Reflections

The ideal city of India...

2009-08-13T11:04:00.001-07:00

I installed the widget from Redanyway, one of our teams in the iAccelerator program and was thinking of what to post to see the autoposting and follow features.

Decided to pick up the characteristics of various cities and create the ideal city of India. Following is the incomplete recipe I have:

Comfort of Ahmedabad
Weather & Weekend Getaways of Pune
Social & Cultural life of Mumbai
Food of Jaipur
Connectivity & Education of Delhi
Beaches of Goa
Snowfall of Shimla

Please feel free to add your ingredients.

The Art of Networking & Being Polite

2009-07-20T09:33:00.000-07:00

Some people do networking very naturally, while the others find it to be a big effort. Interestingly, more often than not, when you consciously put a big effort, it shows up.

I have recently put a post on iAccelerator website of how people can consciously build up the 'natural' networking skill.

>Read the article here<

Am not reposting it here so that I need not edit it at two places if I decide to change something. But will definitely post the PJ punch I cracked in the end:

Basically, I feel there are two ways one can look at the concept of network.

a. One is ‘Work on the net’. Get onto facebook, twitter & linkedin and just connect to people.

b. Do something such that in the end, the is some ‘net (positive) work’ you have done.

I somehow prefer the latter view. Even if all that the ‘net positive work’ means is talking to some interesting people and learning new things.

People, in-general, are Good

2009-06-03T10:36:00.000-07:00

Lately, I got a feel that quite a few people are in general afraid of others. They feel majority of 'others' are thieves, or jerks, or simply someone who can't be trusted. There would be some who would give me examples of some good people they met, but they made it sound as if those good people were like shooting stars. You are lucky to see them and then you go about telling everyone.

So recently, it came as a pleasant surprise when the promoter of one of the companies I interact a lot with told me how he did a small experiment and found out that people are in-general good. Whenever a customer tried to check out goods from their website but was not able to use the online payment mechanism, the backend monitoring employees of this company called up the customer and tried to understand why he was not able to go through the whole purchase cycle. When it turned out that a few of them had credit card payment problems, the company decided to provide them the service with an oral promise that the customer will pay in check/cash later.

Guess what...?

It turn out that apart from just two customers, everyone one else paid up. These two customers also paid up on their own with a 5 day delay.

Experiments Result: 100% good people

Why making good friends in college is important

2009-05-19T10:22:00.000-07:00

It is interesting to see the number of college friends who get together to startup. I am not sure if there has been any study from where I can quote a statistic, but I bet that amongst all the startups, those started by college batchmates would be a significant percent. Microsoft, please don't sue me. I mean no offense to the dropouts.

Am just penning down an observation from the 23 startups - 14 incubatees we have at CIIE and 9 startups which have joined us for iAccelerator in 2009 summers. The obvious ones are like SmsGYAN guys and Empower which started as a Bplan submitted by friends during their college days. Ants, on the other hand, started as an engineering lab project which the friends decided to take forward for commercialization. Then there is Bitstat and Gridbots, where friends got together after working for some time. Slevan and Sankar worked for good 8 years in seperate companies before getting together again to start Bitstat! I guess, when you get frustrated with mundane work at jobs, you want to get back to the exciting college life.

I find Hashcube even more interesting. Deepan and Ram knew each other in school! Deepan made some interesting games when he was in college and roped in Ram who, while in different college, stayed in touch. Actually, they had got their first check in mail by their third year in college. So technically, they could have dropped out like a few other more famous counterparts and still be a part of this musing by me.

So..everyone who is still studying or planning to study sometime in life, let the guy sitting besides you in the exam copy your answers. His skills might come in handy when he is your partner.