Category: Business

The Big Fat Geek’s thoughts on Business and how business processes can be automated via workflows and technology.

Passion and intent

Prasad Ajinkya1 Comment

Bill Watterson to in the commencement speech to his alma matter (Kenyon College), came out with several gems. I wonder how many of them will be retained by the original audience.

An excerpt –

Like many people, I found that what I was chasing wasn’t what I caught. I’ve wanted to be a cartoonist since I was old enough to read cartoons, and I never really thought about cartoons as being a business. It never occurred to me that a comic strip I created would be at the mercy of a bloodsucking corporate parasite called a syndicate, and that I’d be faced with countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions.

Bill talks about his passion, and how it manifested in different forms during his college years. How the passion overtook him, and then how the business overtook his passion. Without keeping your mind fresh, if you engage with passion, then even you might go through the same experience. The key to it is to play and keep an open mind for different ideas and experiences. So what new did you learn today?

A VC who nurtures entrepreneurs

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Just read this on the Wall Street journal, that there is a venture fund by the name of Pacific Lake Partners who actively seek out young entrepreneurs, give them enough money to scout around for the right organization to takeover. Then help them acquire that organization for a healthy return.

You can read the rest of the article here. An excerpt –

Pacific Lake will provide between $300,000 and $500,000 to entrepreneurs to cover living and travel expenses for two years while they search for a business opportunity – generally an established business with revenue between $10 million and $30 million. There’s no sector focus; it all depends on the opportunity the entrepreneur finds.

It feels good to know that there is a venture fund who values someone who can not only boot strap an organization but take on an already running organization and turn it around. This is the stuff of what legends are made up of. All of the awe-inspiring case studies that we used read in our b-schools have suddenly come real. I wonder if any VC or angel investor follows a similar policy in India. As a developing economy, we need increasing number of such folks.

JK Rowling at HBS

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I was unaware of the fact that JK Rowling (the author of the very popular Harry Potter series) holds an honorary degree from the Harvard Business School. So it came as a surprise when I chanced upon her Commencement speech at the HBS Alumni meet.

An excerpt –

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

JK Rowling talks about how she looked at her failures to give her strength. To give her the courage to follow the road less trodden. Failure takes away all the unnecessary things, giving the individual focus and clarity. No wonder they say that failures are the pillars of success.

A parting note (quoting JK Rowling who was quoting Seneca)  –

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I think everyone who is aspiring to make it big should go through that speech. Success is not something that happens overnight, and without a certain clarity of purpose, it is very hard to succeed.

Social Media

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Yesterday, I attended Startup Saturday … the theme was Social Media and how it can be leveraged by start-ups effectively.

Some of my key learning –

  • Online marketing does not replace offline marketing efforts, and vice versa. If you are planning a huge effort in one media, do not ignore the other
  • The best way to use these platforms is not as a broadcasting medium, but as a way of engaging with your customers
  • Don’t create propaganda, create evangelists … who can propagate your name
  • Social media marketing is not cheap, and it is certainly not a free alternative to traditional marketing
  • In case of B2B space, marketeers can target the end-customer through social media and get the attention of their intended customer organization

Will attach the respective presentations as and when the organization committee puts them online :)

Why use LinkedIn

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This is more of a recollection of my learnings than anything else, people can share their learnings and I promise to grow this space.

  1. Targeted resume submissions – Find the organization you want to apply to, go find folks in your network who work for  that organization. Use their referrals to get your resume the place you want it to be.
  2. Business Visibility – Professionals talking about their organizations can act as evangelists on LinkedIn. With the integration of Twitter, the value of LinkedIn as a Social Media Platform has increased a thousandfold.
  3. Peer learning – People who work in the same industry can collaborate to discuss and resolve each other’s problems. Whereas this seems to be a generic utility of a community, I have seen this happen pretty well through the Q&A forum of LinkedIn. Since people who contribute to these are serious minded professionals vis-a-vis the casual replies of Orkut. All this for free unlike Experts-exchange, where the user has to fork out good money to get to the solution.
  4. Showcasing – This is the most obvious one, do I need to get into this :-)

Your comments are more than welcome on this one, since it will only add to this post.

Theory and Practice v/s Practice and Theory

Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

I graduated in 2006, one of the last subjects I took was IT Enabled Marketing (ITEM). Another was Business Models for E-Commerce (BMEComm). The subjects were easy to crack, and were a breeze. We call these mickey subjects, since the subjects are easy to cruise and you get along by putting half the effort required.

After graduating, I was (and am) involved in 2-3 web start-ups. Great ideas, good people … but none of them know exactly what is it thats to be done. Everyone explores. They finally get it right, and so did we. The thing that gets to me, is that we have been taught all this … in theory. But then we never appreciated that theory then. Theory is useless without practice, and practice without proper theory is a blind struggle.

Today, I am tempted to open by texts and see if the models that we have been taught make sense. I am sure that they.

As I stand on a platform to make the jump, I would like to have some sound theory with me as well.