How do we accumulate knowledge?

Since the internet exploded, much of our combined knowledge is available to the average person with internet access. But it is not just about availability though. Information is fed to us [emails, facebook, blogs, news articles] at an unprecedented rate with most of it random, subjective and noisy.

The sheer volume of incoming information means that we hardly have the time to make our own evaluations. So we outsource it. Consolidating information and making it consumable is becoming a big business these days and the loudest (not the best) information gets most attention. Is this healthy?

What exactly do we remember once we finish consuming a certain piece of random incoming information? Why do we remember that? Are the reasons satisfying?

Working with processes and goals

I read this article recently - http://jamesclear.com/goals-systems

In my view, processes and goals have a much closer relationship. Effective processes

1. Convert big fuzzy goals (become better at writing / write a book) into smaller, easily digestive chunks (write 2 articles / week). The smaller goal needs to keep refilling itself to provide enough momentum to read the goal.
2. Form habits by tapping into the unconscious mind. After a few weeks of writing articles, it will start coming naturally to you without having to think too much.

Goals provide fuel for processes, processes are the vehicles to achieve goals.

If Peter Thiel Calls, follow your heart

A friend shared this article with me today - http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130926030101-29380071-adult-supervision

Here are my thoughts:

Peter Thiel's structure is not for everyone, but doesnt mean it is wrong. It is meant for a people who have the urge to do something and university can sometimes stifle them. And the first company that a person starts is rarely bound to be successful. However, it is a fantastic learning experience and that is an important consideration.  

The question really is - who is poised to be better entrepreneur?

a. 4 years, started 3 companies and failed at all 3

b. 6 years, studied a degree, and worked at a Startup-like Company X for 2 years. 

There are many people skilled at managing large companies.. however it is very hard to build the skill set required to go from zero to something. And failure teaches very good lessons. 

We need to remember both Bill Gates and Paul Allen. We ll know the results of Peter Thiel's experiment. in a few years. If it works, great! If it doesnt, too bad.. it was worth trying! :)

So, if Peter Thiel calls, consider the offer and follow your heart! But know that 90% of first time entrepreneurs fail.

Install latest distrubutions on EC2

EC2 typically has slightly older version of software (Amazon AMI, i use that most often. Other linux distributions are likely to be similar but the repos folder is likely to be different). I like to be cutting edge, (but not so much bleeding edge).

Here is how you can use external repos to install the latest distributions. Most of the LAMP stack stuff is available in this repo.

-- 

cd /etc/yum.repos.d

sudo wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi.repo

sudo vim remi.repo 

- change all occurrences of '$releasesever' to '6' 

        - $releasever contains the string 'latest' but that doesnt seem to work, so we manually put the latest server available

        - this is where it gets the repos from, so you can figure out the latest server version available : http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/6/remi/mirror

Then go here: http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/6/remi/x86_64/

wget <path to repo you want>

sudo yum --enablerepo=remi install <path to downloaded repo>

So much easier than building from source.. which is the other altearnative.

Add variety and force quicker results to keep your elephant happy

After the initial novelty of jogging wore off, I started looking for ways to keep the elephant inside my head interested in the 20 minute repetitive process that my rider wanted done.

One of my learnings was that I needed an immediate sense of progress. First I tried counting steps, and then counting squares and even cubes in sync with my steps. Then I realized the most important part of a jog was actually the breathing, and not the running. So I started counting breaths. Paying attention to my breathing ensured better control and I was able to run longer and faster. But ofcourse I got bored. 20 minutes was too long a time to be counting breaths. 

I realized there were 2 aspects involved:

1. Quick short-term goals that require some effort to achieve.

2. Variety.

So I broke it up - to roughly 5 cycles of "slow - medium - fast - medium - slow" running and counted to 20 breaths within each. It was complicated enough that I had to pay attention.  Just when the breaths started getting boring, I would finish 20 and had to change speed. And just when changing speed got boring, I felt the accomplishment of finishing a set. And just when finish sets started to get boring, the jogging ended. If I didnt count corrently, I couldnt change speed correctly, so I was absorbed enough in the counting to keep me from getting bored.

I have been doing this for over a year and it's been working so far. In time, I know I ll get bored. And I can always cook up something else.

Using such tricks rather than a complete distration of say, listening to earphones made me feel closer to the process. And at the end of it, I felt more satisfied.

"When walking, walk. When eating, eat." ~Zen proverb 

(The elephant comes from the elephant rider metaphor to describe our mind - http://sourcesofinsight.com/the-elephant-and-the-rider/ )

Create processes before you delegate.

"You need to be 10 times as good as the person you are delegating to - unless you are bringing an expert on board."

I got this advice recently from an entrepreneur, and I tend to agree in principle. For me it's not about being better, but about practice. Delegation allows you to scale and practice help you create the process which provides the foundation on which you scale. So I would rephrase it as "Do it 10 times yourself before you delegate."

We made 300 cold calls at our startup before we delegated. And we knew all the do's and dont's. But each new person who came in was able to take it one step further in terms of efficiency - we gave the process / framework and they performed. And we were able to repeat the success 3 times with results better than any we had achieved on our own.

As we accelerate, we are tempted to delegate stuff which we ourselves are not familiar with. Like writing daily blog posts for example. But then if the work gets done, it is a short term fix because there is no process created. So the results will not be repeatable reliably - which is fine if it is one-off. But harmful if has to go into the company blueprint.

Painkiller, vitamin, candy, crack

The lean startup model has a huge emphasis on solving pain points. It is a customer centric model, where you go talk to the customer first, identify the biggest pain points and then offer a solution for that. While this is very helpful in de-risking your business in most cases, some businesses by default dont solve a pain point and yet see huge success.. take any gaming company for example. 

So when I was reading one of the many interesting papers/ books lying around at JFDI, I read about Painkiller, Vitamin, Candy and Crack. And I thought that was a very cool model!

A startup can now be a painkiller as mentioned before, or a candy (pure entertainment - people like consuming it even if it wastes time), a crack (people like consuming it with other people - social entertainment) or a vitamin (people know it's good for them but never consume it).

Focussing on the pain point then is important to make sure you dont become a vitamin. But if you are looking at becoming a candy or crack - and the key metric there is people naturally enjoy using whatever you are building and are willing to waste time on it - then it is a different game altogether. The pain in that case is probably boredom.

Hire people not based on achievements but on situations

"How will you measure your life" is a wonderful book. 

Clayton Christensen (also the author of Innovator's Dilemma and Innovator's Solution) plays strong emphasis on context. Any solution / theory is of value only if the context is defined. If the context changes, the theory is not relevant and needs to be reformulated. 

Among other things in the book, there is a section on  building your career. And when you are looking for a role (or looking for someone to fill a role), the context is your experience. Your chances of success depends not on whether you have accomplished what the new role seeks to accomplish, but whether you have been in a situation similar to what the new role demands. 

A person who successfully doubled the sales of an established company does not fit into a role where he is expected to double the sales of a startup. Because his experience hasnt been in the same context! Someone led the sales team for a new product in a small company fits better - even if he wasn't as successful at it.

Personal feedback is generally useless, we need a trigger to change.

Great article by Mark Suster:

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/12/07/why-id-rather-err-on-the-side-of-direct-feedback-than-pleasantries/?utm_medium=bothsid.es-facebook-share&awesm=bothsid.es_q3D&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_content=awesm-publisher&utm_campaign=

My personal view is that feedback is good if it is directed at an object (presentation, company, pitch) but almost always useless if it directed at a person (you should to be more understanding, you should not be so lazy etc). Unless the person is willing to receive it, you can try all you want, the other person might even nod in agreement but it will be forgotten. People need a strong trigger to change and feedback is a lousy trigger.

Practical application:

I wanted my co-founder to be more structured about certain things.. I have stopped telling, and started creating structures myself to force him to be structured around it. 

In a sense it is like building a business. People dont change until they have to. You need to prod at / create a pain point for people to care. 

To quote a Mr Sheldon Cooper,

"Change is never fine. They say it is, but it's not!" 

Look for changes if you "feeling that something is wrong" but aren't sure what.

A lot of times we have a feeling that something is wrong (with ourselves or with the group), but we cannot pinpoint what it is. 

The first step is ofcourse to recognize that feeling and make sure you dont ignore it. I ve found that my instincts are generally right on these things.. and very often things have blwon up because I didnt listen to these feelings.

Now I notice it more, and dont ignore, but if I cannot pinpoint what exactly is causing it, what do you do?

I dont have the answer yet, but I have a couple of learnings from a recent experience: 

Look at recent (~ 1 week) significant changes without prejudice. And see if that is the source of the problem. Even if not the source of the problem, it usually plays a part in improving / worsening the problem and thats an important clue. And even if you feel this change has been assimilated, it doesnt hurt to double check. 

And there might be changes you dont know about - so probe to find out what the changes are, instead of what "negative events" happened.  It is easier to get all the facts in first before categorizing them.

And sometimes, the other person involved has a "feeling that something is wrong" too but is in the same position as you and wont be able to separate positives from negatives clearly. 

And finally, if it involves another person, I have found that it helps to take extra effort in being direct, explicit, and avoid sarcasm (basically any indirect means of communication) till the matter comes out in the open.

Crappy alternative a force people to think of better ones

We were thinking of new names for our company because .com is taken for doctree and that doesn't bode well for our global domination plans. WE have been sitting on this for a while, and I was suggesting a string of different names to promote discussion. They werent particularly good (I was Ok a couple of them but them I am generally less picky than the average person), and my cofounder was rightly rejecting them. But I was little miffed that he wasnt offering any suggestions either. That's when I came across this article

https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/9216e1c9da7d

So i decided to do an experiment after another round of rejection and said "OK let us set a deadline. If we dont come up with a better name in the next 2 days, I am going to register <notsogreatname>.com" 

There was a short silence, after which I got a response with a name both of us were ok with.

So it works! 

The only catch is - the other person needs to care about the decision at hand. Otherwise you will end up shooting yourself in the foot.

Challenges are opportunities to create processes

I was reading the book "How will you measure your life" by Clayton Christensen, and he suggested a very neat model to what a person / company would make decisions.

The idea is that we have resources (money, skills, labour) and we use processes to convert them into products / solutions according to the priorities ingrained in us. To refer back to my post last week, processes and priorities are what maketh the company blueprint. 

And they are quite hard to get right. They require investment and are not immediately measurable. 

The theme that stuck to me most was how each challenge is an opportunity to set a priority and create a process. 

Each difficult decision, regardless of the outcome involves picking a priority to resolve it. And whether we like it or not, it is easier then to pick the same priority the next time a similar decision is required to be taken. And after a few instances it becomes part of the core priorities and starts affecting other decisions as well. If priorities developed this way are consistent and what we want them to be, it becomes part of the company culture. 

And our approach when we go about making those decisions, and handling the outcome of those decisions creates processes in the same way. And when repeated a few times, it becomes part of the culture too!

Climb mountains, not so the world can see you but so you can see the world

A friend shared this quote with me and I thought it was quite profound!

Fact is, most of the world wont be able to see you if you stand on top of the tallest mountain in the world. Maybe noone will be able to see you. But if you look carefully, you can definitely see more of the world than you have ever seen before.

Entrepreneurs build companies. Companies build products

It was something that stuck to my head from the early days of jfdi. And i ve felt a need to remind myself of this every once in a while as It's something easily forgotten in the rush to build a product and release it.

A company is a group of 3 or more people. The job scope of an entrepreneur is to build a framework or a blueprint which guides this company of people to run a business. And if the framework is built right, the company becomes scalable.

A scalable business needs customers, a solution and a target market and the specification of these are the keystones of the framework.  Usually, The product is part of the solution.

That is not to say you don't build a product. you build much as it takes to validate what needs to be built, and it gets added to the framework. And we don't forget that the entrepreneur is part of the company too -  my point is that that's not his/her main job scope.

Focus products on the situation - not the customer

I have just started reading the Innovator's Solution - and this was one of my big learnings from the first 3 chapters.

Taking the example of a cafe serving chocolate milkshake - the authors illustrate how focusing on the situation (When job does the chocolate milkshake product do for people and how can it do this job better?) rather than the customer (Who buys chocolate milkshake and what kind of milkshake do they like?) can make a big difference in how you target the product.

Analysing the product based on the latter case could result in a profile like this:

Target: Typical customer is middle aged working men

Competitors : Other coffee shops / other drinks

Observation: Middle aged men like chocolate milkshake with more milk

How to improve: Add more milk.

The first case could look like this:

Job 1: Alleviate boredom during morning commute, and provide something filling to last till lunch.

Competitors : Other stuff eaten during commute  - bagels, bananas, sandwich.

Observation: The job requires a food that is not messy to eat, takes time (to last the commute), as filling as possible, easy to carry (people generally have work suitcases in the other hand), easy to consume (many people drive)

How to improve : 

Chunkier (slow consumption), fruits or something (element of surprise to counter boredom).

Job 2: Give kids something to keep them quiet for the rest of the day

Competitors : chocolates etc.

Observation : The job needs something that is easy for parents to say yes to, is smooth (kids find it easier to drink), comes in smaller quantity

How to improve:

Smoother, package as add-on with kids meal, smaller containers.

Which approach do you think will yield better results?

Infinite scrolling and assumptions

You must have heard of infinite scroll (http://pinterest.com/ , Google is a good example. See how there is no pagination). I always thought pagination was stupid when you could do something as cool as in infinite scroll.

Looks like Etsy did an A/B testing on infinite scroll.. So how it works is they roll out infinite scroll to a section of the users and stick to the old pagination for the rest of the users. And then they collect all kinds of relevant data like clicks, purchases etc of each user group and compare statistics to see if there is any significant difference in usage pattern.

http://danwin.com/2013/01/infinite-scroll-fail-etsy/

So looks like infinite scroll had a negative impact. 

What is more insightful is the bit about assumptions.. ie. Users want more results and users want faster results. Fair assumptions to make.. what you would call obvious but they didnt have any positive impact individually.. And together, they had a negative impact. If they had tested it before they might have reconsidered implementing infinite scrolling! And there is no way you could know this before without actually getting empirical data. 

So let's be mindful of our our "obvious" assumptions and take a step back once in a while!