Posts Tagged ‘startup school’

Roll with uncertainty

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

A lot of time we spin our wheels going back and forth when faced with uncertainty in life. I know sometimes I tend to overanalyze and try to risk-assess something to death, and still get no closer to a decision. At the last Y Combinator Startup School in Berkeley, Mark Zuckerberg said (paraphrase),

“In a world where everything around you is constantly changing quickly, the most dangerous thing you can do is to not change”.

And that’s especially true in the technology business. As a technologist, if you don’t learn to love it, you won’t keep up. I’m a big fan of Tina Seelig and her famous talk at Stanford titled “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20” (I can’t highly recommend it enough, please check it out and you can thank me later). That talk has received so much interest that it’s now a book.

Going back to uncertainty, it just never stops. If everyone had equal visibility and the exact equal amount of information for decision making, then everybody would be able to make the same sound decision. Now making decision, with incomplete information .. that’s how you win; how you get an edge on the competition. Also not easy, but you have to roll with it.

In a recent Q&A with Tina on BNET,

Q: Your latest book is entitled What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World. So the inevitable question: if you could go back and give your 20-year-old self just one piece of advice, what would it be?

A: I would tell myself that the uncertainty of life never goes away. There are always choices in front of you, challenges to overcome, and failures from which you need to recover. If you embrace the challenges and view them through the lens of possibilities, then you will not only be happier, but will be much more likely to turn the inevitable obstacles into opportunities. The world is always changing, and it is up to you to be flexible and optimistic. With a positive attitude and creative thinking, most problems can be viewed as opportunities in disguise.

Yours truly is reading this book on my Kindle. I. highly. recommend. it.

What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World



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Posted in entrepreneurship, ideas, innovation, problem-opportunity, quotes, things to ponder about, things to remind myself | Comments

Y Combinator Startup School @ Stanford Univ. ’08

Sunday, April 20th, 2008
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.

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Posted in entrepreneurship, people i like, photos, silicon valley, stanford, startup | Comments