Archive for March, 2007
By Rajesh Setty on Fri 30 Mar 2007, 12:29 PM - 3 Comments
A close friend shared his recent experience with one of his colleagues from the past – John (not his real name).
John was seeking some advice from my friend as he was starting his new business. My friend was happy to help him out. After one meeting, John continued to call my friend stating he really didn’t anything else – just some advice. In the third meeting, John wanted my friend to introduce him to a few potential clients and a few potential investors. What John told him was “I really don’t want to take more than 30 minutes of your time. If you send five or ten emails to these customers and investors introducing me, I will take it up from there”
Guess how many introductions he got? NONE.
What was John’s problem?
Actually, there were many. Let me list a few:
1st Problem: John wanted to get help but did not want to acknowledge that he was getting help. Probably because if he acknowledged, he would have to reciprocate. John’s trick (that backfired) –
not acknowledge the help received.
2nd Problem: Equated time spent with the value received. He thought the value that my friend provided was the time he spent on making those introductions. That is hardly the case. If it was, anybody could spend those 30 minutes and make those introductions. An introduction to a person of power may be one of the biggest favors that someone can make to you. Not acknowledging that is a SIN.
3rd Problem: He sort of insulted my friend by trying to “sneak in” and get the benefit “under the radar” What my friend was upset about most was that John undermined his intelligence to see through John’s game.
John’s loss:
As you can see, the big loss was the “loss of mind share” of my friend.
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By Rajesh Setty on Fri 30 Mar 2007, 11:56 AM - Leave Comment
Aditya at Adeologue has reviewed “Beyond Code” in just one page. Here is the link:
Adeologue: One page book review of Beyond Code
For those voracious readers and avid writers, here is an interesting opportunity for you. Aditya is looking for contributors who can write and publish one page book review of books which they have read. It will substantially help the reader community to gain more in less time. Interested people can reach Aditya at this email address: aditya AT adeologue DOT com.
Have a great weekend
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By Rajesh Setty on Mon 26 Mar 2007, 11:45 PM - Leave Comment
I am sure there are reasons why The Apprentice is called a “reality show”. Looking from another perspective, I can see there are more reasons why it is not a reality show. Here are some of them:
1. Configuration is by chance more than by design:
Contestants come together and form teams and start taking on roles based on the task at hand. Configuration is key to the success of any enterprise. I hope that people don’t go and build companies by configuring the way it happens in Apprentice. It will be a nightmare.
2. Loyalty is a joke:
The way team members behave when they are together in a team makes you feel that they are brothers and sisters from the same family. It feels silly when you know that it’s a contest where everyone is competing with everyone else and nobody is “really” anybody’s friend in the long run. Real life does not work that way.
3. Short term results are what counts most of the time:
For example, a day’s winnings will determine which team wins. There is no discussion about whether the same strategy holds good for the long run. Hopefully, people don’t follow this to create “one hit wonders”
4. Winning or losing in some tasks is meaningless:
Some tasks are designed in such a way that in the professional lives of people they may never encounter them. You can make a claim that one can extrapolate and judge the skills of a team member from the way they handle the tasks. My $.02: It’s a stretch
5. Ethics take a back seat sometimes:
When I watch the times where a team won by using rogue tactics and gets away by labeling those tactics as “aggressiveness” I feel like laughing. These kinds of things can only produce short-term results in real-life.
I can go on and on but I will stop here.
Like I said, I love the show but mostly, I watch it for entertainment.
Have a great week ahead.
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By Rajesh Setty on Mon 26 Mar 2007, 11:16 PM - 3 Comments
When I was a kid, I loved to read Guinness Book of World Records. It was fun. I was looking at the website today and could not believe some of the things I read.
Here are three examples:
There are hundreds of such records broken. And the point is….
Sorry I am drawing a blank here.
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By Rajesh Setty on Mon 26 Mar 2007, 10:41 PM - 1 Comment
Offering a freebie will catch the attention of many, especially if what you offer is
a) valuable and
b) there is no other catch associated with it.
I saw that in action during lunch today. Here is what happened:
Mike Martin (president of ValEdge Solutions) and I have been friends for years. We meet every few weeks to catch up on things. Today was one such day. We had lunch at The Prolific Oven right next to Mike’s office.The Prolific Oven serves varieties of pastries and other bakery items along with a range of sandwiches. The sandwich was great. There was also an interesting twist. Every sandwich plate had a small piece of the one of the pastries from the bakery. During the 90 minutes I was there, I observed that at least three people ordered pastries to go after they had their lunch. The sampling really worked.
This is not the only place where the concept works.
Taking inspiration from Seth, I made my eBook “Personal Branding for Technology Professionals” available for free. 97,000 copies were downloaded. Izumoto Takashi from Japan even got a Japanese version created. It may seem like there was no ROI from these eBooks as they were distributed for free. Not true. Just the sheer reach and the number of friendships that developed because of this will make it all worth it.
Having founded an open source solutions company CIGNEX in late 2000, I saw this model work for many open source companies.
You can see that technique in use in many companies that offer free trials.
Question therefore is: What can your business do to take advantage of this?
Something to think about.
Posted under Business Models, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Sun 25 Mar 2007, 8:23 PM - Leave Comment
In my last trip to India, I met Srinath Srinivasa, faculty member at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-B) and author of an interesting book called “The Power Law of Information”
An excerpt from the book related to non-information overload is here…
The amount of information that is generated and consumed in an average social setting has increased by several orders of magnitude.
So how big is the increase? The School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) at the University of California at Berkeley, USA, recently conducted an experiment to estimate the amount of information generated and exchanged using print and “online” media like the internet and telephone. In the year 2002, we seem to have generated 5 exabytes of new information on magnetic media, print, film and optical storage. To get the mathematics straight, one exabyte is 10 to the power of 18 (that is 1000000000000000000 bytes). This is just the amount of new information that is added to an already existing pool.
Similarly, an estimated 18 exabytes of new information was exchanged through electronic channels like TV, radio and the internet in 2002. It is also estimated that the amount of new information that is generated doubles in a period of three years, creating an equivalent of the Moore’s Law for information processing.
To understand how much one exabyte is, let us try counting up to one exabyte. An average desktop computer can count up to 10,000 in one second, given an application program written in a high-level programming language. If we ask this computer to simply count until one exabyte and do nothing else, it will take more than 3 million years.
Today, information access is not the problem. There is a lot of it around us. What is required is the need for access to relevant and trusted information
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By Rajesh Setty on Sat 24 Mar 2007, 9:26 AM - Leave Comment
This is true for me and I am sure it’s true for most of you out there.
“Our careers are linear in foresight and circuitous in hindsight”
PS:
Thanks to Steve Piazzale of
Bay Area Career Coach for sharing this.
Posted under Great Quotes, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Fri 23 Mar 2007, 7:15 AM - Leave Comment
Imagine that you know how to perform a few magic tricks. One trick in particular is liked by everyone who watch you perform the trick. The question that gets asked repeatedly is “Can you tell me the secret behind the trick?”
What is obvious is that you get asked this question only when the trick is VERY good. In other words, if the trick is not so hot, people don’t bother to find out the secret behind the trick.
“If someone is not interested in the magic trick, they don’t care how you did it”
This may seem obvious in the above-mentioned example but not in real life. Many people talk about their products and services and go into the intricate details of all the features and functionalities. They may even go into the details of what technologies are used and how they are so cool. The only problem with all these details (the secret behind the trick) is that the other party may not be interested in the problem that the product or service is addressing (the magic trick)
Homework questions for all of us:
1. What magic tricks do we have under our sleeves?
2. Is the trick hot enough that people want to know the secret behind it?
Core concept courtesy of Hanley Brite, president of Authentic Connections and advisor to Suggestica.
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By Rajesh Setty on Wed 21 Mar 2007, 11:08 PM - 7 Comments
I like working with the “right” first-time entrepreneurs. I am a bit weird and these first-time entrepreneurs are a bit weird too. So it’s a great combination 
Many of them, unfortunately, are under-rated because they have not “done it” before. Agreed, they don’t have the experience or past successes. However, there is a strong possibility that some of their other attributes they bring can more than make up for the lack of experience.
Here are few of those attributes that you won’t be able to “find” in the business plan.
1. Hunger: Some of these people such a “hunger” to make it happen that other people on the sidelines can only imagine. Their hunger will give them that additional power and energy to go where they want to go.
2. Commitment: There are two types. One, commitment to their purpose in life and the other – commitment to the cause of the company. If the person can connect the two together – meaning if their venture leads towards fulfilling their life purpose, you can see pure magic.
3. Connections: Some people have those golden connections that others will die for. Long-term relationships are an unfair advantage and it’s good! I have seen entrepreneurs where their former bosses have funded them and backed them up to the point of winning the first few deals. I have seen entrepreneurs who have got their first few deals from former colleagues or clients from their previous employers – all because they proved in their earlier life that they are valuable and trustworthy.
4. Tenacity: They don’t have the experience to know when to give up. They can continue to chug along when the world thinks that it is a mute point to continue.
5. Higher Risk Appetite: Many first-time entrepreneurs leave jobs that are high-paying and (??) secure. When they walk into a startup, they have assume a huge risk. If they are venture funded, then the statistics are not in their favor – 9 out of ten companies bite the dust. If they are not venture funded, then lack of money is already a risk 
In the face of this and many other risks, they take the plunge.
6. Support system: Alone, they may not have the capacity to act but some of these people have excellent support systems in the form of friends, family members, current and former colleagues or advisors that will volunteer (in most cases for no money) to help them out.
7. Investment in themselves: Some of these people invest time and money to educate themselves to be ready for the ever-changing marketplace. Personally, I don’t work with anyone who is not making those kinds of investments. Reason: Even if those people succeed, it will only be a short-term success. I can’t build long-term relationships with people who are looking at only their next venture.
8. Open to coaching: Everyone needs help – it is just that some people don’t acknowledge it or they are not aware of it. If someone thinks that they don’t need help, it is difficult to offer them help as they may feel insulted. On the other hand, it is a breeze to work with people who know that they need help and they are coachable. Good thing is that help is available in plenty today. It is mostly our unwillingness to ask for it and lack of power to attract help from other powerful people.
9. Creativity: Financing, deal making, recruiting or anything in a startup for that matter can be spiced up with creativity. If you dig deeper, some of these people would have demonstrated unparalleled creativity in their jobs with former employers or while serving in other capacities in non-profits that they would have been involved.
Have a great Thursday.
Update:
Thanks to Guy for helping me refine some ideas in the above post. Guy wrote THE book on startups, so it’s an honor.
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By Rajesh Setty on Wed 21 Mar 2007, 5:19 PM - 1 Comment
The Sales Seminar
John was eager to learn to sell. The promise was compelling. $99 and a day with the gurus of real estate, John would be a better sales person. All the speakers were good. By the end of the day, John had purchased goods in excess of $1000. John was sold!
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Note:
1. A mini saga is a story told in exactly 50 words. Not 49 or 51 but exactly 50.
2. You can download a photographic manifesto of Mini Sagas at ChangeThis. Here is the link – Mini Sagas: Bite-sized Wisdom for Life and Business (PDF, 2.9MB).
3. For a complete list of Mini Sagas, please visit the Squidoo lens “Mini Sagas“
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