, avoiding inaction, in spite of imperfect information. I’m not talking about taking blind chances of course, I need to practice more in making educated guesses, weighing risk vs. reward, including the cost of inaction. I will not always win, but the more I practice making decisions with imperfect information, I’ll be able to draw from a repertoire of previous choice, and gradually improve my batting average.

If I don’t start making decisions when faced with imperfect information, then I would have implicitly doomed myself to mediocrity. This is a wake up call for me. I need to rack up some failures while I’m still young — it’s something best taken cared of early in life so that you can move on.

Sep

17

Third-world stats and myths

Filed Under changing the world, did you know, ideas, microfinance, passion, people i like, things to ponder about, winds of change | Leave a Comment

The following TED video clip is AWESOME. 20 minutes well worth your time, I personally guarantee it.

Key points for myself:

  • It’s better to be healthy first, then wealthy later (vs. the other way around)
  • GDP per capita is tied directly to infant mortality rate
  • We’re moving towards 1 world, 3rd world countries are slowly pushing out of poverty
  • Cookie-cutter approaches don’t always work, 1 size fits all cannot be applied everywhere
  • Some people are unwilling to share data that can help change the world
  • $100 dollar OLPC initiative is truly changing the world

Amazingly cool graphs! Makes me believe even more in why the non-profit microfinance I am helping out with can really make the world a better place. I would love to one day meet Hans Rosling in person.

Sep

12

Ray Kurzweil’s TED talk

Filed Under changing the world, innovation, passion, people i like, technology | Leave a Comment

I’m somewhat familiar with the name Ray Kurzweil and his works in artificial intelligence, and today I can finally associate a face with that name. Below is a vid clip of a talk he gave at TED. Little things like that makes me truly believe in technology, which I have a passion for. If you have 23 mins to spare, and you somewhat like technology — then you will like this:

Jul

6

How long can you ride the wave of a single good idea?

Filed Under business, innovation, people i like, regular reads, things to ponder about, things to remind myself | Leave a Comment

Ever since Shai Agassi left SAP AG (where he was in the running to be co-CEO), he has started a blog describing the many interesting things he is doing, to change the world. His posts are well thought out, requires research, due-diligence, careful observation, and just plain good-old business acumen. Shai is a technical guy (has a BS in computer science from Technion, a reputable educational institution in Israel), so he understands inherent intricacies of technical systems, yet he also has the ability to see the “big picture”, and knows what it takes to run a sustainable big tech company. Those two skills of his that I admire and hope to achieve.

Today, I just read a blog post of his, in his discussion of growth through innovation. He says,

[On Singapore’s leadership success, that comes from treating the island state as a large company] To a certain (much larger) degree, China applied the same model to create modern China over the last few years. Where most countries need one good idea every 5-10 years and can ride the wave of that idea for a generation, China needs to create one of those big ideas pretty much every 5-10 months at their scale. So what is the next big idea – because if you are a small country, like Israel or Singapore, you just can’t wait for the wave to hit the shore, you have to start paddling before the wave comes.

I’m musing over the similarities of running a big country vs. small country with running a big corporation vs. a small startup. If a startup can be built around a single good idea (and then ride that wave for say 5 years), it’s not too far fetched to say that a corporation 10X the size of the startup would have trouble competing in the marketplace if it was also churning out only 1 good idea every 5 years. I guess that’s why huge corporations churn out patents at the rate of a few per day? I remember Carly Fiorina using the number of patents filed by HP as one of the metrics to measure HP’s rate of innovation.

At any rate, reading this post by Shai just reminds me the importance of not falling into complacency. One good idea will only last so long, and in order to sustain a business, you better start thinking of your next good idea before the wave of the current good idea dies out. If you’re a big company, you will probably need a pipeline of good ideas. The process of building this pipeline should be formalized, with each idea vetted and tested out for soundness. In a startup, you can afford to be more ad-hoc and probably just yell over to the guy on the other side of your wall to bounce ideas, but in a big company, your “next-door” co-worker may be in Israel, Beijing, Dublin, or Paris (mine are) — I tried yelling really hard but apparently not hard enough. You can try but I wouldn’t recommend it.

So a question I would pose to my readers is, regardless of what type of business you are in, what is that next idea that you will come up with that will be the basis of that next wave, that your company can ride on for the next 5-10 years?

Shai is a good problem solver. He works by looking at the larger problem, and then breaking them up into smaller pieces, and solving those first. Then summing up those solutions to solve the bigger problem. That sounds a lot like the divide-and-conquer algorithm CS geeks learn.

Shai’s original blog post on this is here.

Jun

9

Best way to sell? Tell the truth

Filed Under people i like, self improvement | Leave a Comment

I read an interesting line from an interview of Paul Graham, where he commented on how difficult it is to make a sale, for someone [technical] who doesn’t know how to sell (which is, pretty much all geeks), and how he overcame that barrier (Paul has a Ph.D in computer science).

His solution? Tell the truth!

A lot of people think that the way to convince people of things is to be eloquent — to have some bag of tricks for sliding conclusions into their brains.

Isn’t that the truth? I’m picturing a used car salesman here.

Our strategy for selling our software to people was: make the best software and then tell them, truthfully, “this is the best software.” And they could tell we were telling the truth.

And the truth sets you free. I think that it doesn’t matter if you can put up a great smoke screen and actually make a few sales here and there, lying isn’t sustainable for the business in the long run. In the age of the internets, nobody can hide. If you screw a few customers over, all your other existing customers will hear about it. A popular place is The Consumerist.

Better actually have a product that back up your claims, than to claim something untrue, and then brag about how you “locked-in” your customers, and that “they are not going anywhere anytime soon”.

Kind of obvious advice, but most of the time, I don’t get sold by people who are mostly honest.

Apr

29

Why limit your own thinking?

Filed Under goal setting, google, innovation, passion, people i like, quotes, self improvement, startup, things to ponder about, things to remind myself | 1 Comment

Paul Buchheit brings up a very valid point about visionary super-achievers, that when it comes to possibilities–it’s not about belief but disbelief.

If you think about it, a vision is by definition, something that is a little farther ahead than the current state of things. It wouldn’t be a vision if it was already achieved, would it? By the same token, if a vision is too far fetched, would we label the person championing it as a psychopath who doesn’t understand reality?

I think the important lesson to be learned here is that when imagining the world of possibilities, as long as you ground yourself in reality, do not fear society disbelieving you. Let’s look at the opposite case: If everyone absolutely believes your vision in its entirety — wouldn’t that just really indicate that your vision isn’t really that visionary after all? At the very minimum, a vision would require a small leap of faith. Leap of faith equals risk, and we all know risk is proportional to reward.

Holding back when imagining the world of possibilities while in search for a solution to a problem is counter-productive, you’re just fighting this internal battle — and the only person that really loses is yourself. I have felt like that at times, and now when I notice myself running in such loops, I quickly disengage from such irrational fears.

In his presentation at Startup School 2007, Paul reminded us that when someone tells you, “That’s impossible” it should be translated as “According to my very limed experience and narrow understanding of reality, that’s very unlikely.” Everyone continuously builds a different set of experiences in their respective lives, and therefore everyone’s understanding of reality is fundamentally different.

Reality is larger than we can possibly comprehend. Are you certain of something? If so, is it possible that you aren’t seeing the big picture? Perhaps you would change your mind if your understanding were a little broader. Maybe invention is a simple matter of observing what has always existed, and change happens when you notice parts of your self that were there all along.

I met Paul last year at Stanford. Paul is Google employee #23, and among other things, creator of Gmail, and the “Don’t be evil” motto.

Maybe big ideas are only impractical for those who lack vision and imagination.

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