“Do feelings of deprivation drive entrepreneurs and economies?,” asks Rosabeth Moss Kanter [http://blogs.hbr.org/kanter/2010/11/mark-zuckerberg-and-misery-as.html], a professor at Harvard Business School. After watching ‘The Social Network [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/]‘ one evening this week, I was left with feelings of inspiration and…
Here’s a meme that resounds quite often in the startup world: > Execution is more important than ideas. Good ideas are only so good in the mind of the beholder, unless proven to be useful or effective through execution. Ideas matter. The execution of those ideas [https://www.nilkanth.…
The real question is not “how to build” something. There are enough technology experts around us who can build stuff. Capital, technology, processes and standards are only secondary to good product design [http://www.apple.com]. The real question then, is “what to build”, or “what to build” better. It’…
For the past few months I’ve been sitting on some ideas (for Web applications) that I’ve scribbled here & there. I’m working on a few (not listed here) in my spare time, but realistically I won’t be able to work on all of them. So I…
The other day I was browsing through the list of world’s most popular goals on 43 Things [http://www.43things.com/zeitgeist/popular_goals], when I came across something one might call a “true lie”. Apparently, 25271 people want to “Fall in love” [http://www.43things.com/things/view/…
How would you classify writing software? Is it science (as in computer science), a form of art (as in code is poetry or prose) or an engineering discipline? Terence Parr, a professor of computer science at the University of San Francisco, recently wrote about why writing software is not like…
Recently I read about the yet unbuilt 2011 Ford Fiesta that attracted more than a thousand online pre-orders [http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/12/09/fords-unbuilt-car-snags-1000-pre-orders-online/] within the first 6 days of the launch of its reservation program. It made me wonder not only about the marketing hype associated…
At one of the company stand-ups I attended recently, the topic of discussion was ‘Good Communication’. As simple and ordinary it may sound, it did make me think about an interesting hypothesis. Research tells us that only 7% of all communication is impacted by the content or the words used.…