Why Indian Innovation and Execution are not Mutually Exclusive.

January 28, 2011

Stumbled upon an interesting post by Abinash Tripathy on his blog.

I think he means well and seems to be trying to say that the technical efficacy of entrepreneurs needs to match their ability to ideate if they are to compete on a global scale with US start-ups. I just thought that he diluted his assertions by getting into a ‘technical supremacy arms race’ and thus implying that the best tech stack wins the game. Couldn’t be further from the truth and it compelled me to respond on his blog, a copy of that response follows below.

Late to this party, but here’s my two paise:

1) Agree that in BG you have a great co-founder. That in itself is a lesson for all who wish to change the world positively. Build a no-compromise team.

2) Agree that an aligned unit with high skill levels and passion for their mission will usually out-execute a larger team with inferior chemistry, blander skill and Metcalfe’s law against them.

3) The above being said, I think the post is a bit too snobbish. Yes – there are many technically deficient wantrepreneurs in the world today. Every hot-zone in the world has them, India is no exception. The simple reality is that the great ones (like, say, Steve Jobs) have the ability to distort reality, understand human behavior and have the humility to understand technical sophistication to a degree where a technical resource can find value in their guidance and presence. Wozniak wasn’t stupid.

He KNEW Jobs had the guts, determination and vision to make his masterpieces be adored by the world around him. In other words, it takes two to tango. Shutting your door on all the crazy people with the will to reach out and coerce you is an affront to the stance on technological innovation you practice @ IBT. Switch on “priority inbox” in Gmail, and dedicate 15 minutes nightly to spin through these calls for help and do the diligence to check their backgrounds. Once in a blue moon the person + idea will be credible and they deserve to be heard.

4) There is a difference between engineering and over-engineering a product or service. I think Paisa.com is a superb expression of technological prowess. That this came from my own country, makes me even prouder. That being said, no one would have died if you picked just one out Memcache and Redis. The site is coasting around 1,000 hits a day at best, but the thing is engineered as though y’all need to scale like facebook and need 64GB RAM on each server you purchase. Mental masturbation is fun but execution is sex. So get laid.

5) Mortals can execute too. Don’t under-estimate the value of balls and sheer will. Have you seen Redbus.in? Technologically – it is precisely the sort of stack and skill IBT regularly ridicules on this blog and on Twitter. The reality is that it makes money and gets 4-10X the traffic Paisa.com seems to be getting (source: compete.com).

Granted – there is every possibility that Redbus.in will choke @ x users vs. Paisa @ 100x. But getting to that capacity automatically opens up a lot of options because traction leads to revenue/investment/value multiplication which leads to better cachet and attracts better talent. That might explain why VCs and Angels invest in great PEOPLE and don’t always check their Vi config.

My goal is not to be incendiary with this post. Just a gentle reminder that you might be better served being humbler and focused on execution. Oh, and be more accepting of outliers.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

A good read overall – I highly recommend his blog. I think Abinash has excellent team building skills and seems to have done it before as well. Once is lucky, twice is good, as they say.

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ESPN Cricinfo All-time Cricket XI

October 26, 2010

As any cricket fan now knows, ESPN Cricinfo announced their all-time Cricket team.

Not team of the century, not team of the decade. This is it, the 11 best to ever step on the field.

The World XI:

Jack Hobbs, Len Hutton, Don Bradman, Sachin Tendulkar, Viv Richards, Garry Sobers, Adam Gilchrist, Malcolm Marshall, Shane Warne, Wasim Akram, Dennis Lillee

But here’s my stab at it >>

Zubin’s World XI:

Sunil Gavaskar, Virender Sehwag, Brian Lara, Don Bradman, Garry Sobers, Keith Miller, Alan Knott, Wasim Akram, Shane Warne, Malcolm Marshall, Curtly Ambrose.

This side in my opinion, is superior to the all-time side because:

1. It’s a better fielding unit. Sobers, Miller, Knott, Marshall, Ambrose, Warne were outstanding close in or in the outfield.

2. Gavaskar and Sehwag are just an awesomely versatile combination. One a destroyer, the other the perfect tricky pitch foil who could open it up if he wanted to and backed away from no one.

3. Right-Left combination across the line-up would give most bowling line-ups fits.

4. I think this team strikes a better tempo… even if Sehwag was lost, Lara wouldn’t scratch around… Bradman would be well, Bradman… Sobers and Miller would carry the score over the top, Knott or Warne would annoy and Akram could put the result beyond doubt.

5. This is a more versatile bowling line-up. Not in terms of creativity, but in terms of what any opposition would face. Curtly and Garner were their own brand of fast bowling and to me King Curt is too irresistible a force to be excluded. You get intimidation, bounce, pace and discipline. Warne is just a spectacle. Marshall and Akram a dream opening line-up. Miller + Ambrose would be amazing too…Sobers could bowl whatever was needed… Sehwag could tie up one end for Warne to do the rest on Day 4 or 5.

6. Having two all-rounders adds longevity to the team. Less load on the bowlers, results in the luxury of using them in shorter spells and it lets the batsmen have an off-day without too much damage being incurred. In the official World XI, Sobers has too much of the load, not that he would mind.

Credible Alternatives:

Sachin for Lara. It pained me to take SRT out of this. But even Sachin would pay to watch Lara, and that says it all. Lara would wish to have SRT’s consistency… but I reckon what SRT wants from Lara is a bit more unattainable. Sachin remains, in my eyes, the most versatile batsman ever to step foot on the field. No situation, no rule change, no format, no pitch, no bowler can stop him from scoring runs. Unfortunately, people say the same about Bradman too and so I had to make a hard but fair call. If Sachin is able to keep his 90+ average over another two seasons (half way there), I will be forced to reconsider this selection.

Imran Khan for Miller. This was a tough one too… but I got to go with KM because he just made it all look so easy… he was Flintoff but with stats to back it up…rapid, hit the ball a mile, brilliant fielder… Imran was awesome but I am not a fan of the “let me be an awesome bowler first, then be a lesser bowler and fire up my batting chops” career. I prefer the Botham or Kapil Dev trajectory… burn bright and even if it is a short while, the world will remember you.

I am not going to justify Murali vs. Warne (are you kidding?), or Lillee/Hadlee for Marshall (especially on Asian pitches) or McGrath for Ambrose (ask an Aussie who he’d like to face).

Who would be captain? Shane Keith Warne.

Current players who could possibly break into this team at the end of their careers? Kevin Pietersen (needs to step it up) and Dale Steyn.

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Mastering the VC Game – A Book Review

July 5, 2010

I saw Jeffrey Bussgang at TechCrunch Disrupt in NYC (CiviGuard was a demo pit participant there). He was there to promote and sign his book “Mastering the VC Game”. Before he arrived, I perused through the back cover and found it to be interesting enough to put it on my future reading list mentally. However, I don’t get autographs of people I don’t know or admire, so I held off on partaking in that opportunity.

Over July 4th weekend, Jeffrey’s book arrived in the mail. CiviGuard has been working hard at getting to Minimum Viable Product level over the last 9 months and has snagged it’s first customer. Now our focus is on gaining even more traction in the public/private sector and pursuing fund raising to amplify our sales. Needless to say, the book arrived at an opportune moment.

The book is an easy read, I was able to wrap up the 235 or so pages in approximately 5 hours across two evenings. As someone who follows a bunch of the people he mentions in the book’s blogroll, a lot of the content isn’t ‘new’ per se, but it is all relevant to the newbie.

Howard Morgan, Fred Wilson, Jeff Clavier, Reid Hoffman, Mark Suster are all people entrepreneurs can learn a lot from, period.

If you haven’t seen this episode from “This Week in Start-ups”, you are missing out:

http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/twist-44-with-howard-morgan/

Watch from the 47th minute to the 1:40 mark.

As with any worthy book on mastering anything – there are nuggets of wisdom that you keep and gain from.

For me those were:

• Christoph Westphal’s journey.
• Gail Goodman’s journey.
• Jeffrey’s dad and his journey.
• Entrepreneur Idol analogy.
• Dollar bills hunched over keyboards (died laughing).
• Managing the Board, importance of trust and transparency.
• The VC world, the importance of LPs in the dynamic.
• Choosing the right VC.
• John Doerr interrogating Jeffrey

Negatives:

Jeffrey comes off more disarmed and genuine when he speaks as an entrepreneur. The tone in the book is more guarded when it comes to the VC perspective – you get a flavor for that world but the information given isn’t likely to give you “mastery” in a conversation with one. Jeffrey is still a VC, so his reluctance to singe his own fur is understandable.

Overall:

Jeffrey does a magnificent job of giving the entrepreneur a very lucid view of the dynamics at play between: LPs, VCs, Angels, Entrepreneurs, Underwriters, IPOs, Private Equity, Large Enterprises and the Customer. His interviewees and role models give the book emotion and depth – this ‘texture’ gives critical insight into the grit and determination it takes to build something game changing.

The book mentions Reid Hoffman’s famous quote:

Entrepreneurship is throwing yourself off a cliff, and building a plane on the way down

I’d like to riff on that a little bit and say:

Entrepreneurship is throwing yourself off a really big cliff, and building a plane on the way down

Translation:

Work on stuff that matters. Throw yourself off a cliff for missions that are truly game-changing and impactful. Too many get burned trying to build planes for missions that are derivative or inconsequential. That’s an awfully short cliff.

And Jeffrey – when I see you next, I’ll ask you for an autograph. Thanks for writing this book.

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Back with some thoughts…

April 6, 2010

Sorry everyone – absenteeism in the extreme here over the last few months. Good reasons for it though – things have been hectic on the career side of things with all aspects hotting up pretty much together.

The  new start-up, CiviGuard, is going well. We had a momentous three weeks, starting with a DHS summit on modeling & simulation where we were able to share our thoughts with some of world’s great thought leaders on the subject. With the summit over, our next stop was CrisisCamp Silicon Valley (CCSV) which was a blast! It was great to see all the key participants in the crisis response and mapping space come together and share key insights and launch new initiatives. A highlight was running into Randi Zuckerberg, who heads up Facebook’s marketing division. There are some interesting synergies between Facebook and CiviGuard which we hope to leverage in the near future. It was our first CrisisCamp, and we expect to represent at many more in the future!

The final event last week was our biggest yet. Where 2.0 is probably one of the world’s premier conferences for location based services. We managed to get onto the roster for “Launchpad” which led us to share the stage with the hottest location start-up in the world right now – SimpleGeo. We went number two – after Will Carter’s ModZombies game which leverages FourSquare. I used his presentation as a segway into mine (something along the lines of “if zombies were to really attack, you’d like our software on-board”). It was an OK presentation – not my best. I could whine endlessly about how the clicker didn’t respond or that the slide-deck was the wrong one – bottom line was that I didn’t really prepare for these potentialities – my only goal should have been to deliver the message. Not going to let that happen again. You burn, you learn.

About an hour after the presentation, it was pretty clear that I was my own worst critic because people clearly understood the message and what we were trying to achieve in the emergency communication space. Which was awesome – we ended up snagging video interviews with GPS Business News, O’Reilly media and some press notes with SlashGeo. In a nutshell – one of my coolest experiences ever. I want to thank Brady Forrest for giving us the chance on that stage – we appreciate that.

Some more press will follow in the weeks ahead. Ahead of the show we launched our new site, a viral video, did a press release and got tons of traction through the Singularity University network. All in all – through social media, new media and internet properties – our total exposure was north of 100,000 impressions. Our Twitter follower count spiked by 30% and so did page views on our new site.

For most start-ups, Where 2.0 would be the absolute highlight of their year. We have the privilege of also participating at the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington D.C. in May. This is a huge opportunity as we are keynoting in front of our primary customer base. We are super excited about this opportunity and look to make an even bigger impact then.

Next post is on the iPad. It won’t have any of the usual facts. Promise .

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Avatar in real life :)

January 17, 2010

Pretty interesting post by Sara Sidner (CNN) about villagers fighting a big corp.

Only difference is that “Toruk Makto” is not Sam Worthington but a 75-year old Grandmother of three

I wish them luck!

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Cricket – Team of the Decade

January 1, 2010

Happy New Year! Hope you all have a great 2010 full of novelty and goodness!

All you non-Cricketers can ignore this post! Cricinfo went ahead and published it’s “team of the decade” for Tests and ODIs yesterday.

I agree with a lot of it; but felt there was too much of a price put on statistics  vs. impact or excellence in pressure situations.

So I’ll take a stab at my Test and ODI teams of the decade and then do a T20 one as well – we’ve only had it for about half the decade but nobody’ll mind!

Test Team:

1. Hayden
2. Sehwag (vice-captain)
3. Lara
4. Sachin
5. Kallis
6. Flintoff
7. Gilchrist (keeper)
8. Warne (captain)
9. Murali
10. McGrath
11. Akhtar

12th Man: Bond

Hardest decisions was leaving out Ponting. Statistically he is unrivalled as the batsmen of the decade. But in terms of worth to his already awesome team? I am not so sure those 30+ centuries this decade were the difference between Australia being dominant vs. an also-ran. This is a decade where Australia had Hayden, Gilchrist, Martyn, the Waughs, Hussey, Clarke (last half), Lehmann and Langer. Take Warne or McGrath out and you are left with Lee, Gillespie, Fleming, Kasper, McGill… good bowlers but 300 wickets is about tops vs. 500+ for those two.

Lara didn’t play close to 4 seasons of this decade but the 6 seasons he did play he was just otherworldly in a declining West Indian team. The 2002 Sri Lanka series is testament to his brilliance. One can make a strong argument that Lara was the greatest force keeping the West Indian from relegation to Associate Member status. If it wasn’t for his ICL faux pas – he’d have played into 2008 I reckon and  played at a very high level. Besides that, both Ponting and Lara aren’t going to be prominent candidates for ‘captain of the decade’ so there’s no leadership edge either.

The other hard decision was leaving off Dravid. Statistically – Dravid had superior decade to Tendulkar. Tendulkar however was more consistent than Dravid this decade. Dravid had 4 seasons averaging under 40. I still would have given it to Dravid because there is enough brilliance in the side (via Sehwag and Lara) to offset the loss of Tendulkar, but alas, we also have Kallis – who can bat in a bubble just as well as Dravid can. And we all know that Sachin (via that Sydney double ton) knows how to bat in a bubble should he want to. Anybody who can render top-flight batting into a lab experiment has my respect.

Bond or Akthar was another conflict. Bond is statistically superior. Both are fragile. Akthar is quicker, more aggressive and flat out unplayable when he is on. Bond is more consistent, but we already have that excellence in McGrath. Special mention goes to Inzamam, he’d actually be 12th man on this team but I don’t think he’d be able to perform without the words “Pakistan” on his back. Oh well. One of my favorite players.

So in a nutshell, we have an amazing side here… capable of stone walling or brilliance… capable of bruising, probing and dismantling a line-up…capable of any feat posted to them on a cricket field. A true side of the decade.

About the ODI team… I am fine with the Cricinfo team. I would perhaps swap Kallis for Dravid as he would be a better runner between the wickets for Symonds and Ponting in the middle overs. The ODI format is just depressing for me. It’s aging and I hope this was the last decade for it. I would make Murali 12th man and put in Warne. Again a very statistically inclined decision from the Cricinfo panel.

Twenty20 is more interesting:

1. Gayle
2. Smith
3. Afridi
4. Sangakkara (keeper)
5. Dhoni (captain)
6. Yuvraj
7. Symonds
8. Warne
9. Flintoff
10. Lee
11. Gul

12th Man: McCullum… I think history will show Sangakkara being the more consistent T20 player. And in a volatile format where almost everyone is a game changing player due to the time constraints, someone who can always deliver 4-5 boundaries every 15 or so balls is a useful asset. The only weakness is that we don’t have a 2nd change quick on this team but it is hard to drop Symonds in a format that is biased towards batsmen.

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GSM Goes Nekkid

December 28, 2009

So… looks like Karsten Nohl went through with one of the most pervasive open source experiments in IT history. The GSM A5/1 encryption algorithm is now cracked, code books have been generated, real-time decryption and snooping is now a distinct possibility using off-the-shelf hardware (ATI/Nvidia/IBM-Tosh PS3 Cell Procesors/USRP2)  and open source software (Asterisk, OpenBTS).

Assuming that Karsten’s statements are true, the GSMA is going to have their hands full defending and mitigating fallout from this eventuality:

• 4BN phones affected by this public reveal
• It is stupid easy to dupe a GSM phone into revealing it’s IMSI (subscriber ID) and have it mate to a rogue base station
• A5/3 is a better algorithm but hasn’t been adopted by GSMA… and even its days are numbered
• Karsten & Co. will demonstrate GSM device nudification on December 30th in Virginia or Berlin, room A03 though

The result of Karsten’s decision could lead to progress in other areas of IT:

• Open sourcing A5/1 code books and making the program available on SVN makes it a certain terrorist honeypot. Tracking those downloads and subsequent network flows could reveal some actionable intelligence.
• The A5/1 code book weighs in @ 128 petabytes and takes 90 days to generate on 40 CUDA nodes. I wonder what that could drop to with 100K nodes using commodity cloud and a Map-Reduce library. There seems to be plenty of interest in getting Amazon to offer a GPU cloud.
• Fast multi-core aware algorithms for parsing and correlating the code book using Haskell or Clojure are other opportunities for improvement.

The downside is obvious:

One can hope this doesn’t end up doing harm. By exposing a ’security through obscurity’ vulnerability, Karsten has done the morally correct thing. But I fear that any malicious use of this source code will tarnish the reputation of open source even though such lapses are likely to be prevalent in the closed source ecosystem.

Let’s see how this turns out.

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Dawn of Location Social

December 23, 2009

Dopplr, Whrrld, FourSquare, SimpleGeo, GeoAPI, Layar - welcome to the burgeoning world of location oriented services.

As I write this, GeoAPI has been acquired by Twitter to offer users the ability to share location with their social network and for customers to get access to a fire-hose of geo-social content that they can mine for a number of contexts. When it comes to Layar, I think their management seems to have missed a trick by seeing Augmented Reality as an independent service.

The problem with having to be a “layar” on the Layar “browser” is that coupling AR capabilities with the actual business you are running becomes impossible. With Layar 3.0 you could use their browser specific environment to build password protected Layars and forms. Not worth betting the house on in my opinion.

It might work well for Yelp for example – but doesn’t really work great for companies wanting to offer a rich, interactive and customized AR experience coupled with other platform specific features such as sound/video/picture/accelerometer.

SimpleGeo picked up on that opportunity and now plans to offer a solid platform for companies to embed and integrate. I think their “sticky” MO is that usage of their API requires use of their cloud infrastructure. All things considered, this is the more appealing model for wide-scale adoption of location oriented services.

Twitter’s purchase of GeoAPI is of interest to my own start-up, CiviGuard. Being able to ask the Twitterverse “Is subject X happening in Location(s) Y?” and getting a response is a great value-add for our CiviCommand decision execution component. Anything we can do to support Emergency Operations Centers (EOCs) with quality information (vs. noise) is a benefit.

Twitter’s MO behind the acquisition was probably to counter the hot new thing in the location social space – FourSquare. I think it is going to be a solid counter and Twitter tends to integrate technology from acquisitions pretty quickly – Summize being a prime example.

All in all – this is great momentum for the location oriented services space – as far as I am concerned – the more the better. Expect Google to couple Latitude with Wave in the near future, I also won’t be surprised to see a quality AR API being added to Android so that it is supported natively.

Facebook – the internet identity king is in an interesting position because the credibility of a given profile can be corroborated by the person’s site affiliations and general web behavior. For most of the identities on Facebook, a cache containing their profile, their social graph, the sites they have used FB IDs for and their Google/Bing search results can be used to assign a reputation rating.

The higher the reputation, the more weight their location aware comment carries – and the more some search engine (or reputation agent) in the future will want to corroborate such information. Such agents and engines are bound to go mainstream because there is only so much semantic marking with RDF triples, FOAF and semantic querying with SPARQL can do.

Compellng times indeed.

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Android – Attaining Ignition

November 30, 2009

From Om Malik (GigaOm) – Android Developers are not happy with sales proceeds from the Marketplace. Must be a slow news day because this is unnecessary sensationalism.

Notice to developers: If you REMOTELY expected to be rich beyond your dreams building Android apps in the last 9 months you are senile.

The future is going to be much, much brighter for offerings that run on Android 1.5, 1.6, 2.0 and 2.1 – the simple fact that Verizon’s Droid now accounts for 25% of Android Web Traffic within a month of launch should tell you how immature the market was until recently.

So Skyhook Wireless – thank you for doing that survey, with that amazing sampling of 30 dreamers developers – the results this year were obvious – the results next year will be very different.

I think it is a matter of time before we get an ‘Independent Android Review Authority’ established to vet out crappy or incompatible offerings from the good stuff. After all there are 10,000+ apps to sift through making it a very App Store like deluge. There’s an opportunity there for harvesting power, hopefully someone will take the baton.

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Thoughts on the Multi-touch Conundrum in the US

November 8, 2009

I was researching some of the available and planned Android-based tablets for my start-up and a few other mobile projects and came across Motorola’s Android Media Platform initiative.  In a nutshell, it appears to be a partnership between Google, Motorola and Texas Instruments to produce an Android++ platform for media tablets ranging from 3.5inches to 10inches in screen size.

Motorola’s current news maker is obviously the Droid which seems to have garnered a lot of buzz and probably will end up selling a good amount units on Verizon’s smartphone starved but excellent US 3G network. It was interesting to see that Android 2.0 and the Droid’s gorgeous screen are multi-touch capable yet the capability isn’t offered due to patent disputes, presumably, with Apple.

But then, the MILESTONE was released in Europe and it is essentially the same Motorola phone and it HAS multi-touch. A closer look at the Android Media Platform’s software architecture shows a component specifically tagged as “Motorola Multi-touch”. Not Google, but a closed-source multi-touch library made by Motorola is at the crux of the dealings.

Apple probably hasn’t been able to acquire EU protection for its multi-touch patents (they tend to be far more discerning there) and so Motorola is willing to share it with consumers there since no license fee is involved.

So yes, Apple has the trump card in the US – but Google is not the problem. Screens – their size and behavior, in addition to the handset experience – tend to be controlled more by the manufacturer and carrier vs. the Operating System maker – so why should an Open Source OS license patented technology?

This  leaves two scenarios:

- Motorola wants to play with Apple but is getting nowhere.

- Apple is willing to share but the numbers end up hammering Motorola’s margins perversely.

Fascinating. Props to the Apple IP team.

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