Category Archives: Focus

Focus, Learning, Tips

The power of active observation for entrepreneurs

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There’s an awesome stand up act that Jerry Seinfeld does in his “I’m telling you for the last time”. In that he tells the audience a secret about men.

The question on many women’s mind is “What are men thinking about?” is his premise. He goes on to say “Let me clue you on to the secret women. Here’s what men are thinking.”

Nothing.

We are just walking around, looking at stuff.

Its pretty funny and mostly true. Its also true of most people, not just men. Most of our “thinking time” is spent thinking about nothing.

Nothing.

That’s such a waste of time.

What I think it really means is its not worth sharing what we are thinking about.

We are “constant dreaming” about mundane useless stuff and our thoughts wander to more useless stuff.

While we go about some daily routines, we are still thinking and less “observing”.

Most successful entrepreneurs I know have a heightened sense of observation.

They watch everything. I mean they observe at least 50-80% more than the average person.

Most non-entrepreneurs people see the same things an entrepreneur does, but they dont observe.

A technique I use is active observation. It is seeing, then asking questions. As you know, questions are the root of solving interesting problems.

To discipline yourself to constantly keep observing, you have to train your mind to look, then ask. Not keep looking and neither keep thinking.

There is a downside to active observation. Its that you are not in the “present”. Critics will point to the mind-rest that your brain needs which helps it recuperate and rejuvenate. They might also say you should go with the flow to generate great results.

I prefer active observation when I am thinking about ideas and problems to come up with which need solving.

P.S. Post a few comments on facebook, I wanted to clarify that active observation is observing then doing. By default I assume most entrepreneurs are doers. Many though confuse doing (action) for progress.

Angel investing, Community, Entrepreneurship, Focus, India

Solve meaningful problems as a startup

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Back in the 90’s and better part of last decade, most of the smartest folks from the top colleges would go and work at Wall Street. Lured by high salaries and fat bonus checks, they used their wizardry to create CDO’s, asset backed securities and derivatives to create billions for hedge funds, investment banks and trading desks of large financial organizations.

We all know where that ended up – the subprime mortgage crisis.

We thought there was a turn of events when one of them started to build a meaningful startup.

That prompted Bill Gates to say

“I’d say we’ve moved about 160 IQ points from the hedge fund category to the teaching-many-people-in-a-leveraged-way category. It was a good day his wife let him quit his job”

I get a sense that, “founding an Internet startup” is the new “joining a hedge fund” in the 90’s.

We are getting an amazing number of very smart people who are joining these startups in droves and applying for incubators, accelerators, hackathons and startup weekends.

There is a massive movement of high level IQ points from old-school consulting and “IT services backend for a large Indian outsourcer” to startups. That’s awesome news.

I have attended and judged 3 startup hackathons and prototype creation sessions over the last 1 month. I am absolutely thrilled that there are so many people turning out for these events in India. Over 650 attended the Yahoo Open Hack day. It was amazing to see such a diverse group of young talented developers and programmers solve some very interesting problems.

The part we have to work on is why the brightest minds are solving the most trivial of problems.

Startup IQ
Startup IQ

I think the problem with Indian startups is they think we are in the US.

There are rich people problems (The pictures from my mobile phone dont look good, can we build a “pimp my photo” app”) and there are real world problems (how can I make sure new grads from college learn to develope real apps, so they can get a job and reduce the jobless rate).

My humble request to Indian entrepreneurs is ‘Please dont build any more “I’m bored” apps’.

I am not trivializing the need for “fun” apps.

All I am requesting is that the highest IQ folks should be working on the highest impact problem areas to aid most humankind.

Entrepreneurship, Focus, Tips

The art of disciplined experimentation

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Being a hobbyist is an awesome way to keep learning and test “theories” you have. Most cases, when I have a theory I’d like to prove or disprove, I’ve found the best way is to just try it out. That applies to a new product idea, new marketing technique or a new sales strategy that I have either a hunch for or have overheard from someone else.

The key part that I have learned from my experiments, is that you need a framework (or a model) to clearly outline what you intend to learn from it, what assumptions you made, what steps you took and what you learned from the experiment.

If you dont have a framework, you end up with a lot of experiments whose results might suit you at a later date, but you “forget” about those experiments.

The thing about experiments is you have to understand clearly why they succeeded or failed. 

If you do that and internalize the learning, it becomes a part of your decision making for the future. Experiments without learning is just wasting time – which is also a valid reason to experiment in itself, but you have to be clear about that upfront.

To be disciplined in my experimenting, I have found that doing one at a time suits me best. I found out from a expert in SEO about a much simpler way to track the keywords you want to rank for and a quicker ethical way (than the usual 2-3 months) to appear on the first search engine results page.

My immediate thought process was “that’s just not right” and “wont work all the time”. But it was right and it works, and the only way I would be convinced of it, was if I did it myself.

I also put a time frame for my experiment, to determine if its worth the result. Many of these experiments take several months, so doing nothing but that one experiment during that time, is hard. The results from that learning better make up for more than the time and effort.

Which is why I developed for myself a list of questions so I can be disciplined about my experimenting. These questions are fairly straightforward, but my lens for the questions is based on three criteria:

a) Will it be fun?

b) Will I learn something I dont already know?

c) What new things will I learn and where can I use the learning from the experiment?

Entrepreneurship, Focus

May you be blessed enough to make a thousand mistakes once, not one mistake a thousand times

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I have a good friend (lets call him Bob) who worked at a Fortune 50 IT technology company for 21 years. After reaching the top of his organization (partnerships), he then left, for a startup to head up their partnership and business development efforts. He was their first “suit” / “business guy”. The startup was funded by a very well known venture firm in Sand Hill, had 21 people (mostly engineers, product managers and the like) and a hot product in the networking (infrastructure) space. The interview and courting lasted many months, so he was confident he made the right choice.

He could not have been more excited during the first week at work. There was creative energy and fresh thinking daily, new and yet unsolved problems that had no obvious solutions and he felt he was finally “learning again”.

In in the 2nd week the cofounders and he had a catch-up lunch, when they told him “they needed to go another direction and his position was to be eliminated” and they’d like him to leave. No other reason was given, but just that they were not ready for a BD person at this time, since the company was going to pursue another route.

I recall him telling me over lunch a few weeks later, when he mentioned that he was not totally shocked, but it surprised him for sure. We did some Monday-morning quarterbacking and figured it must have been either his inability to fit into their “culture”, which was very developer-centric or his relatively higher salary.

A few years went by and he continued to be friends with the co-founders and met one of them for a catch-up lunch.

The conversation was enlightening for sure. The co-founder was more candid and particularly said “most of the engineers said the amount and breadth of experience that my friend possessed was narrow and limiting”. Which shocked Bob, since he had really “21 years of experience”. He had dealt with all types of ISV‘s – small and large, had experience with all the system integrators, from consultants to outsourcers and had connections at every level.

The cofounder then said “Yes, but you did practically the same thing for 21 years, not 21 different things in a year”, which skewed your thinking to solving every problem literally the same way.

Bob was shocked for sure, but he took it in stride and in the meanwhile had started his own BD consulting company, helping many startups navigate the large ecosystem of partners.

Over the next 2 years of his consulting he claimed to learn a lot more than he had in his 20+ years at the F50.

What did he learn that he did not know before?

“I found more ways I could be wrong and more mistakes I made daily” he said. “With a large brand name on my business card, those mistakes were largely ignored. They were a lot more magnified when you are dealing with others who now have that large brand name on their business card.”

Focus

2012: A year to dial back

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I started this week thinking about what I wont do in 2012. 2011 was a very eventful year for me and my family. We bought a house, sold a house, bought another home, started a new company (Jivity, and Vinita started Social Hues), invested in several startups and also committed significant capital to specific projects. All this coupled with a hectic travel schedule of speaking engagements, which saw me out of the office for 84 days out of 250 working days and 25 days on leisure travel.

There are multiple things I would love to do but dont have time for at all. The focus of my time is being spread too thin to get enough value from my own company sufficiently.

So, here’s a list of things I am not doing to do in 2012.

1. Reduce speaking engagements dramatically to less than 1 a quarter. In Q1 I have committed to being at Kolkata to help friend Aninda Das at NASSCOM, and one more at Coimbatore which I committed to in late Nov last month. That’s it, and I dont plan to either attend or speak at more engagements until March. Just to compare that to 2011, I was committed to 41 speaking engagements throughout the year. This also means that I am going to reduce the number of entrepreneur networking events, dramatically.

2. Less mentoring and advising startup entrepreneurs. This is something I really enjoy and like, but I have to give up, since I just dont have the time.

3. Definitely not writing a book. I was toying with the idea to write a book on sales & selling to help entrepreneurs, but the commitment of time is tremendous, so I have to pass on that also. I would really enjoy this project, especially since I love writing.

4. Not work on any more new “ideas”. Like most of you, I get multiple ideas each day / week / month. Some I pursue and many I drop. The ones I do follow up on, I have done a fairly shoddy job, since there are too many competing priorities I am juggling.

5. No more startup investing. Having committed money to several startups in the last 2 years, I have much to learn still and more to digest. 2012 is my year to digest and step back and watch on the sidelines. I will no doubt miss several promising entrepreneurs and some important trends, but this too will have to be passed for lack of time.

Why this strict regime, is a question I got asked by a good friend over lunch last week?

The biggest reason is focus.

I was doing too many multiple things that I enjoyed, without a clear focus on the one thing that would get me the best return. I was not practicing what I preached to most folks – Focus on doing one thing very well, instead of multiple things poorly.

So what am I going to focus on for 2012. Just to take Jivity to the next level and focus on maintaining good physical health – primarily by reducing my intake of junk food.

I will you all an awesome 2012!