Readable Stuff

i normally dont post stuff written by others on my blog, but i guess i am bending that rule now. the content really appeals to me and i thought it would be good to share it with others. these are excerpts from the websites and blogs i normally read. thats it , enjoy the wow moment

1. Mark Cuban, blogmaverick.com 

These investors, including myself, know what you don’t, and they are not telling you. The minute you ask for money, you are playing in their game, they aren’t playing in yours. You are at a huge disadvantage, and it’s only going to get worse if you take their money. The minute you take money, the leverage completely flips to the investor. They control the destiny of your dreams, not you.

Investors don’t care about your dreams and goals. They love that you have them. They love that they motivate you. Investors care about how they are going to get their money back and then some. Family cares about your dreams. Investors care about money. There is a reason why venture capitalists are often referred to as Vulture Capitalists. The minute you slide off course from the promises you made to get the money, your dreams fall in jeopardy. You will find yourself making promises to keep investors at bay. You will find yourself avoiding your investors. Then you will find yourself on the outside looking in. The reality of taking money from non family members is that they are doing it for only one reason, to make more money. If you can’t deliver on that promise, you are out. You will be removed from the company you started. You will find someone else running your dream company. If this sounds like a scene out of the Sopranos or an episode you would watch on TV about a loan shark, you are right. The only difference is that it’s all legal.

There are only two reasonable sources of capital for startup entrepreneurs, your own pocket and your customers pockets. I personally would never even take money from a family member. Could you imagine the eternal grief and guilt from your mom, dad, uncle or aunt because you blew your nephews college money or the money for grandmas last vacation… I cant.

You shouldn’t have to take money from anyone. Businesses don’t have to start big. The best ones start small enough to suit the circumstances of their founders. I started MicroSolutions by getting an advance from my first customer of $500. The business didn’t grow quickly in the first couple years. We didn’t grow past 4 people in the first couple years, and we all worked dirt cheap.

So what’s wrong with that? It’s OK to start slow. It’s ok to grow slow. As much as you want to think that all things would change if you only had more cash available, they probably won’t.

The reality is that for most businesses, they don’t need more cash, they need more brains.

2. Also from blogmaverick.com 

At no other time have their been 3 financial news networks and thousands of websites providing so much financial information and opinion. The sum of which  has definitely lead us into a situation of  “Paralysis by Bullshitalysis”.  Everyone is afraid to buy. Everyone is afraid to sell or short.  Sales forced by de-leveraging is the catalyst for the market.  However, there are so few buyers, the de-leveraging sales are taking forever.

Who knows what the new normal is. No one has any idea what is going to happen in this market. NO ONE.  Personally, I am completely hedged. I bought puts, sold them. Sold Puts, bought them back, then decided to hedge every long dollar and then some with big puts on the market. This allowed me to be protected on the down side, and tip toe on the long side. As stocks go down, my hedge allows me to buy more of the stocks I like. If the market takes off on the up side, hopefully my longs will more than cover the cost of my puts. If the market does nothing. I’m stuck right where I am, with my puts losing time value every day.

Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t.  What I do know is this, everyone is a genius in a bullmarket. The last 5 years, that wasn’t a stock market. THIS is a stockmarket. This time it is different. This may just be the new normal.

The impact of tax rates on productivity and development is something economists masterbate about,  enterpreneurs don’t waste their time thinking about it. We have business to do. 

3. Paul Graham, paulgraham.com 

For example, initially I thought maybe this principle only applied to Internet startups. Obviously it worked for Google, but what about Microsoft? Surely Microsoft isn’t benevolent? But when I think back to the beginning, they were. Compared to IBM they were like Robin Hood. When IBM introduced the PC, they thought they were going to make money selling hardware at high prices. But by gaining control of the PC standard, Microsoft opened up the market to any manufacturer. Hardware prices plummeted, and lots of people got to have computers who couldn’t otherwise have afforded them. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect Google to do.

Microsoft isn’t so benevolent now. Now when one thinks of what Microsoft does to users, all the verbs that come to mind begin with F. [3] And yet it doesn’t seem to pay. Their stock price has been flat for years. Back when they were Robin Hood, their stock price rose like Google’s. Could there be a connection?

You can see how there would be. When you’re small, you can’t bully customers, so you have to charm them. Whereas when you’re big you can maltreat them at will, and you tend to, because it’s easier than satisfying them. You grow big by being nice, but you can stay big by being mean.

You get away with it till the underlying conditions change, and then all your victims escape. So “Don’t be evil” may be the most valuable thing Paul Buchheit made for Google, because it may turn out to be an elixir of corporate youth. I’m sure they find it constraining, but think how valuable it will be if it saves them from lapsing into the fatal laziness that afflicted Microsoft and IBM.

The curious thing is, this elixir is freely available to any other company. Anyone can adopt “Don’t be evil.” The catch is that people will hold you to it. So I don’t think you’re going to see record labels or tobacco companies using this discovery.

4. Steve Jobs, stanford.edu

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

…..

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

…..

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

billboards, iphone and business sense.

billboards have always been able to catch my attention, this time i have a lot to say about the ‘Idea cellular’ billboard which proudly flaunts their new marketing tag line  “one school, all present” (or something like that). the underlying idea that is that Idea cellular is so cheap and has such a wide network that teachers will be able to teach number of students across the villages of india (through phones!!) thereby spreading literacy and developing the nation. sweet. very sweet indeed. BUT, what is this billboard doing in the middle of a city?, infact at every other corner in the city? Reliance communications made the same mistake (you cannot call it a mistake in the fullest sense) when they promoted their network as the common man’s network. they lost many of the customers in the cities to other networks. the mindset of the people metamorphosed in such a way that even those who were a bit affluent abhorred reliance.  idea is doing the same thing now. people from the cities do not want to associate themselves with those in the villages, not at least in india. even those who come from the villages do not want to associate themselves with the villages. funny, i know. (this is typically similar to the NRIs who come back to India and insist on mineral water forgetting totally the fact that a few decades ago they used to run around drinking water from borewells in short nickers, or even without.)

what i want to say is that the advertising should be consumer centric. the people in the villages would be able to connect to the idea cellular’s education campaign, not just in a small way, but in a big way. the ads strikes a perfect ten there. however, the city crowd has a different way of thinking.

if you take the KFC himayatnagar road, you are likely to find another billboard which shows the picture of an iphone labeled ’smart’ and then the picture of a maruti suzuki car labeled ’smarter’. now this is definitely crazy, my first instinct was may be they give you a free iphone when you buy the car or something like that, but no ! i have absolutely no idea why maruti suzuki is gone nuts. please come and have a look at the billboard for yourselves.

speaking about the iphone, all i want to say is that – it wont work. now, i know i am a total apple ‘loyalist’ and would love to see apple products everywhere, but logically thinking, we end up elsewhere.

1. the iphone costs a whooping 31,000.

2. there are two types of people who have this kind of money for phones.

a) people belonging to the age group 40 to 60. one thing we need to remember here is that india has this generation of people who have worked ‘their way up’. very few of this age group population would have inherited their fortunes. (FYI, india is still a developing nation and we didnt have proper roads in cities until a few years ago.) these people are definitely unlikely to shell out 30k on a phone.

b) the heirs of this 40 to 60 age group, this market sector would be in their teens or twenties and they’d love to have the iphone if only it had ‘forwarding messages’ and ‘video recording’ in it. there goes your youth market.

the iphone was designed keeping the needs of an average european or american businessman in mind, who, as per our research should be atleast a second generation rich. that will take another 20 years in india, until then people will still use phones which are good enough to talk and talk alone.

good night and yes, dont forget to excercise tomorrow morning, you look weird these days.

business, travel and boredom.

business has always been by passion, how much ever i try to convince myself that i can digest technology, i am still unable to do it. the idea that you work day and night trying to invent new things in the RND department and some smart guy in designer suits will somehow cash all your efforts is abhorring to me. Putting it very bluntly, i want to be that smart guy. After two decades of wandering in the forests of hyderabadi colleges and schools, i am yet to find a guy who is good with both technical and the HR. The thumb rule is that people will stammer at at least one of these aspects. For reasons totally unknown to me, i do not want to commit myself to management so soon, i want to have a fling with technology for a few years, which is what brings me to GRE.  i know i am terrible with technology and most of my peers will gladly agree that the first half of this sentence is a fact.  i am still trying to try to get some tech gyan in me. lets see how much i can make it. 

designing is a very important aspect in life, you understand this very well when you travel on indian roads. every time you get stuck in a traffic jam, you want to curse the guy who designed all these roads. even though hyderabad cannot match any of the indian metros when it comes to ‘fashion sense’, it can very well claim to be a metro based on the ‘jamming power of the traffic here’. this congested roads gave wind to the flourishing billboard advertising industry. i can say for sure that the billboard ads always get better response in places where the traffic situation is pathetic. billboards are of no use at hill stations or at other spots. the idea is very simple: when people have nothing else to see, they’ll see your ad. 

just about a week or so ago, i experienced another of my  ’wow moments’. to refresh your concept of the wow moment, it is a moment when you feel the wow!. self explanatory, perhaps. a mahindra renault billboard caught my attention. the ad was that of their new car ‘logan’, it simply showed a young male model posing beside the car and the caption read ” why can’t my first car be a big car?”. i have been seeing this ad for weeks but the wow moment brings in insights which nothing else can. now, this logan car was initially promoted as a big car, more like a status symbol. and then came the new airport. some company bought hundreds of logans and turned them into taxis. far from being a status symbol, the car now became a damned taxi in the eyes of hyderabadis. what does the publicity team do in such circumstances. get a bakra. they start charming the young market which fresh jobs who wouldn’t be so much bothered about their status or other complicated things like that as long as they get a car. mahindrarenault is suddenly in business. let me tell you, it is extremely satisfying to figure out such simple business gymnastics, if there is something in this world which really gives me a high, its this. 

and yes. i’ve been to pune. one look at pune at the rich poor gap we read about in our social studies books is reminded very strongly. there is more to write about the journey than the destination. on our way back, because of some strange problem which i still have no idea about, our train was late by 14 hrs. i assure you this is insane, especially because indian railways are in serious collaboration with the pigs, dogs and houseflies in place of a regular drainage system. in short: its all on the tracks. when a housefly comes and sits on your hand, you wish you’d never known something called probability. i hope you understand. if you don’t, read again. you will. kudos to indian railways. the previous sentence was meant to be sarcastic. the situation was much more pathetic a few years when most indian rails were almost always known to be 24 hrs late. of course they had their own reason- just like that. however, thanks to laloo prasad yadav, the world’s largest employer (yes, he is!), the trains now leave on time. infact  seven of my friends missed the train thanks to the traffic and rains during this pune trip. we missed the biryani they were going to get. by the way, laloo has always had his charisma do wonders for him, you can read about laloo here, here or here. he is interesting.i assure you.

when people are bored, they can do amazing stuff. paid jobs degrade the  mind, someone said that, i don’t remember who. when people are bored, they innovate, they do stuff they would normally never even think about. i have two hallmark examples. what better way to flaunt your endeavors than on the net.  here are two of my friends dressed up like joker from the movie batman and a goth . 

thats it for now. happy independence day.

the punctured parachute

its two am in the night and i am strolling through random blogs trying to kill time, i have a feeling i am suffering from internet addiction disorder; wikipedia has a lengthy description of it, have a look at it. i personally feel addiction to the internet is not a bad thing, the ‘kind’ of internet addiction is what matters here. 

a lot of strange things have been happening lately to me and i am kinda ok with all of them. my root canal treatment failed and i have a swollen jaw, i have terrible cough for two weeks now, i tripped down the stairs and got a hairline fracture and from the time i gave up swimming, i have a feeling i am growing fatter,that apart, i am perfect. 

bill gates left microsoft last month to devote his time full time for charity. this man, despite what people have to tell about him has lived a remarkable life and continues to do so. bill gates was definitely not the pioneer in software industry, he was the pioneer when it came to making money through software, the man was responsible in a major way why you are reading this blog now and why i wrote it, it’s definitely not about the great software, there are better OSs and better computers around but they somehow never reached our homes. microsoft did. and that’s where gates the businessman comes in. gates was definitely not a stringent innovator, he was a businessman, a blunt businessman. he knew what to do where and was emotionally secure and cool almost always, very much unlike the monkey boy steve ballmer who is known to have vowed to ‘kill google’ and not let his children use an ipod. (yes, you can smile here ). 

this week had yet another news item as the blogosphere buzzed with verizon ceo commenting on steve jobs getting old and wanting him to die. even though he didn’t explicitly state it, the meaning was obvious. people might see it any way they like, but as far as i am concerned, this is some sort of honor, your competitors are so pissed off and jealous of you, they’ve given up all hopes of any competition and are wanting you to die. what can be cooler than that ? given the elegance, style and the awesomeness of the iphone, i am pretty sure that there is no one in the whole market who can even come half way of what apple did. and with the costs coming down, it wouldn’t be surprising if you end up seeing iphones with just about everyone in an year or two. 

two days from now and india will have it’s first sci-fi movie. i am normally a persons who abhors movies but i just had this feeling that i should be commenting about this movie. love story 2050 reminds you of star wars, minority report, xmen and so many others just by the look of its trailers . the point i would want to make here is that the target market which the makers of this movie might have speculated have already a lot of sci-fi in hollywood flicks and its unlikely that they’ll boo boo at it. also, you can’t expect the basic indian crowd to come out and enjoy sci-fi movies. for those who are going to see it, there’s nothing new in it, the others don’t quite bother about it. i am no astrologer but i have a feeling that all those projects which people take up just because they are ‘cool’ and have ‘worked before’ never quite work out. 

by the way, i saw schindler’s list yesterday and i think its an amazing movie.  we’re all so lucky we weren’t born at the time of the war. 

ps: the punctured parachute was blue in color. and contrary to what you might have imagined, it was discarded, no one ever used it.

make them want you

predictability, my friend is a bigger virtue than patience. 

no one is, was and ever will be  in the same space-time coordinates as you are now, so the same rules, tips and tricks which work for you now may not work for others or even for you at another time(or even vice versa).  

every disease has its cure, and you cant swap ones medicine for the other. 

the same logic applies to both life and business, what might ‘totally rock’ today might be dull and drab tomorrow. 

the 1980s saw the sony walkman coming into the music market, it was the right time and the right attempt, it ‘totally rocked’. 

the ipod came somewhere around 2001, once again they hit the right shot at the right time, business bloomed.

then came the zune player(did you hear about it ), bad timing, bad hitting. 

the thing about the market is you have to give them what they want, no matter how meaningless or foolish it is. and often the market only asks for a ’sequel’ to what already existed. the desktop market asked for laptops, the laptop market asked for better laptops and so on so forth. the task of the company is to give them that. plain and simple(so, it may seem! )

people will always want more and better stuff(human nature, my friend , human nature) , its the job of the company to give them that and when you cant meet up their expectations, you are simply wiped out unless there is nothing in the market which is as good as yours. perhaps one big reason why zune didn’t work is because people had already seen the ipod. perhaps one big reason why windows works is people haven’t yet seen a mac.

this can best be explained by the automobile market, all cars have four wheels and a steering, until you see a better car, you are going to be very happy with your old one, the moment you see a better one, you are going to want it.

 say you didn’t know about ice creams, then you wouldn’t have bothered about them, but now that you know what an ice cream tastes like, you are going to want it.

‘wants’ might be said are subject to viewability. (business is more to be ‘want based’ than ‘need based’).

your product should shout at the customer: ” dude, this is what you have been looking for all your life”.

 the challenge here is to rightly anticipate what people want and i tell you this is not at all easy, there will always be error, the trick is to minimize the error. six sigma helps here, but you know, being humans, you can never predict anything to an entirety, how much ever you try, there will still be loads more that could have been done. 

beauty, my friend  is when you look a little less uglier.

Bingo!

Now now , look at the meaningless topic , it only shows how jobless and innovationless i am.(Whats the opposite of innovation? ) It also indicates something else, so are you.

Still reading ? well you see i am out of topics to fill up my blog, but i guess its been so long something has be posted.

any suggestions? now !!!! we have a topic ? why do people write blogs and what do they get out of it ?

one reason is simply because blogging is a hobby, some find it ‘cool’ , some others want the world to know what kind of person he is ‘actually’ , then there are some like me who are simply jobless.

the bottomline is blogs are written for people to ‘read’, thats it. if you have the best blog in the world and people find it useless, hardly anyone will read it, this brings me to a new topic, i am on another cloud now: usability and value, unless and until people find value in what you are offering, no one is gonna give a damn about it. people are too busy (trying to get into newer better relationships, discussing statistics of some sportsperson or simply gossiping, more about this a little later.) to give a damn about what you have to tell or do.

The Right Thing:

In business as in life, people look for the ‘right’ thing and ‘right’ decision always. To be very honest, it does not exist. The world is big, very big and theres room for everyone. Whatever decision you have made will gave their own consequences, you simply cant categorize anything as entirely right or wrong. For eg: Microsoft decides to focus on increasing profits and they do everything in accordance to it, Apple decides to stick to quality and they do everything in accordance to it. Both of them have their own markets and following. Now tell me who is RIGHT?

I am busy.

We’ve heard the sentence written above a zillion times. I am too busy to rewrite it. Lets put it to test now. Lets have a look at the world around us, dozens of TV shows around are running successfully, tickets for sports matches sell like crazy, especially if its Indian Cricket or European Football, people have time to get into new relations every now and then, there are people bragging about their jobs, lifestyles, parents etc etc(social networking will help you soothe your emotions if you are one among them), people have time to flaunt their expensive clothes and goodies(thats why brands sell), movies and music are a huge market, entertainment was supposed to be an accessory, not an addiction like it is now,…. and the sickest of all: page 3 news: how is it going to matter to you if some socialite or actor is busy with whatever makes them busy, every magazine and newspaper has a gossip column which discusses personal shit about senseless actors, thats sick enough, whats sicker? people actually read such stuff, it sells, they have ‘time’ for it.  people like me have time to write meaning less blogs like this, thats bad enough, and you: reading such stuff : thats worse.

I am asking again, are we busy? am i ? are you ?

Love you, hope the next post makes some sense, this was just a reminders to my ‘readers’ that i still exist.

Right now, I am pretty busy!