Software, Magic, and Life

Keep Fear Alive! Or Restore Sanity!

2010-09-18T10:28:00.000-07:00

As I became more and more familiar with the politics and rhetoric in the US - and its history, I'm beginning to realize that none of this is new. But that's part of the greatness of the system in the US. In spite of its flaws and ...the mean-spiritedness of various people and parties involved, this country keeps making progress overall, over a sufficiently long period - about 10 years.

The society and the political system has had the resilience and character to overcome any challenge it has faced. On the flip side, nostalgia can often be misleading- there is no such thing as the "good old days". Things were almost always worse in the past.

Here's one thing that absolutely symbolizes what I'm talking about:
http://www.RallyToRestoreSanity.com/
And of course, this:
http://www.KeepFearAlive.com/

Uniquely American responses to American problems!

No Legal or Official Reason to Trust the Rating Agencies

2010-08-28T22:02:00.000-07:00

I had posted this on my facebook wall some time ago, which is not easy to search through nor is it well-suited for blog-size posts. Hence reproducing here as the information is eye-opening.

“they’re winning because this is not a level playing field.”

The Ratings agencies (Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch):

1. have NO duty to be correct.
...'the companies didn’t owe ... a “duty” — a legal obligation that could form the basis of a negligence claim'

2. have NO shared responsibility.
'judges have rejected the idea that the rating agencies worked so closely with the investment banks that they were essentially co-underwriters'

3. are NOT experts
'a regulation exempts rating agencies from the definition of “experts” who can be sued'

4. have NO conflict of interest - because you already know about it!
'it has been around so long and is so widely known that it isn’t a cause of action'

5. are merely expressing OPINIONS
'their grades are just opinions about the future'

6. are protected by the First Amendment
"and therefore entitled to robust First Amendment protections, like those afforded journalists'

Corporate Tools & Unpaid Fools

2010-08-18T16:03:00.000-07:00

Found this comment on last night's Daily Show, which discussed Google's betrayal of net neutrality, Dick Armey's pretentious and dishonest definition of "tyranny" and Congressman Louie Gohmert's hissy fit on Anderson Cooper 360 when asked to provide evidence of his "research" on "terror baby threat". It touches on apprehensions I share with most people who don't have any agenda other than intellectual honesty, basic human decency, and fairness.

"I'm depressed.

When a little known issue like Net Neutrality is brought up, liberals tend to know a lot more about it than conservatives.

Why? I can only guess it's because honest people who care about politics tend to be liberal, while paid corporate tools / unpaid fools only know enough talking points to misinform the public in a way that paints their puppet-masters in a better light.

When liberals point out that they know the issues better, they get called elitist, despite the fact that progressive policies favor all at the expense of the top 1%. The rich have money to spare on buying up news outlets in what amounts to a bought-and-paid-for propaganda campaign to convince working voters to vote for corporate welfare and against social welfare.

Fox News has daily memos to all of its reporters telling them what to report on and with what slant, yet they dare to call themselves "fair and balanced." The rich take Americans for schmucks. They think they can lie to our faces and we'll praise them for it.

And we do."

Redistributing power to the people

2010-04-28T00:40:00.000-07:00

Reporter: What do you think of western civilization?
Mahatma Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.

What Gandhi once said tongue-in-cheek, you can say also about American Democracy today.

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

-Louis D. Brandeis, US Supreme Court Justice from 1916 to 1939.

I agree - except I would substitute "power" for "wealth".

Balance of power is a desirable goal in itself. That's what Democracy is about. But concentration of wealth is not a problem in itself; it becomes a problem when it's part of a system that enriches a few who exploit the many to get rich, get elected, to get away with committing crimes (white collar or not).

In other words, it's about the power imbalance that comes with money - not money itself. An ideal democracy wouldn't have this problem.

I don't care how rich the richest get. I do care how the average people and the poor fare in the society. The solution though is to empower them to succeed and protect them from abuses by the rich & powerful - not to redistribute wealth.

Mariage Insurance

2010-04-19T01:03:00.001-07:00

I have often spoken with my friends about a business plan to sell "marriage insurance". It would make getting a divorce as automatic and simple as getting your car insurance company to handle a collision claim. It would also focus on making getting married at least as difficult as getting a driving license (indicative of knowing the rules & having the minimum qualification) and as much a responsibility to maintain in good standing as a car insurance policy (indicative of a good "record".)

In other words, we need to educate and counsel couples before they get married - and periodically during it - rather than what's common practice today, doing it when a marriage is already troubled and couples are more likely to fail at it and divorce rather than successfully work it out.

The idea is to give people who choose to marry the tools to increase the chances of making their marriages work, and likewise allow them the dignity of a quick & relatively painless divorce.

A recent New York Times article article quotes latest studies that effectively make the medical case for my "marriage insurance" - it gives some fascinating insights on how the physical health of people gets affected based on whether they remain single, if they get married whether they remain in a good or bad marriage, and whether they get divorced.

Here are some of the quotes I found most revealing:

troubled relationships ... can leave a person far less healthy than if he or she had never married at all.

single people who have never married have better health than those who married and then divorced.

women in unhappy relationships and the women who remained emotionally hung up on their ex-husbands had decidedly weaker immune responses than the women who were in happier relationships (or were happily out of them).

couples in troubled marriages appear to be more susceptible to illness than happier couples.

couples should first work to repair a troubled relationship and learn to fight without hostility and derision. But if staying married means living amid constant acrimony, from the point of view of your health, “you’re better off out of it”.

people who had divorced or been widowed had worse health problems than men and women who had been single their entire lives.

women ... who were at highest risk for signs of heart disease were those whose marital battles lacked any signs of warmth; men were at risk, however, when their marital spats turned into battles for control

Some suggestions for a "healthy" marriage from the couple whose studies produced most of the above results- and who themselves have a successful 30 year marriage:

taking time off together and making sure their disagreements don’t degenerate into personal attacks

use those moments of stress as an opportunity to repair the relationship rather than to damage it

Sehwag going down the Ganguly way

2010-04-18T13:19:00.000-07:00

I wish I had written this 3 weeks ago; actually I wish someone with influence over Virender Sehwag had.

Being a huge Sehwag fan and of Gambhir to a lesser extent, I cannot understand what possessed Delhi/Gambhir to break up Sehwag-Gambhir opening pair that won them so many matches in IPL, leave alone the small matter that it's the best opening combination in the world today and in the history of Indian cricket in all three forms of the game.

They deserved to lose today for not acknowledging & addressing this problem in time - they have had enough failures at the top to know.

That said, Sehwag has to take personal responsibility and grow up. It is great that he has all this talent, mental strength & unselfish attitude, but he has to understand that it's all about winning - not just about not believing "in wasting balls" as he said recently.

Also, asked about his tendency to get out playing risky shots, he correctly pointed out that a risky shot for someone else may be less risky for him- and vice-versa (and also that a defensive stroke may sometimes be more risky than an attacking shot). Yet even granting him all that, he still has a responsibility - in the interest of helping his team win - to curb "risky shots" by his own definition of a "risky" shot.

And he most definitely can do that - he has a role model in MS Dhoni who has done precisely that. Dhoni is an equally aggressive & mentally strong player with lesser talent, but has come through more often when his team has needed him by showing greater maturity & willingness to calibrate his batting style to the match situation.

That last bit about match situation and personal contribution should be ringing alarm bells for Sehwag, his well-wishers, and all of us who know how his contribution can change the outcome of almost any game. Sehwag seems to have lost his desire to contribute to wins through his own batting, especially in the limited-overs formats - shades of what brought his mentor, Saurav Ganguly down.

It's about time for Sehwag to chuck Ganguly to the dustbin of history and instead look to the man who replaced him for inspiration- MS Dhoni. Otherwise, he may find himself going down the same path of ignominious ending to his T20 & ODI careers.

Agile Entrepreneurs do it by Osmosis

2009-10-14T22:27:00.000-07:00

Entrepreneurs learn best by Osmosis

We need role models we can emulate.
Entrepreneurs we can relate to in Scale, Time, and Context.

Scale

We need people who have succeeded at what we're attempting, but not to such an extent that there's a daunting chasm between us.

It's easier to see how we can emulate the success of a peer than that of Steve Jobs.

Time

The success has to be recent for it to be relevant. - because everything changes: technology, market, consumers, investors, the economy.

Many of my advisors who were successful entrepreneurs over a decade ago are now relearning these lessons themselves, - the hard way, while pursuing their next startups.

Context

If the success is derived from a context foreign to us, it's hard to see how we can emulate that.

Factors contributing to success are often either downplayed or exaggerated, for effect. You need to know the story behind the story.

Don't get me wrong- I'm sure some of you will figure out the right lessons to learn at the right time, and eventually succeed.

But for many of us, it's really about the hard grind - day to day, week to week, month after month, for years together. Before you know, it's been 2 years since you started - with not much to show for it.

Persistence is good, but it means nothing if you're not making reasonable progress. I speak from the experience of spending a decade amongst bootstrapping entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley:

And that's why Agile Entrepreneurs was created - to help entrepreneurs learn from each other. Osmosis formalizes & facilitates this learning process in a structured way.

Each week

We pick a Topic that's narrowly scoped
Invite a Role Model (AE member or outside entrepreneur) to speak
Entrepreneur shares their experience
We discuss the relevance of their experience to our situation

This last part is what makes Osmosis - and Agile Entrepreneurs - really stand out as an effective tool to minimize the risk of failure and increase the probability of your success.

Sample Topics:

Selling your company
Getting a Co-Founder
Product Management - Going from Requirements to Launch
User Acquisition
User Growth
Monetizing your users
Getting your first reference customer
Getting money out of closing your first major customer deal
Managing cash flow - staying positive
Marketing - SEO
.. the list is endless

Do Something

2009-10-11T10:12:00.000-07:00

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing" -Edmund Burke

"Well then, do something, don't just complain about it" - You

Obama did something - he ran against evil, against history - and triumphed!
He gave everyone all over the world *HOPE* - and he delivered.
By winning. By "doing something about it".

People on the side of "the evil" should be eating crow. All others - including the silent majority - can "do something". Rejoice in the "triumph of good".

And Peace.
.

Criticism of Obama is (not) based on Racism

2009-09-25T15:49:00.000-07:00

Stephen Colbert said it best:

"Any time a racist criticizes the president someone cries racism"

"What better way to prove you're not a racist than by highlighting a fellow critic's race"

"I wish more African Americans were like the President - raised by white people"

"Before the next time you accuse the president of having a secret plan of taking white people's money and giving it to black people or broadcast chuck and jive imitations of African American leaders, just put on a little blackwashing"

Amen!

User Stories for Product Managers

2009-09-16T21:16:00.000-07:00

I've previously said that User Stories are the most powerful construct in Agile methods, more than TDD, in my view.

The challenge in using User Stories though lies in the fact that they shift the responsibility of getting things right - and quite fairly I might add - from the Engineering team onto the Product Owner/Product Manager. And unless you have strong buy-in from management, it's difficult to make it to the end of the Product Management process and to a point where you're cranking out iterations one by one.

The key lies in efficiency in creating and managing User Stories, and tying them effectively to an evolving User Interface even as the product starts coming alive.

I'm planning to share some of my experiences and thoughts on this soon. Meanwhile, I found this interesting article while searching the net for splitting stories along CRUD capabilities.

Ways to split user stories
.

Adhoori Kavita

2009-08-25T22:53:00.000-07:00

I came up with the first stanza of this poem over 20 years ago, but have never been able to finish it. I'm posting it online here in the hope that inspiration may strike me again and allow me to finish it. Or someone who is lost on the internet and stumbles upon my blog and this note may be able to help me finish it!

Note that it's part Hindi and part English - Hinglish, if you will!

Here goes:

Adhoori Kavita

Hum Ne Jab Dil Diya ...

Maloom tha ki aage Uphill Task hai
Pyar karna Skill aur Strong Will ki baat hai
Pyar mein Success Thrill hai,
To Failure ek Bitter Pill hai

Phir Bhi Humne Dil Diya ...

...
???

------
Help!

My Experience (a kid's poem)

2009-08-25T22:33:00.000-07:00

Here's a poem I wrote when I was in 8th grade in school

My Experience

Once upon a time, I had a little donkey
Whom I very lovingly, used to call Pinky
But in fact, he was very brown
And making a fine pair, I looked like a clown

Whatever we looked like, that does not matter
My story begins, as I grew fatter
Allow me to tell you, for your information
At that time, was I, a very poor washerman

One day, on Pinky, I loaded a huge clothes bunch
And on the top I settled, with my heavy paunch
Due to the mighty weight, his bones crunched
And the next minute, into the air I was launched

As I fell on earth, I started groans and moans
Nevertheless, the next thing I did was to check my bones
My limbs ached, and I felt very sick
Later on, I learned that the cause was Pinky's kick

After that experience so dim
I decided to become slim
And hence I advise you, never to become plump
For you too, as me, may receive many a bump!

Funding an Entrepreneur's Pedigree

2009-08-04T12:33:00.000-07:00

I got sucked into this debate with a friend, who is a great person and definitely not the type of investor I'm arguing against. That's why, it would be nice to hear first hand from the type of entrepreneurs I'm talking about - those who know similar startups that got funded because of better pedigree of founders, while they bootstrapped for years without investor support.

========================================

My friend is trying to explain to someone w/ a Harvard MBA why the 90% net income margin in their financial model is not believable.
-

Me
... and yet, in the end, most VCs still end up investing in people with degrees from Harvard and Stanford; coz it's takes talent to spot talent, and a lot of work to support and nurture it. If they fail, it's not the VC's fault; if they succeed, the VC made smart investment.
-

My Friend
Murali I think that statement might be a bit over the top. I know plenty of unemployed / unfundable ivy league grads. It's not a magic ticket.

Trivia Q: What fancy school did Ron Conway graduate from?
-

Me
Ok, maybe it was a bit over the top (esp. given your original post wasn't about that). But my point remains that, notwithstanding the Ivy league grads you know who can't get funded, I know - and I'm sure you do too - a lot of Ivy-league grads who got funded with a napkin-business plan while similar or better non-IL startups with a product, customer and a much refined business plan struggle to get funded. Again, my point here is the relative ease in access to capital for the IL guys due to the disproportionate weight given by the VCs to the pedigree.
-

My Friend
No, I don't know of anyone who got funded because of their degree. The belief that the lack of an ivy league degree holds you back is more damaging than the lack of an ivy league degree.

Conway graduated from San Jose State University. I doubt he cares if someone went to Harvard or not.

Life is what you make it. Ask Ellison and Gates.
-

Me
I do know a lot of investors who are lazy, choosing to back a startup primarily because one of the founders has a brand-name pedigree. If they practiced what they preach, they wouldn't lower the bar for the ivy-league entrepreneurs while raising it even more for non-IL startups. For the record, the entrepreneurs I'm talking about do not believe they're held back by lack of Ivy-league degrees- they take pride in their path to positive cash flow by bootstrapping for years. And they don't confuse raising Venture Capital with success- in fact, I also know quite a few who failed because they raised VC money too soon.

Obama was right - Cambridge Police did act "Stupidly"

2009-07-26T16:50:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you know about the arrest of the Harvard Professor, Henry Louis Gates, in his own house!

After the initial strong reactions, including one from President Obama, people by and large seem to have settled down to accepting the incident as an unfortunate one, with no one to blame but the situation itself. And history - of race in America. And also perceptions - of black and white about each other.

Here's an AP article that does a fairly good job of analyzing the incident.

Still, as a brown guy from India who is neither white nor black, and having lived in the US for more than 18 years, I have no hesitation in agreeing with the initial reaction of President Obama.

The issue is pretty simple, really.

A police officer gets a call about a possible break-in, and while investigating, makes a few errors in judgment, overreacting and aggravating the situation. He should have given Mr. Gates the benefit of doubt, while continuing to verify his identity and his side of the story. Instead, his actions clearly show that he adopted a more suspicious and aggressive attitude. The government can't just walk into someone's home and accuse them of being a burglar. At least not in America.

After the first few minutes of fear and doubt, the officer clearly had to know that he was dealing with a false alarm; that's when he should have apologized and excused himself.

Was that too much to ask in this situation?

Well, let me tell you another story from my personal experience and you can decide for yourself.

In April 2002, just about 6 months after the 9/11 attacks, my wife and I were moving into our new apt. in Durham, NC, carrying packing boxes from a U-haul truck parked in front of our apt. A neighbor called the cops reporting "suspicious activity". When the cops showed up, I was shocked and deeply offended, but stood my ground, cooperated with the investigating officer- reluctantly, and then challenged his judgment, demanded to know the identity of neighbor who made the call, demanded the officer's ID (and noted it down), and promised to report him to his superiors as well as the media.

The officer complied with all my requests politely (except for revealing the identity of the caller) just as I complied with his. Both of us realized pretty quickly that we had been played (inadvertently or not) by a hypersensitive potentially racist neighbor. The situation didn't get out of hand even though all the elements of the Gates situation - and then some - existed in my case (I even had a huge "terrorist" beard). The officer apologized for the inconvenience caused to me before leaving.

Even as the conversation and confrontation was nearing the end, I began to feel grateful that I was in the USA, and appreciative of the way the officer handled the situation with me. I could not fault him for anything that he said or did. I could only get upset at the madness that was prevailing in the country in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks- and the stupid neighbor who didn't pause to think before calling the cops on a neighbor moving into their own home.

Mr. Gates incident could and should have been handled at least as well as my incident was.

In this country, when you feel threatened by someone in your home, you have the right to shoot to kill to protect yourself, let alone shouting angrily at them. A police officer who finds himself in that situation should do better than to react to and provoke a justifiable scared, hurt and offended resident.

In both the cases, the police officer had the responsibility to not aggravate the matter any more than necessary while investigating, and to apologize for the inconvenience, at the end.

Fortunately for me, in my case, the officer maintained a cool head. And consequently the situation played itself out. And I never made that call to the officer's superior or anyone in media (although I kept his card with me for several months, just in case he returned with yet another crank call).

Unfortunately for Mr. Gates, President Obama, and all of us upset with what happened at Harvard, office Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police overreacted even after he realized there was no break-in. To say he acted "stupidly" is being generous.

But what's worse than stupid is Crowley's insistence that he didn't do anything wrong and thereby refusing to defuse a situation that has been blown way out of proportion by his mishandling of the situation. It's time for him to update his "racial profiling" course material with a chapter on "handling falsely accused residents in their homes".

Hanky Panky, Social Norms and Brainwashing by Marketing

2009-07-04T08:33:00.000-07:00

As I wiped my hands on my handkerchief after I stepped out of the restroom, my friend's teenage daughter turned to me and said, "that right there is a major turnoff for women, if you ever plan to date women, don't ever use it". Startled and a little puzzled, I asked her why she would say such a thing about an object of hygiene. She said, "Have you heard of Kleenex?" And what if I don't have one handy when I have to wipe my hands or face or worse, have to sneeze or blow my nose? "Use your hands and wash them later", she replied without hesitation, and added, the only person she knew who uses that (referring to my guilty hanky) is her grandma!

Her reply was eye-opening - she was hinting at social cluelessness defined by a generation gap, but it also gave me the missing clue to a similar comment on TechCrunch last week by someone who said he blows his nose into his elbow joint! (Remember that ladies, the next time someone holds his elbow out for you to grab it while he leads you around the room.)

This left me pondering American attitudes in particular and National, Cultural, Ethnic, Economic & Social attitudes in general. I grew up in India where it's considered educated and well-mannered to carry a hanky with you - even today. I have allergies and never know when I may start sneezing. I often find myself in the middle of a meeting or seminar, seated between people but far from a table - that may or may not have tissues (even if I did consider "changing my ways").

So I did a mini-research on use of the handkerchief and found a few interesting articles, including this one.

The issue here is not merely social etiquette or generation gap or best way to practice hygiene or how-to-not-turn-off-a-woman-you're-dating. It's that increasingly people are doing what social conditioning makes them to do, not what they have invested enough effort to find out to be true or conclude to be the right thing to do.

It's Marketing. Plain and simple.

Bombarded constantly by one of the most efficient marketing machines the world has ever known, an alarmingly large number of Americans have willingly surrendered their ability to think for themselves. It's peer pressure on a national scale - dictated by the media, advertising, and pop-culture. Surely this problem exists everywhere in the world to different degrees, but it's a left-handed tribute to American marketing genius that people here follow what they're told to eat, drink, wear, do, say, and even feel or think (more on this in another post).

Coming back to hankies, they're the handy, clean, hygienic, comfortable, economical and environmentally friendly solution to a sneezing fit, obnoxious snot, a scary cough, or just about any temporary hygiene issue that shows up unexpectedly - as long as you have enough of them (at least one per day) and wash them regularly. But you already do that with your underwear, don't you? So buy some hankies and don't use paper tissues unless they're the only option available.

The Wise & Persistent (a.k.a. Agile) Entrepreneur

2009-06-21T14:50:00.000-07:00

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
Bertrand Russell

The Dunning-Kruger effect explains the pervasive and perverse phenomenon where people with less competence rate their ability higher than do people who are relatively more competent.

The successful pursuit of any major goal in life requires many things including the much overrated Luck. In my mind, two qualities stand head and shoulders above everything else as absolutely essential to success:

Your ability to Learn
Your Persistence

I've previously discussed how to improve your ability to learn.

Today I want to share with my fellow entrepreneurs my thoughts on persistence.

I'm sure you had enough lessons of persistence knocked into your head. And it may even be getting to a point where the word starts to lose its meaning. But the thing is, persistence will lead you to success only if you have a proportional ability to learn - use it wisely & competently.

And as an entrepreneur, you can't afford to learn just from your own mistakes (akin to paying for all your lessons). You need to take advantage of the FREE lessons- i.e. learn from other people's mistakes.

I've seen dozens of entrepreneurs from start to finish, up close and personal. A few succeeded, but the vast majority didn't. Some "failed fast" within 6 months, and even more gave up after several months or a few years when their budgeted cash flow dried up. Both these categories of entrepreneurs typically paid a relative small price- in money, time, and other costs (career, family, emotional).

However, a smaller but still significant minority persisted for years, spiraling down and paying a heavy price along the way. Not to forget the ultimate cost - the death of not just their dream, but their courage to dream. They got so beat up that they got the entrepreneur knocked out of them for good.

The most valuable lessons I've learned are from these persistent entrepreneurs stuck on a path to inevitable failure, unable to learn and change course, unable and seemingly unwilling to heed any advice or take any help, relentlessly heading towards disaster (unless saved by the highly-overrated Mr. Luck).

- You need a second chance to apply the lessons learned from your mistakes.
- The persistent entrepreneur with a learning disability never gets a second chance.
- The "wise" entrepreneur who gives up too quickly learns nothing that helps the second time around.

The wise entrepreneur with the competence or ability to learn and correct the course in time, as well as the courage of his convictions to be persistent, will have the greatest chance of success over the long-term.

Forget the "bold entrepreneur" tautology and stop investing in random noise a.k.a. luck. Be a Wise and Persistent Entrepreneur - if you want to help yourself succeed.

It's a slow economy- Let's talk about handshakes & picking up chicks

2009-05-09T14:19:00.000-07:00

You know it's a rough economy when Guy Kawasaki is tweeting about picking up chicks and TechCrunch is blogging about handshakes & social etiquette and beating up dead horses.

But shouldn't these guys be talking about my friend's company that just got funded to do DNA computation in the cloud - or something like that?

User Stories: you're not Agile without them

2008-07-12T07:17:00.000-07:00

Failure to effectively transition to Agile development is often based on a fundamental failure to understand what a User Story is.

Allow me to explain.

The most important aspect of a User Story is that it's an independently *schedulable* unit of requirement (feature). The key to achieving the "independently schedulable" characteristic of a user story is that you express it in terms of how a "user" would use it. This leads you to a unit of functionality that's implemented end-to-end (UI to backend) that a user can actually interact with.

Not surprisingly, because of the focus on how a user would think about a feature, a user stories are highly readable - and could very well be written by the users themselves. However, the other important and less obvious aspect of a User Story is the emphasis on communication with the end-user and getting confirmation on the acceptance criteria.

Describing all the requirements as User Stories for a decent sized product is rigorous, intensive work, because of their granularity. It also shifts the responsibility - for making sure that the product does what it's supposed to - into the hands of the Product Owner (a.k.a. Product Manager). In other words, a user story forces you to acknowledge that the main responsibility for most bugs lies not with the QA, not with the developers, but the process of expressing requirements (by the Product Manager) in units of work that can be independently implemented (by the Developers) and exhaustively verified by the QA team.

I strongly recommend the following two articles by Mike Cohn for more on User Stories:

1. Advantages of User Stories for Requirements

2. Advantages of the “As a user, I want” user story template

I say XP, you say Product Management; I say Scrum, you say Project Management

2008-06-29T13:03:00.001-07:00

Chances are you've heard about Agile before but you don't know what the heck it is - even if you think you do.

Chances are:

if I say "Agile", you think "methodology"
if I say "Agile process", you think "Scrum"
if I say "Scrum", you think "daily standup meetings"
if I say "XP", you think "Pair Programming
if I say "Requirements", you think "PRD"

The problem with the above word/phrase associations is that they establish an incorrect image in your mind about the essence of XP, Scrum and Agile. It is this image that determines in the end whether you succeed or fail when you attempt any Agile method; in fact, it is this image that decides if you'll ever seriously attempt to use an Agile method to build software.

No wonder that Agile methods often get such a bad rap from smart, well-intentioned, successful software developers, engineering leads, and product managers. Their exposure to Agile is through other people who are equally ignorant about it. It doesn't help that - unfortunately for a lot of people - the first step they take towards learning about Agile is the "ScrumMaster" training. Did you know that all it takes to become a ScrumMaster is about $1500 and 2 days of your time?

Yet, managing software product lifecycle from requirements, to release planning, to development & QA, to repeating the process all over again, week after week, iteration after iteration, is one of the toughest jobs you can do in a software organization - worthy of a few graduate level courses, if not an entire Master's degree.

What you can't learn in 2-days of ScrumMaster training, you certainly can't learn in one blog post from me. But I'll give you the right way to think about it, as you research articles, books, courses, or better yet, as you attempt to actually apply "Agile" principles in a project within your organization.

So,

when I say XP, think Product Management process
when I say XP, think Software Development process
when I say Scrum, think Project Management process

In essence,

"XP is a better process for Product Managers to manage requirements, a better process for Programmers to convert these requirements to code, and the only process that strives to satisfy them both, simultaneously."

"Scrum is a better process for Project Managers balancing Work that must be completed and Resources that are available to them, in a fixed amount of time - and works best when used with XP."

What does your VC have to do with your spouse?

2008-06-10T22:44:00.001-07:00

Last week at Agile Entrepreneurs, an entrepreneur asked the inevitable question of valuation and equity you need to give up in return for VC funding. As the other entrepreneurs in the room chimed in with the expected answer, the analogy hit me.

Getting funding from a VC is like getting married. No matter who you marry, you give up 50%. And while every man dreams of marrying a hot bombshell, who he ends up with has a lot to do with who he is and how good he looks.

That pretty much sums up the terms you're likely to get from VCs:

The amount of equity you need to give up is fairly constant, irrespective of the amount of money you raise. And the amount of money you're able to raise depends on your leverage.

Moral: Focus on making yourself (and your company) more attractive, i.e. building value. There's not much else you control when in comes to negotiating with VCs.

Venture Quotes for a softening economy

2008-05-12T21:39:00.000-07:00

Guess who said the following?

"There's a lot of hot air and arrogance in the (VC) business that we all would be better off without"

"...useless pontificating in front of entrepreneurs working harder than (VCs)..."
"...VCs who constantly speak of deals and projects, reveal their self-interest and slight the labor and dreams of the entrepreneurs"

If you think it's some disgruntled entrepreneurs who don't "get it", think again. In the past, I've made some pretty strong but heartfelt things, and I could have said the above, but I didn't.

Read on here to learn who uttered these pearls of wisdom.

Bugs in the American Legal System

2008-05-08T16:56:00.000-07:00

As an immigrant from India, I have always been very impressed with the American legal system. In over 17 years, I have not encountered grassroots corruption, have been treated courteously by those in power, and have seen the system work overall in favor of the individual. In particular, I've always seen the punitive damages system as a counter-balancing force that puts the "fear of God" in the minds of the rich & powerful corporations that would otherwise tend to trample the average citizen.

I'm not so sure any more after I heard this program on NPR's Fresh Air today: Reporter Explores America's Unique Take on Justice

It discusses the news series in New York Times, by Adam Liptak, called American Exceptions.

The highlights of the series so far are:

Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’
The U.S. has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but almost a quarter of its prisoners.

Foreign Courts Wary of U.S. Punitive Damages
For most of the rest of the world, allowing separate awards meant to punish the defendant is a terrible idea.

Illegal Globally, Bail for Profit Remains in U.S.
Bail bondsmen, who post bail for people accused of crimes in exchange for a fee, are all but unknown outside the U.S.

Serving Life for Providing Car to Killers
An American legal doctrine makes accomplices as liable as the killer for murders committed during felonies.

Lifers as Teenagers, Now Seeking Second Chance
The U.S. stands alone in the world in convicting adolescents as adults and sentencing them to life.

Sex, Rape and God

2008-04-09T12:27:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting article in Washington Post that discusses the nuances and history of Mormon polygamy. I found the comments below it sufficiently compelling to respond. I'm reproducing here what I said there:

All this talk about what the religion or the sect says is a red herring in my view. The only issue is what is legal, and what should be illegal.

The core problem with this incident and others before it isn't whether polygamy is or should be legal.

* The problem is adults having sex with children *
* The problem is _systemic_ RAPE of children. *

No society should condone in any form sex with children.

Polygamy, Polyandry, Polyamory, Bigamy and any kind of sexual union between *consenting adults* is not the issue, and shouldn't be illegal in the first place.

The problem is that laws exist on books in several US states that make these various kinds of sexual activity illegal - including fellatio and sodomy - even between consenting adults.

Updating our legal systems and eliminating sexual prejudices from the society would go a long way towards eliminating sexual crimes against children. Whether it's religion or a cult, an ancient tribe or an oppressive society, sex is the most fundamental of human needs that's the most "regulated", ironically leading to oppressive rules of sexual engagement in practically every society and country.

Treat sex as a basic human need - no more, no less - and you'll have taken a giant step towards eradicating most ills of societies, especially sexual crimes against children.

What's in a User Story?

2008-03-09T15:23:00.000-07:00

Being Agile: my occasional ramblings on Agile development & Extreme Programming

I constantly run into people who claim to be Agile but don't understand XP (extreme programming). And a lot of people fail to grasp the essence of XP because they get stuck on an XP principle that they find threatening - 'pair programming' and 'test driven development' are the usual suspects.

I'll focus on Pair Programming and TDD another day. Today I want to discuss the most important and fundamental aspect of XP - User Stories.

User Stories are like better, state-of-the-art Use-Cases - simpler and lending themselves to be scheduled individually.

Think of a User Story as a fine-grained Use-Case, leading to better estimation of effort, tracking of progress, and higher quality of implementation (fewer bugs due to requirements that are fine-grained, thorough and less ambiguous).

A User Story looks just like a bug would in a bug tracking system:

a one-line title summarizing the requirement that the user story encapsulates
a detailed description consisting of a bulleted list of acceptance criteria
a schedulable unit of work whose progress can be tracked

It is the schedulable nature of a User Story that gives it a huge advantage over any other form of requirement gathering, including Use Cases.

Next Time: How to schedule User Stories

Great quote on dealing with pressure

2008-03-04T23:25:00.000-08:00

M.S. Dhoni, who has now led India to victory in two prestigious events in the last seven months, attributed the results to a team effort.

"The role of the captain was not the only one. The captain is one guy who gathers the pressure and then channels it to the individual player and then it depends on how that individual reacts," he said.

Cricket, Racism, Hypocrisy, and Context

2008-02-01T15:03:00.000-08:00

Check out this column on the recent racism row in cricket.

The 100+ comments below the article provide an excellent repost to the ill-informed, poorly written article.

Sure, Indians are as capable of racism as anyone. But the article got completely side-tracked into issues of *all* discrimination, not just racial discrimination.

‘Monkey’ and ‘donkey’ are commonly used in India to call someone ‘stupid’ or ‘a fool’. Growing up in India, we used to play ‘catch’ with a ball, where each time you miss you get ‘labeled’ which a letter from one of the following sequences: ‘M’, ‘O’, ‘N’, ‘K’, ‘E’, ‘Y’ or ‘D’, ‘O’, ‘N’, ‘K’, ‘E’, ‘Y’.

The bottom-line is this: what is offensive or racist is *context-sensitive*.

In the US, when a non-black person calls a black person ‘nigger’, it’s racist, but when a black man calls another black man ‘nigger’, it’s not.

Among Indians, friendly cussing happens in their primary language of communication. For some of my Hindi-speaking friends ‘gadhe’, ‘bandar’, ‘behan-chod’, ‘maadar-chod’ is not insulting, but calling them “son of a bitch”, “mother fucker” would definitely be. Yet for many of my English-speaking Indian friends, bastard or son-of-a-bitch are not insulting, but the literal “sister-fucker” might be.

One of the comments on Soumya’s article compared Indian crowds calling Symonds ‘monkey’ with how Inzamam was called ‘Aloo’ - both were meant to irritate the player. I can go step further and say that they were called ‘aloo’ or ‘monkey’ based on their *appearance* (Inzamam: aloo=fat and shaped like potato; Symonds: monkey=looking like a monkey). Definitely insensitive to call someone names based on their appearance, but that doesn’t automatically mean the appearance in question is racial. Potato is not racial. Monkey in India is also used to describe someone as ‘ugly’. Yes, when Indians refer to Blacks in a racist manner, they call them ‘kallu’ or might even compare them to monkeys - that’s definitely racist.

Which brings me to this: I grew up in India and have lived in the US for 17 years. And even though I follow cricket fanatically, I had no clue that Symonds was of a mixed race until this racism row. I never understood the furore about the ‘monkey’ chants in India directed towards Symonds- simply because I never saw him as a “black” man. Having learned of his mixed-race now, I can see how he might be offended.

On the other hand, I don’t get offended when my friends cuss me with the usual vocabulary, but even slight cussing from someone I don’t know well would be insulting. Fair enough if Symonds had told Harbhajan earlier that he finds it offensive to be called ‘monkey’, but he has to then reciprocate and not use any term that Harbhajan finds insulting. It’s a two-way contract, which became null and void, when Symonds broke it first.

Any which way you look at it, Symonds is a hypocrite and provoked Harbhajan unjustifiably in an attempt to bait him, knowing how hot-headed Harbhajan is. For his part, Bhajji is an idiot to fall for the bait, and he deserves a severe tongue-lashing from his captain and team management for dragging them into this muck. But his team-mates, BCCI, and Indian fans are correct in standing up in support of Harbhajan - *even if* he did call Symonds a ‘monkey’ *in retaliation*, because he was being deliberately baited, by Symonds and his “less than credible” teammates - Clarke and Hayden - who, at best may have *chosen to hear* what they wanted to hear, and at worst may have lied to “convict” Harbhajan.

In conclusion, let’s still not forget that *proven facts* only point to abusive or offensive language by Harbhajan - and by Symonds - not racist comments.

Aussies' mission statement

2008-01-13T11:07:00.000-08:00

For you cricket fans following the brouhaha that started in Sydney recently, here's a funny update - Revealed: Aussies' mission statement.

Marketplace for Sex

2008-01-05T17:48:00.000-08:00

We learned that Bonobo monkeys use sex as a tool for peace.
Now it turns out, male Macaque monkeys "pay" for sex - and market price at that!

What next? Gay gorrillas adopting and raising baby chimpanzees?
You never know...

Cricket: Gavaskar vs. Tendulkar

2007-12-16T12:30:00.000-08:00

I'm a huge fan of the game of Cricket.

(For the average American sports fan who doesn't understand how a game can be played for a whole day in the shorter version, and upto 5 days in the longer version, I've got two metaphors for you: War and "Reality Show". I'll have more on this another time.)

Too many Indian cricket fans lack historical perspective or the ability to make unbiased observations.

I've been a huge fan of both Gavaskar and Tendulkar.

Far too many times I've been left seething with anger and frustration by Tendulkar in the 2nd innings of India in a test match (and in ODIs, when chasing - especially a daunting target - like in the 2003 World Cup final).

And I've seen way too much criticism of how slowly Gavaskar played that's not matched by appreciation for how often he played match-saving or match-winning innings for India.

Here's an article (just found while randomly googling for interesting articles on cricket. It does a very good job of comparing the fighting qualities and mental strength of both players.

In search of common sense

2007-11-19T20:54:00.000-08:00

Guy Kawasaki wrote an article a few days ago titled "In Search of Inexperience". He talks about why serial entrepreneurs are not necessarily what they're cracked out to be - implicitly arguing in favor of first-time entrepreneurs.

I wrote a comment there which I'm reproducing here:

I agree with the premise, but disagree with the analysis. In other words, the theorem is correct but the proof is wrong.

In the 8 years since I first dived head-first into entrepreneurship, I've found that people with common sense - in this Silicon Valley chockful of analysts, MBAs, VCs, and "angels" - are an endangered species.

It is plain common sense that anyone who is hungry, passionate, persistent and all that good stuff is more likely to succeed than someone who is not as motivated.

But the malaise afflicting the armchair quarterbacks in the Silicon Valley (i.e. anyone who is not an entrepreneur) is the obsession with bottling up the magic potion for success as an entrepreneur.

After once listening to David Thomson, the author of "Blueprint to a billion", I asked him if he knew of anyone who had done it twice. The answer was an embarrassed silence followed by a "no, I never thought about it".

Guy, give it up. There's no "blueprint" for success.

Rich or poor, first time entrepreneur or serial entrepreneur, 19, 27, or 42 years old, none of these things have anything to do with success. The answer is much more fundamental- sooner or later the man who wins is the man who thinks he can (from the poem by Walter Wintle).

The Man Who Thinks He Can

2007-11-19T20:20:00.000-08:00

A blog post by Guy Kawasaki inspired me to go digging for this classic poem.
Dedicated to all my fellow bootstrapping 'Agile Entrepreneurs'.

The Man Who Thinks He Can

If you think you are beaten, you are;
If you think you dare not, you don't.
If you'd like to win, but think you can't
It's almost a cinch you won't
If you think you'll lose, you're lost,
For out in the world we find
Success begins with a fellow's will;
It's all in the state of mind.
If you think you're outclassed, you are.
You've got to think high to rise.
You've got to be sure of yourself before
You can ever win a prize.
Life's battles don't always go
To the stronger or faster man;
But sooner or later the man who wins
Is the one who thinks he can.

Walter D. Wintle, "The Man Who Thinks He Can." - Poems That Live Forever, comp. Hazel Feldman 1965

Cool ad explaining Greenhouse emissions

2007-10-12T13:19:00.000-07:00

Found this on the website for Alliance for Climate Protection, the group that Al Gore is donating his Noble prize money to:

Global warming pollution becomes vivid and graspable. Watch our ad that is making people say "Oh now I get it."

Citibank's junk mail opt-out is like jumping through hoops

2007-09-26T09:55:00.001-07:00

I have a Citibank NRI (non-resident Indian) account which I don' t use much. But I get a ton of email from them - all marketing messages. I tried "unsubscribing" (still trying to figure out how can you unsubscribe when you didn't subscribe).

The reply I got back from Citibank shows their callous attitude towards their customers and particularly regarding the issue of spam:

From: India Service [mailto:indiaservice@citicorp.com]
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 8:39 AM
To: Murali Krishna Devarakonda
Subject: RE:'Citibank=006-038-728' Unsubscribe

Dear Mr. Devarakonda,

This is with reference to your email dated September 25, 2007.

To withdraw the promotion mailer facility, we require the Coupon A form. The form is available in the nearest NRI centre.

The list of NRI Centers are available in the 'Contact Us' under the "customer service" option in our website www.citinri.com.

We assure you of our best attention at all times.

Warm Regards,

Officer - Customer Care.

Would you hire an entrepreneur?

2007-08-31T13:05:00.000-07:00

Would you hire an entrepreneur?

A lot of entrepreneurs, especially the successful ones, proudly proclaim how "unemployable" they are. But given that a lot of entrepreneurs are bootstrapping these days and funding sources have gone upstream, more and more entrepreneurs are looking to moonlight or get back into the job market to make ends meet.

Assuming that a typical entrepreneur is a highly motivated and driven individual and likely to contribute more than any typical employee, the only risk for a hiring manager is the knowledge that the entrepreneur-hire is going to leave the job sooner or later.

Would you consider hiring an entrepreneur for a short-term (3-6 months) contract, assuming that you'll get double the work and a lot of passion, energy and a can-do attitude in the bargain?

Entrepreneur Committee - Advisory Board of SVASE

2007-07-29T17:09:00.000-07:00

For whatever it is worth, I would like to announce to my millions of would-be readers that I have been invited to join the Entrepreneur Committee on the Board of Advisors to the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs.

And I have accepted.

If you're a hi-tech entrepreneur, I would love to hear your suggestions on what I can do in my "official" capacity to make SVASE a better organization for startups.

TheFunded.com - Report Card for VCs

2007-07-29T16:37:00.001-07:00

Most of you probably know about this site already, but I just learned about it and I had to share it with you!

Report Card for VCs

The Funded

Quoting from the Red Herring story:

Report Card for VCs

TheFunded.com turns tables, letting startups rate funders.
April 29, 2007

By Ken Schachter

Venture capitalists, long accustomed to taking the role of Simon of "American Idol" in judging startups, are seeing the tables turned.

That's because TheFunded.com recently launched, inviting entrepreneurs to post to its web site ratings of venture capital firms. On Thursday, after collecting more than 500 reviews, TheFunded.com released a list of the top five venture firms worldwide.

Venture capitalists said it was inevitable that VCs became subject to the same scrutiny as college professor (RateMyProfessors.com), doctors (RateMDs.com) and contractors (AngiesList.com).

"It was only a matter of time before this came up," said Sarah Tavel, an analyst at Larchmont, New York-based Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the firms ranked in the top five. "Increasingly the process is becoming more transparent and, perhaps, more symmetrical."

Bruce Cleveland, partner with No. 1-ranked InterWest Partners, based in Menlo Park, California, said the site fills a gap for entrepreneurs and evens a one-sided relationship.

...

Read the complete story on RedHerring.com

Pay by productivity

2007-07-24T13:15:00.000-07:00

I have often said that people should be selected and rewarded based on productivity, not mere experience. In fact, this belief forms the basis of the 'pay by productivity' contract system we use in the services division of Crystal Ball.

But today I'm not going to talk about how we do things at Crystal Ball. Instead, let me just point you to this very cool article on incentivizing, measuring and rewarding productivity.

Quoting:

Software defect measurements are frequently attributed to individual developers, but the development environment often conspires against individual developers and makes it impossible to write defect-free code. Instead of charting errors by developer, a systematic effort to provide developers with immediate testing feedback, along with a root cause analysis of remaining defects, is much more effective at reducing the overall software defect rate.

By aggregating defect counts into an informational measurement, and hiding individual performance measurements, it becomes easier to address the root causes of defects. If an entire development team, testers and developers alike, feel responsible for the defect count, then testers will tend to become involved earlier and provide more timely and useful feedback to developers. Defects caused by code integration will become everyone’s problem, not just the unlucky person who wrote the last bit of code.

It flies in the face of conventional wisdom to suggest that the most effective way to avoid the pitfalls of measurements is to use measurements that are outside the personal control of the individual being measured. But conventional wisdom is misleading. Instead of making sure that people are measured within their span of control, it is more effective to measure people one level above their span of control. This is the best way to encourage teamwork, collaboration, and global, rather than local, optimization.

Read the original article

Bootstrapping in India

2007-07-14T11:33:00.000-07:00

I'm posting my response to a question asked on LinkedIn Answers by Sramana Mitra: "Bootstrapping a Product Company from India?"

Here's what I had to say:

One aspect of bootstrapping is money. The other is people- good people.

We're solving both problems with our strategy of treating our offshore team in India as a services company that specializes in high-quality, low-cost product development for early-stage startups in the Silicon Valley.

But we are really a web-based product startup based in the Silicon Valley with our offshore team based at Hyderabad, India, since June 2005. When I came back from India in September 2005 after putting it all together, I had a team that boasted a University gold-medalist who turned down an offer from Google and deferred PhD at MIT to join us, a national programming competition winner, and a seasoned manager from Wipro. Then one fine day, in March 2006, my whole team just disappeared, and I only had 85 pages of use-cases left to show for it!

Since then, I've rebuilt the team with more dedicated and ambitious employees led by someone who had prior experience of working for a Silicon Valley startup but only a 2nd class B.Com degree. But we're now just kicking ass big time because we're using user-stories instead of use-cases. Our Extreme Programming driven process has done wonders for us, and we're now the experts at applying XP across borders for a cash-starved early-stage web-based product startup - and we're leveraging our experience to help other Silicon Valley startups also bootstrap.

For us, it's less about money and more about a strategic decision to help in our growth plans. We are kicking ass because we offer complete source-code level transparency and control, no long-term contract, better quality, faster, at a fraction of the cost of outsourcing to India. And while the rest of the services industry has only two models, "I Screw You" (i.e. Time & Material) and "You Screw Me" (ie. Fixed Bid), our unique pay by productivity model gives us an incentive to put the most productive people to work on other startup projects as well.

Most importantly, we're not really a "services" company nor aspiring to be one anytime soon. This means we're not doing it for money, we can pass on all the savings from our process to the customer. We're doing it to hire and retain good people in India- where engineers prefer brand-name companies first, and then services companies with steady cash-flow- not "risky" product companies.

The fact that we're also an early-stage product startup in the Silicon Valley- eating our own dog-food so to speak- lends great credibility to our offering. And it helps that we understand intimately the value of being responsive to the customer and market needs.

Finding a co-founder for a "mature" early-stage startup

2007-07-04T11:25:00.001-07:00

Often, you hear about how two or three or four friends/colleagues got together and launched a hi-tech startup ... and lived happily ever after.

You might also have heard about how VCs "help" a single founder put together the right team- sometimes without the need for the quotes around "help".

I have come across several founders of hi-tech startups lately. Maybe it's because they're all bootstrapping, and maybe it's because the cost of doing a software startup has gone down so dramatically. But the fact is that more and more startups are being launched and bootstrapped all the way to Angel/VC funding, until they become cash flow positive or until they die.

Many of these solo-founders don't want to go it alone. But once you're bootstrapping, you are on a roll, and it's not easy to find someone at a later stage who comes along, say a year later, and shares your passion and vision.

On the flip-side, I see wanna-be co-founders on the sidelines much like the way Angels and VCs do, waiting to see how far you can go it alone before they decide to join you. In other words, they are trying to maximize their contribution to risk ratio - and reap the rewards of being co-founders.

What is the best way to find a good co-founder for a startup that's "early-stage" by the Venture industry's definition, but has come a long way bootstrapping?

I don't know, I'm still looking for an answer. But I've started 'Agile Entrepreneurs' specifically to help founders find answers to questions like this.

Why is it so hard to find a good "User Information Architect"?

2007-06-15T10:22:00.000-07:00

As the bootstrapping founder of a web 2.0 startup, the single most important - and difficult to find - skill for me is the web User Information Architect. Not quite UI design, and definitely not graphic design, a UI architect is a human-computer-browser interaction expert and highly experienced and skilled at both layout and transitions.

Many of my fellow entrepreneurs seem to share my predicament. They tell me how they hire 3 different people:
- the first one to do the UI storyboards (in Visio or some graphic tool, or even paper);
- a second person who converts it to HTML, changing where needed to see what's really possible in HTML, finding appropriate tools/controls for combos, etc., but adding hard-coded links to show page transitions; and
- the third, to convert remove the hard-coded links from HTML before implementing JSP.

In the last 8 years, I have personally found only one person really skilled and able to do it all in HTML/JSP, with phenomenal productivity (about 3 times more productive than all the three combined). Yet, he seems to be charging the same as the first one who only does storyboarding. In sum, he's a huge bargain, given how talented and productive he is. But ... he's also very busy.

So, I'm always in a dilemma- should I find someone else to do my UI? And then the harder question- can I find someone I can afford who is equally good? So far, the answer has been a resounding 'No'.

Why are good UI architects so rare?

A plan to blog more often.

2007-06-13T12:56:00.000-07:00

I am a prolific writer when I set my mind to it.

From 1977 to 1984, I had exchanged an unbroken chain of written letters (about half a dozen per year) with a childhood friend. I had similar, smaller chains with some of my other school friends.

I read a lot too. And don't me talking - I usually have a lot to say.
But trust me, I listen well too (when I shut up).

So, it's like all my life I was waiting for the blog' to get invented, but when that did happen, I seem to have run out of steam to take advantage of it.

I've thought about why that is and the answer is simple.
I'm a whole lot busier- especially since I'm bootstrapping my startup.

But there are those who should be busier than me, successfully blogging all the time.
How do they do it?

I don't know for sure, but I'm going to start doing the following:
1. Write short blogs, with anything that I can think of. Even a single line quote.
2. Start writing the moment I think of something to write about, and save it as a 'draft'.
3. It's ok to have several incomplete blogs in my 'drafts' folder- I can finish them when I find the time and mood. So, the drafts serve as a reminder as well as an incentive to finish a thought.
4. I know, those of you who already do this must be snickering to yourself, "that's what a draft is supposed to be, dummy".

But I'll admit it, I always used to see 'drafts' as sequential, and the realization that I can use them in parallel and at random is very liberating!

Let's see how often I blog now with this new found wisdom!

Are you a Predator?

2007-04-29T19:54:00.000-07:00

While searching for a metaphor for "Entrepreneur", I came across this very interesting blog by Tom Evslin:

Entrepreneurs Are Predators

Predators are smarter than prey. Hare-brained is an insult; sharp as a fox is a compliment.

I have an evolutionary theory to explain this (full disclosure: except for reading voraciously on the subject, I am totally unqualified to have evolutionary theories). A leopard chasing an impala can make a mistake, lose the quarry, learn from the mistake, and hunt more wisely on another day. If the impala makes a mistake, it becomes the leopard’s lunch. Predators fail often; prey fail only once.

So it would be a waste of energy for prey to have a large analytical brain or to divert any resources into learning while running away. Better just to have long legs, good ears, and a healthy paranoia. Thinking could be fatal. It also doesn’t take a lot of smarts to eat grass.

Predators learn terrain; they can learn the habits of prey they’ve never seen before. They learn where to wait patiently and when to pounce. The play of kittens and cubs is as important to the development of their brains as it is to their muscles and their reflexes. And the play is full of stumbles and pratfalls – learning experiences, in other words.

I’ll bet tyrannosaurus rex was a genius compared to brontosaurus.

If you’re starting a new company, especially a new company that’s going to do something new, you have no idea what you’re getting into. OK, you’re prepared for the long hours, the lack of a steady salary, the need to raise capital; but are you ready for all the mistakes you’re going to make?

Optimize your resources- Apply the 80-20 Rule

2007-04-18T11:27:00.000-07:00

Formally known as the Pareto principle, the 80-20 rule states that "80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes."

Startups - who by definition are starved for resources - would do well to apply the Pareto principle to everything they do.

From the wikipedia:

It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., "80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients."

It also applies to a variety of more mundane matters: we wear our 20% most favoured clothes about 80% of the time, we spend 80% of the time with 20% of our acquaintances etc.

In business, dramatic improvements can often be achieved by identifying the 20% of customers, activities, products or processes that account for the 80% of contribution to profit and maximising the attention applied to them.

The idea has rule-of-thumb application in many places, but it is commonly misused. For example, it is a misuse to state that a solution to a problem "fits the 80-20 rule" just because it fits 80% of the cases; it must be implied that this solution requires only 20% of the resources needed to solve all cases.

This is exactly what Agile development is all about- identifying and focusing on 20% of the work that gives you 80% of the value!

There's no place to hide in XP!

2007-04-18T10:53:00.000-07:00

I have not met a single person who doesn't acknowledge the inherent values in XP when we talk about the values and not "this thing called XP". It is obvious to *anyone* who has enough years of experience behind them.

* The challenge then they often face in accepting XP/Agile is their own conflict-of-interest. *

You see, XP and Agile are brutal if you are lazy or if you are (or have become) mediocre. There's no place to hide in XP- everything is exposed. You can't create the anecdotal "job security hacks" so that you can't be replaced- because there are others in your team who know your code and can replace you if you're not pulling your weight. Or if you're a contractor, you now risk being caught for overbilling if you don't have "velocity" commensurate with the hours you're billing.

I speak, of course, from my experience as a programmer.

But more currently, I speak from my experience as the founder of a startup- as the employer, the product manager, the project manager, the requirements analyst and ... the customer. The engineers who "get it" are those who are passionate about "doing the right thing", are hard-working, and definitely above average, if not smart. The smart engineers who failed despite our best efforts were typically either washed out senior engineers (unwilling/unable to learn anymore) or had the fatal combination of inexperience & intransigence.

Succeeding in XP is not easy. It requires intensity and focus.
And merely "working hard" is no substitute for productivity.

There's no place to hide in XP.

"Well, it may be all right in practice, but it will never work in theory"
- Warren Buffett, on the attitude of his alma-mater Columbia University towards his method of investing.

XP is to Development Process what GOF is to Software Design

2007-04-18T10:27:00.000-07:00

The problem I see with most objections to Extreme Programing (XP) and Agile development is that they are often speculations on theory, rather than wisdom based on actual practice. It's amazing to see the amount of time and energy people spend in *discussing* process than actually building something and learning from the experience.

The following is my real-world take on this subject, directed at no one in particular, but at everyone in general who is critical or afraid of XP (often the same people who don't have meaningful experience of using it):

XP is a process that has *evolved* through the collective experience of programmers through the mess that the software industry had become- always late, always over-budget, always buggy. And we were told to accept it as a fact of life.

In the midst of all the chaos, there were programmers working after hours doing what they weren't allowed to do during the day - writing tests for code (TDD), automating builds and tests (continuous integration), fixing things they were not supposed to fix (refactoring), working with their like-minded colleagues (pair-programming) on weekends to ensure they got a lot done without the "inevitable bugs" which would have brought down the fury of the management upon them, ... and so on.

XP and Agile brought us all out of the closets. That's why only experienced people with open-minds find it easiest to adopt XP. Or fresh out of college students or young programmers who have not yet been corrupted by the "you're too good to write tests- you'll only do coding" crap they often get fed.

To me, questioning XP without learning XP is like questioning the Gang-of-four Design Patterns before you have any serious programming background solving the problems solved by the GOF patterns.

Design patterns *evolved* after years of people doing things the wrong way, before they learned the right way. Design patterns teach us how to write good code by learning from the mistakes made by smart, experienced programmers before us and the lessons they learned.

*** Design Pattens are Best-practices for programming, solving most typical programming problems.

*** XP/Agile are Best-practices for product/project development process, solving most of the typical process problems (requirements gathering, estimating and scheduling work, measuring progress, managing change, getting feedback early & often, continuous knowledge transfer and peer-review, ... the list is long.

Test Trimming: A Fable about Testing

2007-04-18T10:17:00.000-07:00

While browsing the web randomly, I found this very cool article on the value of testing.
Says the author, Gerald M. Weinberg:

"Throughout my career, I've watched in dismay as one software manager after another falls into the trap of achieving delivery schedules by trimming tests. Some managers shortcut test work by skipping reviewing and unit testing in the middle of their project. Others pressure the testers to "test faster" at the end. And, most frequently, they just drop planned tests altogether, hoping they "get lucky."

I've written several essays about the dangers of test trimming, but nobody seems to understand, so I asked myself, "What am I doing wrong?" Perhaps I wasn't practicing what I was preaching. Perhaps I was trimming tests myself. Perhaps my writing needed more testing!

So, I wrote a story about taking shortcuts and read it to my granddaughter, Camille."

25 Startups to Watch

2007-02-27T14:09:00.000-08:00

Is your startup in the list?

Bartering Complementary Skills

2006-12-24T13:06:00.000-08:00

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about how bootstrapping entrepreneurs can help each other out using complementary skills.

Then suddenly the metaphor popped into my head:

"Mother Lover" - the second SNL digital short starring Justin Timberlake and Andy Sanberg.

Don't go there if you have any moral-dietary restrictions, otherwise, enjoy a good laugh!

Btw, the first of this series is called "Dick in a Box", which aired in December 2006.

---

Update (Oct 19, 2009): I just edited this blog post after nearly 3 years, mainly to update the link and to add the second video in the series. The helpful message from the new editor in blogger was:

"Not sure what to put in the box? First, find the page on the web that you want to link to. (A search engine might be useful.) Then, copy the web address from the box in your browser's address bar, and paste it into the box above."

Gaand Mein Danda

2006-12-19T14:16:00.000-08:00

If you don't know Hindi, you probably won't relate to it.

Turns out the youth culture in India is alive and well, and quite creative too.
Here's a hilarious- and a very melodious song, Gaand Mein Danda, from "Bodhi Tree", a student band from XLRI Jamshedpur.

Read along with the lyrics for total enjoyment ;)

Some of their other hits include:
- Sabka Katega
- Too Many Potatoes
- XL Ki Kudiyan

Here's some more on the topic if you're intrigued:
Sutta mil gaya
Swear word mil gaya

Boxers or Briefs?

2006-12-15T14:50:00.000-08:00

I must be nuts to address this age-old question.

Anyway, did you know the source of the popularity of this seemingly risque question?

Not that I didn't ponder this question myself for years.

Hmm ... Boxers, or Briefs?

You see, growing up, I felt that boxers were too clumsy inside the trousers and ride up your thighs - so they were never an option for me. Yet briefs grip you in a chokehold, not letting you breathe.

So, I'll confess. I tried boxers a few years ago. And got hooked on to them- I liked that I can lounge around in them.

But of course, as any man can tell you, boxers have, ahem, disadvantages.

And did you know that you are risking getting a hernia if you're running up and down stairs wearing boxers inside? Now that should scare you into giving up boxers! If you don't know what hernia is, and you didn't check the above link, take a look at this slideshow. It certainly scared my boxers off!

I'm now switching to boxer-briefs. Little more freedom than briefs, and a lot more protection than boxers.

p.s. If this advice is too late for you, cheer up with "Living with Hernia".

Micro-lending for Agile Entrepreneurs

2006-12-12T19:28:00.000-08:00

These are indeed exciting times for the bootstrapping entrepreneur! If you haven't already, please join our self-help networking group, Agile Entrepreneurs where entrepreneurs help each other with a variety of issues in a format borrowed from the Toastmasters club.

And if you're in a tight spot for money, you should join our group on Prosper.com, an excellent people-to-people lending web-site that I wish had found six months ago. In fact, I wish I had founded this group a year ago! I had certainly been talking about the concept- my friend Pravin can attest to that fact.

Regardless, I've dived in and created a closed group in Prosper, called Agile Entrepreneurs. I intend to invite other entrepreneurs to join the group and use it to raise small loans until they are able to generate cash flow or get funding.

And if you're looking to make money while helping out your fellow entrepreneurs, you should support Agile Entrepreneurs on Prosper.

You make money on the interest that is set by an eBay-style bidding, based on the borrowers credit history. Most people make multiple loans of small amounts to diversify and reduce their risk. Note that Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay is an investor in Prosper!

So far Prosper seems to have had excellent results for both lenders and borrowers.

Check it out!

The Riskmaster - by Tim Draper

2006-12-07T21:27:00.000-08:00

Here's a very cool song for entrepreneurs.

The story of my life!

Enjoy!

Agile Entrepreneurs

2006-11-08T14:54:00.000-08:00

Agile Entrepreneurs is an organization created with the entrepreneur in mind, first and foremost.

Perhaps your dream is to own a lifestyle business where you’re the boss of your business and you make more than you would in a job- that’s it. Or perhaps you have a plan to develop a product that you can sell to Yahoo or Google for $10 million in 2 years. Or maybe you dare to dream big- a $100 million company that can compete with the big boys, and may need Venture Capital someday.

You must have heard about entrepreneurs who wrote a business plan on a proverbial napkin, got VC funding, built a product, and made a lot of money selling it (the company, and optionally the product too).

Well, the reality is that far too many first time entrepreneurs end up in the heart-breaking position of seeing their companies get “successfully” bought out, but only the investors make some money and the entrepreneurs lose out completely.

For a startup to have a fair chance of success (hint: why do the vast majority of startups fail?), you have to do it all in the reverse. First you find a customer, then you go build a product that the customer wants, and when you are making money (selling the product) … that’s when you go raise Venture Capital.

But why would you go to VCs when you’re already making money?

To grow your company fast!

That’s what VC money is meant for. To grow an existing company with a customer and a product and revenues. To grow it faster than would normally be possible by relying simply on revenues from customers.

Understand that not all hi-tech startups need venture capital. Not all of them will get venture capital. Not all of them will succeed with Venture Capital. Yet, many can and will succeed even without Venture Capital. It all depends on the kind of business you have in mind. And regardless of the kind of startup you’re dreaming about, chances are that you’re at least a year away from Venture Funding if you’re still at the dreaming stage.

The interests of the entrepreneur are not being served optimally by other organizations that seem to cater mainly to the needs of the venture capital industry.

It is up to you to decide how to build the company of your dreams. Join Agile Entrepreneurs to learn how to make informed choices, avoid common mistakes, and maximize your chances of success with your startup.

The Placenta Pouch- from Belly Button Corporation

2006-11-07T09:13:00.000-08:00

Some time ago, when I was working at BBC (yes, the British Broadcasting Corporation) , a couple of my women colleagues educated me on how a baby breathes inside the mother's womb.

They told me it's pretty simple- the baby gets the oxygen through the placenta.

Simple? Huh?

Fish are capable of breathing in water, but humans breathing through liquid stuff?

I don't know why enough people aren't curious enough, and don't know what scientists are doing about it. But if I were a scientist or VC in the biotech field, I would look into it.

Here's the basic idea:

Figure out how the human baby is capable of breathing inside the mother's womb, getting oxygen from the placenta. Then we create a placenta pouch that will be connected to your belly-button (or wherever appropriate). Fill up your nostrils and lungs with water (or whatever liquid necessary) just like the human baby does, and dive into water!

You can now breathe inside water! How long you can breathe underwater would depend on the Placenta Pouch you buy ...

Watch out for the launch of Placenta Pouch from Belly Button Corporation (BBC)!

Getting somewhere in America

2006-10-31T05:16:00.000-08:00

The problem with the designated driver program, it's not a desirable job, but if you ever get sucked into doing it, have fun with it. At the end of the night, drop them off at the wrong house.
- Jeff Foxworthy

Made me think about how in the 21st century, we're still trying to figure out how to get from Point 'A' to Point 'B'. Seriously, how many of you have a reasonable legal solution to this problem of getting home from the bar or a late night party- when you're buzz drunk?

How about getting to the airport? Do you really pay $90 for a cab ride after 9 pm to the SF airport from Sunnyvale? Perhaps you get a friend or spouse to drive 30 miles to the airport and back. Maybe you belong to the small minority of people who have figured out the $31 door-to-door shuttle- and can put up with it.

Well, think about how you usually drop off and pick up your car for oil-change or repairs?

The list goes on and on - think about all those times your old faithful lets you down and you're looking for a short-term alternative (no, we're not talking about bored husbands looking for a fling ;).

Hang in there dear faithful readers (readers? where? but I digress). Your prayers have been answered- see for yourself in the CrystalBall!

Pretty soon you can go from Point 'A' to Point 'B' without fuss. And it's FREE!

Sex for Peace

2006-10-23T19:45:00.000-07:00

Make love, not war!

How often have you heard people mouth platitudes about world peace?

There's the beauty pageant contestant offering to use her celebrity status to secure world peace if she wins (although admittedly, Stephen Colbert has found out a link between beauty pageants and middle-east peace).

Seriously, though, do you really want world peace?
Did you say yes?

Well then, that's easy- just have more sex!

Scientific observation has revealed that social interactions among bonobos are far less hostile than among common chimps. This is not to say that bonobos never fight; they just do so a lot less. Unlike common chimps (and humans, of course), bonobos have never been observed deliberately killing members of their own species. Among bonobos observed both in the wild and in captivity, sex and mutual pleasure are keys to keeping the peace, reinforcing social relations based upon the give and take of sensual, erotic pleasure rather than on pain and force and fear.

Apparently, all that hot sex just cools ‘em out.

Apparently what we need for world peace is the same thing that we need for a little peace of mind- sexual healing (lyrics).

Listen up people. We all know how well make-up sex works after a fight, dont' we?

Well, just switch to having sex before a fight- and you might just decide not to fight after all!

What does it mean to be "commited" to a relationship?

2006-10-22T22:20:00.000-07:00

Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines Commitment as follows:

the state or an instance of being obligated or emotionally impelled

Here's my take on it:

You know you are committed to a relationship if you focus on your negative qualities and the other person's positive qualities. In other words, you try to improve yourself and accept the other person unconditionally.

Chew on it!

Mood Music

2006-10-22T16:13:00.000-07:00

What does Phil Collins have to do with Aishwarya Rai?
Nothing!

I am just in one of those moods. Here are some music videos I felt like checking out.

Have fun!

Kajarare from the Hindi movie, Bunty Aur Babli. This video rocks for it's choreography by the reigning diva of the Hindi film industry, Vaibhavi Merchant.

That's All (lyrics) by Genesis.

Careless Whisper (lyrics) by Wham.

I Will Survive (lyrics) by Gloria Gaynor.

And best of all, the Allien Version of I Will Survive (women, please, no flames! It was just too funny to resist!).

Listen - How to Learn to Learn

2006-10-16T14:34:00.000-07:00

Good listening skills, in particular Active Listening is essential to learning- and success.

Listening- you think you know it- most of us think we're good listeners. It's very hard to know and acknowledge that you are not good at listening. You may never become a good listener because so many personal emotions and prejudices get in the way of listening.

A good listener tries to understand thoroughly what the other person is saying. In the end he may disagree sharply, but before he disagrees, he wants to know exactly what it is...
Kenneth A. Wells, American

Active listening is about focusing on the person who is speaking. An active listener needs to focus full attention on the person who is speaking.

Here are a few good links to learn more about listening:

What is listening?

Poor Listening Habits, Poor Listeners, and Good Listeners.

Active Listening

You'll find here the four characteristics of empathetic listeners.

Attributes of Good Listening

Have you ever stopped to think that we require courses and training in our education in speaking and writing, but not in listening? Why not?

Active Listening: A Communication Tool

ask good questions,
listen non-judgmentally,
paraphrase, and
empathize with the speaker.

Finally, would you have believed someone who came up to you and said he was a member of the International Listening Association?

Status of Women in India and ... Malnourished Kids

2006-10-14T07:55:00.000-07:00

In a report the results of which really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone from India
India ranks 3rd from bottom of the world on malnourished kids

Consider some of the findings from a report released globally today by the Washington-based International Food Policy Institute (IFPRI).

The proportion of children found underweight in India, according to the latest figures is 47.5 per cent, which makes it worse than conflict-plagued, drought-stricken Sub-Saharan Africa.
According to the report's lead author Doris Wiesmann, “In India, women eat the last and the least, increasing the chances of anaemia,” she explained.
“It has been observed that the women who have a say in the family, allocate more resources to their children’s nutritional needs. Men have other priorities,” she said.

What are you going to do about it?

What can you do about it?

Simple, treat the women and children in your house as your equals- insist that they sit down to eat with you. If it's a matter of practical feasibility, let the women and children eat first!

It's time to dump the retro Indian tradition of making the women and children wait while men eat first during lunch and dinner. I know most of my progressive and educated friends do not subscribe to this shameful practice, ... but a lot of them still do!

And try to educate and influence your maid, your driver, your office boy, your dhobi, your doodhwaala, and the next construction worker and the auto rickshaw driver you run into.

But remember, you have to start by setting an example of yourself!

Is that too much to ask of you, my dear friends from India?

To dream or not to dream? How about keeping your mouth shut?

2006-10-13T16:39:00.000-07:00

Here's a really nice quote from one of my dear friends in response to one of my dreams.

Between the bigger things you cannot do,
and the smaller things you don't want to do,
you may end up doing nothing

The problem with quotes and analogies is that they are almost always approximately appropriate, but rarely if ever exactly applicable . A quote is by definition a generalization. Also, we are by nature biased with our prejudices, biased by our own very personal and unique experiences, and biased, by nature, against those who are near and dear to us. While we want them to succeed and would eventually be happy if they succeed big, our natural instinct is to "help" them "stay grounded".

I disagree with this helping nature, of course. I can - and will- expound on the virtue of dreaming big and having a big mouth. But that will be another day.

Today I'm going to present a few quotes on the flip-side of my friend's quote. Feel free to add yours to the list.

Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.
Mark Twain

At the age of six years I wanted to be a chef. At the age of seven I wanted to be Napoleon. My ambitions have continued to grow at the same rate ever since
- Salvador Dalí

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
- Thomas E. Lawrence

If you can dream it, you can do it.
Walt Disney

Reminding one another of the dream that each of us aspires to may be enough for us to set each other free.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
Robert F. Kennedy

LAT - for a LONG marriage!

2006-10-13T15:43:00.000-07:00

There's the carefree (or lonely) single life, there's living (pilot program for marriage) together , the blissful (or harried) married life, and then there's the amicable (or nasty) divorce.

But wait, did you know there's another choice? LAT. Living-Apart-Together.

Everyone probably knows that living together before marriage is supposed to increase your chances of marrying someone sufficiently compatible with you.

LAT is on the flip-side of it. It can prolong your marriage beyond a point where divorce might have been the only option given the insufficient compatibility between the couple.

My suggestion is no one should consider divorce before trying LAT. And lest you believe it's a brand new western concept, gentle reader look eastwards, towards India, the land of the kama sutra. There you will find the time honored tradition of the wife retreating to her mayke or puttillu - for a temporary separation (LAT) supervised by her parents.

It has worked wonders for marriages in India.

Food for thought? While you're thinking about it, check this out.

HotMela? HotMall? HotMahal? HotNagar?

2006-10-13T14:51:00.000-07:00

Sabeer Bhatia is at it again. Generating hype, that is.
This time he's building a city, Silicon Valley to be precise, in India.
It's called Nano City and the idea is to create an environment that will foster innovation and create a Silicon Valley in India.

Well-informed readers would shrug and yawn - this has been tried umpteen times before without credible success. Paul Graham discusses the futility of it all in his essays "How to Be Silicon Valley" and Why Startups Condense in America.

But for India it's a win-win, regardless of whether Bhatia succeeds in his vision. At a minimum, India will end up with a modern development housing some universities, some companies, and rich residents with a lot of disposable income- creating a mini-economy of their own.

But Nano City? Am I the only one who is sick and tired of the Cyber-Xs and Nano-Ys? Why not give it a nice Indian name?

To get started, check out some of the more popular suffixes for city names in India. And Sabeer, if Nano City turns out to be yet another no-no-not-another-silicon-valley-wannabe, we'll be happy to share our wealth of nice Indian city names for your baby.

Traffic "Problem"? Travel to India!

2006-10-10T18:19:00.000-07:00

Here's why Americans need to travel more often - to countries like India.

To get some perspective.

Cooper Marcus of SparkParking.com thinks India's traffic anarchy is a positive thing. I bet he never set foot on the roads of India!

Yo dude, take a timeout. Come to India with me the next time I go there. I guarantee it will be one of the most educational and life-changing trips of your life.

The Environment - and Your Health

2006-10-10T10:40:00.000-07:00

My friend Marc Joseph gave up a lucrative career in business to launch Marc Joseph Nutrition based on his very personal experience with Mercury poisoning. As with anything he does, Marc, who has a Stanford MBA, aced his Master's program in Nutrition.

Check out his blog for excellent information on how your "environment" affects your health. Topics covered so far include:

Without Better Prevention & Treatment, Strokes May Cost $2.2 Trillion by 2050
Ground Zero, Toxic Air, & Heavy Metal Toxicity
Obesity in China
Families Troubled by Health Care Costs
Healthy Schools Program
Calorie Restriction and Alzheimer’s Disease
Adding Fat and Making Vegetables More Nutritious
Skin Cancer and The Tanning Industry
Iraq Veterans Exposed to Depleted Uranium
Microbes Helping to Cause Obesity?

Your Conscience (Part-2) and Test-Driven-Development

2006-09-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

... contd. from Part -1: Your Conscience is Your Compiler

Friend: Ok, got it. I used to think these are instincts.

Me: Well, you can hack it, i.e. ignore your conscience, but then you're corrupting your "code" and it affects your "program" behavior. And soon, you can't fix it anymore.

It's gone, unless you do major "refactoring".
Or a complete rewrite- which for humans is death and rebirth... and what does anyone know about death and beyond anyway?

In this life, you can only do refactoring, there's no rewrite.

Friend: Nice analogy. TDD!

Me: Well, TDD- Test-driven development is to ensure you are always following your conscience...But at the same time, allowing yourself the oppportunity to learn and the privilege to change your mind some day as you mature. TDD lets you easily incorporate lessons you learn as you grow and mature. It helps you change more easily than would be otherwise possible for you. It helps you easily figure out what went wrong- and how to fix it! And in fact, it would be so obvious and simple that even someone who doesn't know you much can help pinpoint it to you. I can go to a stranger and discuss some of these issues... and they'll say a thing or two that'll tell me immediately what I was thinking or doing wrong. It helps me change myself with objective criteria.

Friend: yeah

Me: TDD, my friend, is the best thing that happened to software since software was created...

Test-driven-development is turning the software "animal" into a software "human"!

TDD is the conscience of Software!

Your Conscience is Your Compiler!

2006-09-26T23:41:00.000-07:00

The following is the exact transcript of an IM chat about "Conscience" I had with a friend:

Friend: I follow my instincts.

Me: Animals follow instincts - humans follow their conscience. It's the only God I know. Your conscience always tells you what's right or wrong.

Friend: No murali, I disagree. How do you define what's right?

Me: Your conscience tells you- always. If you do something you believe is wrong, you'll feel guilty. If you don't believe it's wrong, you won't feel guilty

Friend: Yeah, but why do you do things?

Me: Because we are human.

Friend: No, it's because we want to survive.

Me: It takes a lot of character to always obey your conscience, a lot of strength.We survive either way. But if you and your conscience are on good terms, you have unshakeable self-belief.

Friend: Yeah

Me: And you'll care about little things like pride, self-respect, principles, character, reputation...because they are all the external manifestation of your internal conscience. I can tell who talks to their conscience and who does not. I may not agree with them, but I can respect them even if they hurt me.

Friend: Yeah, until now I used to think that all the humanly charcters are the manifestations of their internal instincts, which differ in intensity depending on the urge to survive.

Me: We do have instincts- but it's very different from a conscience. That's what makes us human- above animals.

Friend: So conscience is the feedback given to instincts?

Me: Yeah! I may want to have sex with every good looking woman in sight...that's instinct. My conscience says.. to do that, I need to make sure certain pre-requisites are met ...

- she has to agree
- I should not be in a relation with someone who I believe I will be cheating
- she should not be in a relation with someone who she believes she would be cheating
- it should be consistent with my prior beliefs until that moment my instinct told me to do something

Simply put, your conscience is your compiler.

If it doesn't compile, you can't do it.

... contd. Your Conscience is Your Compiler (and Test Driven Development)

Mood music- Dealing with Betrayal and Lost Love

2006-09-22T15:23:00.000-07:00

I'm in an odd mood these days, with a touch of melancholy.

There are two songs that just popped right into my head and won't go away.

Maybe putting them on the blog here will do the trick?

"Don't You Want Me" by Human League (lyrics) is about love, betrayal, and hurt when the wounds are fresh.

"Sometimes Love Just Aint' Enough" by Patty Smyth and Don Henley (lyrics) is about coming to terms with and accepting lost love and abandonment as you start to heal.

Startup Valuation: Meebo.com

2006-05-27T18:55:00.000-07:00

... continued from "Milk Money for Meebo.com"

I’d put the percentage equity that the VCs took for their $3.5 million at Meebo at a lot closer to 20% pre-money given how hot Meebo was (again, based on all the buzz about them on Sand Hill Road).

Still, let’s assume 25% pre-money.

That makes the pre-money valuation of the company 3.5 * 4 = $14M.

In other words, Sequoia put in $3.5 million and got 25% of Meebo, putting the company’s value at $14M pre-money.

After the investment, Meebo’s post-money valuation is $17.5M (i.e. 14 + 3.5, the value of the company + the cash). That means, Sequoia now owns 20% of Meebo, post-money. Like I said, that’s about the minimum any self-respecting VC firm in the Valley would like to hold in a startup after Series-A financing. And Sequoia is right up there with Kleiner-Perkins at the top of the VC hierarchy in the Valley.
---
Note that at the other extreme of 40% post-money, Meebo’s post-money valuation $8.75M. That puts the pre-money valuation at $5.25M for an absurdly high 66.7% ownership stake. We can readily discard this scenario.

Agile Entrepreneurs, Part 3 of 3: Agile Software Development

2006-05-27T18:51:00.000-07:00

The Agile entrepreneur has a choice all too common these days.

Implement it yourself. Or hire smart people for equity only- easier to do in the Silicon Valley than anywhere else (it's amazing what a single ad in Craigslist can do). Or pay young, super-smart programmers in India for a fraction of your monthly salary- you may not be able to afford it for a whole year, but we're talking about 3 weeks (i.e. iterations) here at a time.

Regardless of the approach, practically every software entrepreneur in the US now has the ability to incrementally implement the features defined by the customer(s) , one iteration at a time. And get valuable feedback. And sooner or later, you'll have a paying customer as long as you stay true to the principles of Agile- "The Customer Is Always Right At The Beginning Of Each Iteration" (apologies to Sam Walton and Kent Beck:).

Alternately, the customer(s) might realize soon enough and declare that the product doesn't have as much value for them as they initially thought - and led the entrepreneur to believe. That is, either they won't buy or the price is not worth the effort for the entrepreneur.

No big deal. The entrepreneurial itch has been scratched, definitively, affordably. He can move on to better things in life, like, umm ... another product?

Software entrepreneurs no longer have to choose either risking getting burnt in order to find out whether their idea has merit or living for the rest of their lives wondering what if.

For more tips for Agile Entrepreneurs, go to www.AgileEntrepreneurs.com

Success

2006-05-26T14:11:00.004-07:00

Ok, so you've all heard zillions of quotes on success- and how to achieve it.

Here's my take on it- that takes all extraneous factors and mind-games out of it, and puts the responsibility for success squarely on *your* shoulders:

You can Choose to have an Excellent Reason for Failure; or
You can Choose to Succeed

It all depends on how much you want to succeed!

Milk Money for Meebo.com

2006-02-05T13:55:00.000-08:00

Here’s something that I highly recommend y’all read:

“milk money…” - parts I, II, & III

It’s an amazingly detailed and honest account of the fund-raising process from someone who raised the money just over a month ago - in December 2005!

One thing that’s not mentioned in the story is the amount raised from Sequoia. I know it’s $3.5 million- straight from the horse’s mouth.

So let’s do the numbers.

$3.5M in Series ‘A’ means anywhere between 20% to 40 % stake was given away, based on how much leverage each party had.

Note that regardless of leverage, any experienced VC will typically want to own *not more than* 40% and *not less than* 20%, “post-money”. [VCs taking more than 40% drastically reduces the founders’ feeling of ownership and thus, their incentive to succeed. Taking less than 20% would mean the VCs will spend very little time or effort on this company- instead choosing to focus on the other companies in their portfolio where they have a greater “interest”.]

... continued in "Startup Valuation: Meebo.com"

Agile Entrepreneurs- Part 2 of 3

2006-01-31T15:30:00.000-08:00

Too often wannabe entrepreneurs fade out because they do not have the resources to put their ideas to the test. They may be able to talk to a customer or two, but there they often reach a dead end when the customer asks for a prototype or demo. It costs money - and takes time - to build one. And most aspiring entrepreneurs don't have a lot of money- at least not enough - at least that's what they think.

If you're an aspiring software entrepreneur, without an infinite capacity for risk, your prayers have just been answered.

Imagine this scenario. The entrepreneur uses an online (web-based) agile project management tool to define the requirements. He then meets with potential customers, gets their feedback and refines the requirements, and prioritizes the features.

Next the entrepreneur defines a short Release that contains the bare minimum functionality needed to "validate the business model". In plain English, this means that there's a customer out there who is willing to pay for it if delivered as promised.

This is where it gets interesting. The entrepreneur and the potential customer(s) decide on and define together - quite possibly directly into the online project management tool- the highest priority features to be implemented in the first three Iterations.

Continued in "Agile Entrepreneurs, Part 3 of 3, Agile Software Development

Agile Entrepreneurs- Part 1 of 3

2006-01-27T15:39:00.000-08:00

Mark my words, it is going to start happening within a year. I can see it in my Crystal Ball :) And remember, you read about it here first- Friday, Jan 27, 2006!

Agile methodology, XP, and Hosted Agile Project Management tools (like Rally) are poised to take software entpreneurship and offshore outsourcing to the next level.

India is finally going to shake off it's mentality of servitude and take major steps towards fostering Silicon Valley style innovation.

How? Agile/XP approach of rapid, iterative development with customer feedback at its core is screaming from rooftops with a megaphone for very very v... early stage startups and budding software entrepreneurs to notice it. It's a marriage made in heaven!

I can't think of a more natural fit of a solution to a problem. Agile development is for software entrepreneurs what lithium is for bipolar disorder (ok, so I guess the analogy proves that I can actually think of a more natural fit).

... contd. in Agile Entrepreneurs- Part 2 of 3

RallyDev- Hosted Agile Project Management & Collaboration Tool

2006-01-07T13:21:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: Feb 2010: I wrote the following in Jan 2006 before I had enough exposure to User Stories and before I got stuck in the quagmire that Rally - at least in that version - turned out to be. I stopped using it a month later. The problem was ironically the same problem Agile development evolved to solve- Rally itself was over-engineered, tried to do much and did the simple & important things not well enough-- if at all. To make matters worse, it was very slow and highly cumbersome to input info into- these were the early days of Web 2.0 and Rally seemed to be going overboard with use of AJAX. I've heard good things about Rally again lately but haven't validated it for myself. I'll do a separate blog post on this topic when I do.

I'm smitten by the Agile software development methodology. It's not as if I've heard about it only today, but now I have a tool that can (I believe) help me manage the CommuterStation product development in India more effectively.

The great thing about it is that it lets you- nay, it makes you - define your product's Features & Use-cases, Releases and Iterations, Resources and Tasks, so that they are all online, inter-dependent, and trackable and manageable. One of the cool things is about Rally is the integration with Eclipse and Fitnesse.

Check out the following for starters on Agile, if you want to get started.
Agile Manifesto
Agile Alliance

And of course, there's no substitute for simply Googling "Agile" or "Agile Project Management".