Inspiring comment....

I just read this comment on www.avc.com by elie siedman....thought i should keep it permeneantly and so copy pasting it here....

The comment follows.

I've lived the ups and downs and downs and ups of entrepreneurship and my experience has been that when you look back on those days when you were in the trenches fighting for survival, you'll see them, through the lens of nostalgia, as the "good old days". By contrast, scaling a fast growing startup that has found its market fit is stimulating and exciting but, at least for me, sits nowhere near as prominently in my minds list of proud moments.

My last entrepreneurial run went from 2000 to mid 2006 with a true "go to the light" near death experience throughout most of 2002. The business ultimately found its market fit and had a high growth phase from 2003 to 2005 (from 7 people to more than 200 during that time). Through the miracle of memory, I now remember 2002 very fondly as a source of pride, learning, and character building. But at the time it was not fun - on the contrary, it was as scary as I would let it be.

I've been watching and reading about startups since I was in high school and knew it would be what I tried to do when I read Startup by Jerry Kaplan while in college (still a great book for entrepreneurs). I've observed again and again that for every rapid success like Facebook, there are 100s of overnight moderate successes that took 10+ years and will never make it to the business papers and blogs. It's really a marathon, not a sprint and sometimes your worst enemy is your own psychology or the psychology of the naysayers who inevitably crawl out of the woodwork. After all, it's easy to be a critic and when things don't follow a perfectly straight curve to success, if you allow yourself to, you'll hear plenty of them.

On the hard days, I sometimes look to Parson's rules of life: http://www.bobparsons.me/19/robert-ca-not-eat-r... They are all great but number 2 and number 3 are, to me, the things that ring true on all too many days of the entrepreneurial endeavor.

2. Never give up. Almost nothing works the first time it's attempted. Just because what you're doing does not seem to be working, doesn't mean it won't work. It just means that it might not work the way you're doing it. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and you wouldn't have an opportunity.

3. When you're ready to quit, you're closer than you think. There's an old Chinese saying that I just love, and I believe it is so true. It goes like this: "The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed."

And the last comment - startups are uncertain until they are not and when they stop being uncertain, they are no longer really startups. If you sign up for being an entrepreneur or working in startups, that's what you are signing up for. On the particularly hard days I ask myself whether there is anywhere I'd rather work (or anything I'd rather be doing including sitting on a beach) even if it meant more money or less uncertainty. And on those days I realize that I really do have the best "job" in the world.

Two thoughts from my father to close the comment, the first of which he told me when I was a teen: "There will always be someone smarter, richer, more accomplished, or better looking so to find satisfaction and meaning, you'll have to look within". Nothing truer could be said about entrepreneurship. I've never had a huge homerun - the kind of thing that gets you into the business press. But I don't value my contribution to innovation and creation any less than the names and stories I read about in the press. All entrepreneurs - large and small - push the ball that is society and humanity just a bit forward. Larry and Sergei are the ones we read about in the press but their insights - large as they were - were built on the shoulders of countless unnamed others who are mainly not rich and certainly not famous. Entrepreneurship and innovation is a "noble profession" (borrowed from Randy Komisar's recent comments http://entrepreneur.venturebeat.com/2010/04/23/... ) for all of the people who are involved in it - those with their names in lights and those who grind away anonymously. Society and humanity benefits very little - or not at all - from the untold numbers of rich people who became truly rich by hacking the financial system (to quote Mark Cuban) - and benefits massively from the countless numbers who - despite stress and lack of financial reward - devoted their working lives to innovation. The failures matter by the way. The iPhone for which Steve Jobs gets credit was built on the backs of countless other handheld computers that were before their time and whose investors and employees "failed".

And closing with a joke from my dad "what's experience?" "It's what you get when you don't get anything else"

The discussion on GOD

It is fascinating always to talk about GOD.


My argument in recent times is " We are too little to
talk about it".


I am not trying to curtail the thinking about what is around us...
the universe...the living beings...their mysteries...they way
efficiently plants produce food...the way efficiently we
produce lives (...making life with pleasure ...think of it...).
Can someone device a mechanism like that...

There are so many mysteries and unsolved issues around us, diseases, poverty,
...why to talk about some thing called GOD...what are you
going to get by proving it is there or not there...anyhow
our (human) life is going to be the same.

People who talk about GOD ...whether far or against...always are
stupid to me.

Sometimes...i get this weird feeling...when they talk about GOD ...i feel
like some Horse is talking...seriously.....Horse talking!!!

Happy today...

Today I am finally happy.


I distributed the money borrowed for the business venture...
I understand that it is not compulsory to return an investment
made in a business....

Somehow i felt people have put in money in the business because
i requested for the investment...they did not put money
on the business plan...but on me.
So it becomes ultimately my responsibility to make the business
make money and return.


Ho...it was a horrible situation. I could return their investement
from my personal savings....but no-one will accept that....
even from the business also many won't accept.

I have to generate the money from the business ....but alas
the business is already dead....how am i going to make the
money from a "Dead man"....

Luckily and so luckily for me....one guy was ready to take
the code (that too...non-exclusive) for almost exact amount
of the investment...i felt happy like i am on clound 9....
(i donno what that clound 9 is....heard my father say that)..


Finaly the money came through and i have distributed the contribution money to everyone

Yaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhooooooooooooooooo

Kasi

Prayer

What is a prayer ...

Is there someone listening to your prayers? I don't believe
so but still why do people (we) pray?

Why can't we pray to a person and why are we looking at something
which we don't know whether exist or NOT ..
Why not pray to a person we know...

It is something like telling things to your closest friend or wife ... but the
issue there with the friend or wife will judge us for all what we are saying
so we cannot pray to them ... because we will meet them again and the
judged personality from you will be open to him/her.

Precisely the point...So, we create a person who will listen
to us without judging ... even if he judges he never tells
that back. So if you can tell something to someone without
being judged is the best thing one can expect.



Prayer is ...

That and telling someone your problems (or more generally,
your life situation) without any fear of being judged as a
result…

What is wrong with tropical people!!!

How westerners treat themselves and others.


They treat them (selves and others) with analytic, reasoning and not with much
emotion. There is always bio-driven selfishness to be accounted
but, leaving that.... they seems to me are more reasonable and accountable.

On the other hand ... Indians treat even business with
emotion. Why?

Is it so in other countries of tropical-region? Is the climate
and environment makes this mental habit or behavior?

I started writing this blog after reading a blog about "Jesus Vs economics".

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/the-greatest-question-ever-asked/


I went through 40+ responses to this and look at the responses
Westerners treat even Jesus with reasoning. If the same question have
been asked even about Gandhi (leave alone Indian god). The
response if unedited would not be readable. I am sure.

What is wrong with this tropical living creatures (Indians).


Kasi
P.S. just a rant.

SMS business idea

SMS business.

Here is an idea i have been thinking about... and even proposed to someone in this space.
Though the Idea is good (according to me ha..ha...ha..) ... making it work is
a big challenge.

I call it "Pincode.com" ... this name is probably influenced by reading somewhere...probably rajesh-jain's blog.


You tell me (through sms) where you are right now with your pincode... i will give you what is exciting right now happening in the pincode.

Exciting: Events, Sale (discounts), Hotels etc.,etc.,

U show my SMS and redeem ...


This is just like creating a virtual world on the SMS-cloud....similar to www ...but a volatile data which vanishes every week or month. Some of the data can be everyday updated (totally contrary to www where the data resides for 10's of years).

What this calls for is million dollar investment to cover even part of a big city like Mumbai or Chennai.

Ultimately this can boil down to page-ranking level which i call "Cell ranking"

Based on cell ranking we can give more to a cell and block a cell....like how a page-ranking works now the Google.


Kasi

The following report and analysis is taken from somewhere ... i thought i
will post it here... to remind to look at it after 10-years ... whether
i fall into this as an entrepreneur ... the report says i have good chance !!! :-)


In any case, here are some of the points from the report that
I found the most interesting.

1. The average and median age of company founders when they started their current companies was 40.

2. 95.1 percent of respondents themselves had earned bachelor’s degrees, and 47 percent had more advanced degrees.

3. Less than 1 percent came from extremely rich or extremely poor backgrounds

4. 15.2% of founders had a sibling that previously started a business.

5. 69.9 percent of respondents indicated they were married when they launched their first business. An additional 5.2 percent were divorced, separated, or widowed.

6. 59.7 percent of respondents indicated they had at least one child when they launched their first business, and 43.5 percent had two or more children.

7. The majority of the entrepreneurs in the sample were serial entrepreneurs. The average number of businesses launched by respondents was approximately 2.3.

8. 74.8 percent indicated desire to build wealth as an important motivation in becoming an entrepreneur.

9. Only 4.5 percent said the inability to find traditional employment was an important factor in starting a business.

10. Entrepreneurs are usually better educated than their parents.

11. Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.

12. The majority of respondents (75.4 percent) had worked as employees at other companies for more than six years before launching their own companies.

Which of the above surprises you the most and alters your mental model of what entrepreneurs are like?