Red Lillee

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Fuck the Accolades. Seek the Criticism.

This post was written by Brendan Baker on Quora, worth a read for any creative person, anywhere..

This post is for the 5% of people who are driving. This is not for the calculators. This is not for the supporters. This is for people who do things.

Fuck the accolades. Seek the criticism.

Accolades don’t help you.

What helps you is qualified support and knowledgeable criticism.

I come from a world of social entrepreneurs. Some of them do amazing things. Right now I’m working with Kauffman Foundation Education Labs startups. Same thing.

Because of the potential for social impact, both groups get a lot of praise and accolades.

For example, in the past, I’ve worked in Senegal and Ethiopia to design low cost water pumps and build whole markets around them.

‘Oh wow!,‘ most people back home would say, ‘that’s amazing!’

That never really helped. But a few people knew what they were talking about.

‘Okay,’ they’d say, ‘Generally this is pretty good, but you’re going to fail, because you’re missing this key link in the supply chain.’

More helpful.

Or ‘Yes, you can get pumps to hundreds of people, but what about sanitation? That’s missing from your plans. Rethink it.’

Even better.

This happens with VCs too, incidentally. Most conversations with VCs seem to go well, because VCs are good at building relationships. But really, two productive things can come out of a meeting with a VC:

1) They help you directly. Money or connections.

2) They make you better. They criticize you where it counts. They poke holes. They make you defend. They make you justify. They make you question.

Most VC meetings don’t result in money. But hopefully they can make you better. This has real value.

I remember my first pitch to Silicon Valley VCs. They identified the core assumptions we hadn’t validated and politely tore us apart. We went home a crushed team. Through the night we rebuilt the weakest parts and emerged stronger. It was the most valuable meeting we had.

If you’re doing something big, people will compliment you. Most will give you accolades or be quietly supportive. But it’s those who simultaneously support and challenge you who can help.

The best teams know this. They embrace feedback and seek criticism. They find ways to change and improve.

And they know that when someone criticizes them, it’s an indication of respect. Only the people who really care risk helping us improve.

Fuck the accolades. Find the knowledgeable criticism.

B

Post on Quora

Beagle Board and Hawk Board Seminar

On 30th oct. (saturday), I attended a seminar on Beagle & Hawk Board at the CDAC centre in juhu Mumbai. It was a very interactive seminar, lots of stuff related to beagle & hawk boards, and how you can use them were told & discussed.

beagle board

here is a summary of what happened in this one day seminar:

Syed Khasim, who works at Texas Instruments and is known as one of the founders of beagle board started of the seminar with the overview of beagle board & the related families of processors on these boards.

He next mentioned the importance of choosing the right processors & boards for your projects as these make a difference in performances & costs. Texas Instruments as processors suitable for almost all applications from the basic (Sitara) to advanced which use audio, video & graphics capability namely the OMAP series of processors. So you can choose based on the your specific requirements & save costs & increase performance.

Capability of OMAP

Khasim demoed how to install Andriod on beagle & hawk boards. Some boards also come with android pre-built on the boards. For details you can visit rowboat project page. You can also install Ubuntu, Angstrom & Win CE on these boards. All follow basically the same steps with a few custom changes.

Demo of installing and working with apps on boards

After Khasim’s talk there was a session by Sunny Siji of Bizmobiletech who gave an overview of the OS on beagleboard and also talked about UI & Application development on the boards.

Chaitannya Mahatme of Pune’s open arm lab gave a presentation about building tool chains for ARM, such as linkers, loaders, compilers etc. and also gave a brief talk on the build environment for the linux & ARM.

A few people who already owned the boards had some problems which were solved & discussed at the end part of the seminar, and the interesting thing was the solutions were given by many in the audience. The seminar concluded with discussions on the things such as how to get this initiative of bringing the users & developers of beagle, hawk & panda boards together and how it can be made to do something substantial. All in all, I had a great time.

Note: I have not gone in detail about the various topics as it would be a very long post. I will write about these separately as & when i try these out, which hopefully will be very soon.

Resources:

Beagle Board mailing list/group: http://groups.google.com/group/beagleboard

If you are a interested in beagle, hawk, panda boards in Pune and want to know more, you can visit Open ARM Lab website which they have just launched and also join their mailing list, it is a good resource.

Open ARM Lab Pune, mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/openarmlab

If you can know any other resources please write them in the comments section below, it will help the readers & me as well.

Google Instant

Google is rolling out google instant in India.  When I opened google this morning there it was.. finally I could use google instant. here is a short demo with screenshots:

When you first open google

When you first open google you will not notice anything different. it is when you start typing in the word you want to search, that you start noticing something….for this demo i’m using the keyword ‘nikhil’…

When start typing the keyword

you will notice that results are displayed as soon as i have started typing, it gives the relevant results for the words present in the search box as you keep typing, as you can see i have typed only the letter n of ‘nikhil’, it shows the most searched items beginning with n, similarly it will show the most searched items when i have typed the letters ‘nik’ & ‘nikh’ of the word ‘nikhil’, as shown in the images below.

search displayed as you type in the search box

search result displayed as the you type in the box

Also notice as we type in the keyword google highlights in grey of the most searched word of containing the same letters. (not sure if this there earlier)

word highlighted in grey.

google has also provided an option to turn google instant on & off,  this is located right next to the search box as shown

You can turn google instant on & off as & when you want.

At first glance Google Instant looks good, the search results are displayed faster than before. Looking forward to using it more and if there is something else to write about I will update this post.

DO!

This is the first poem I have ever written,  so naturally as with all sane people (I do consider myself sane for some reason) i have my doubts whether its good, bad or ugly or even its worth calling a poem. But non the less I’m publishing it here cause if not here then where? so here goes

DO!

If you DO, you will GO places,

If you DO, you will Flow,

If you DO, you will have a Glow!

Cause.. if you Don’t, you Won’t,

So get off your butt & get to Work!

Please do send me your honest reactions, so I may improve or even stop writing poems if I’m that bad

Welcoming back myself to my blog!

I haven’t visited this blog for quite a while now let alone writing anything on it! So..I have decided to start writing again. Few of my regular readers (me & a close friend) will be happy today. Since I’m not a famous starlet, politician, someone in the media etc. or even someone who is a expert in anything my opinion will not matter much… so I will try not to express any. Nah, just kidding! anyways as I’m already an awesome writer, hope I find something as awesome to write about..so stay tuned.

Best Wimbledon Mens Final

Yesterday’s Wimbledon men’s final between Roger Federer & Andy Roddick was spectacular. After last years final which was pretty awesome too most thought that this year Federer would win fairly easily, but when the players got the court what followed was nearly five hours of pure awesomeness. It was really divine to see two people playing their hearts out with a single aim & focus on only one thing….winning the title.

The match had many exciting & spectacular moments:

one of them being the famous comeback by Federer in the second set tie breaker after being down three set points and coming back & winning it with his serve, in the entire match he had served up an incredible 50 aces.

It is quite interesting to note how both players were handling the pressure of the situation, while the pressure, anxiety, tension wasn’t showing  on either of their faces, you just knew it was there….while Roddick was looking up at the stand where his wife & coach were seated after the points, Federer seemed to be just talking to himself quietly and getting on with things as he usually does, I was reminded about a comment made by Fedex on TV, he said ‘you can only depend on yourself’ and i think it was evident from his body language that he believed that.

Even after the four & a half hours of tennis in the final set, with each of them trying to break anothers service, neither of them were ready to back down & never looked tired at any stage, finally after 30 games in the last set ,  Federer emerged as the champion.

The highlight of the match though I thought was Andy Roddick, not only because he played some great tennis but also because of the way he carried himself throughout the match, even after losing it, he was able to control his emotions and also applauded Fedex along with the rest of the spectators. Roddick although was always a good player, he was  looked upon as somebody who could be erratic at times and had inconsistency as an issue, but with this performance I feel he has shed that image and has really emerged as a a true champion & a great ambassador of the game, a serious contender of winning slams consistently, I personally hope to see more of Roddick in the Finals of the grand slams.

Finally I was also happy to see & hear my all time favorite Pete Sampras ( Pistol Pete), that really was icing on the cake for me, it was Sampras who ruled the roost what with seven wimbledon titles & fourteen grand slams.

So all in all it was a treat to watch a great sporting event with great sportsmanship and now hoping to see the same in the US Open

BlogCampPune2

This coming saturday everyone related to blogging will descend on SICR near Model Colony for the second edition of Blogcamp Pune,

What is BlogCamp anyways….simply put blogcamp is an event organised by the bloggers for the blogging community focused on sharing, learning new ideas on various issues concerned with blogging where anyone who is interested & willing to contribute are invited to join in. this will be an intense event with demos, dicussions and interaction between attendents, you will hear from experts and people who are already into blogging speak and you will also get your queries answered and get more than usefull tips and tricks along the way to improve your blogs in every aspect. But you should ‘participate’ in the event rather than just ‘attend’, to participate you can do simple things like encourage ur friends to come along through social networks, word of mouth etc… you can also choose to take photographs of the event or take videos etc.. if someone isn’t already doing that!! or you can give an talk on a topic of your choice (related to blogging) even if it is only for 10 mins or promote the event by writing a blog (just like this one ), Idea being to get you involved rather than just ‘attending’ which would be even more fun and you don’t have to pay anything to participate in this blogcamp.

So if you already have an blog or else are interested in starting one yourself you should be definately attending blogcamp pune this saturday, my gut feeling is this is going to be a rocking and an awesome learning experience!! See You There

Although the event is free for all I recommend you register yourself right now:
To register for the event click here
For more details about this event, visit this site

Search Engines

From the past couple of days I have come across some very interesting new search engines, Google is still the big daddy as far as search engine goes, google i guess has the most number of users in the world than any other company and has the largest conglomerate on the internet with google docs, blogspot, google video,  youtube etc… but almost all its services can’t be called No.1, now they are sure to feel the heat in its primary domain which is ‘Search’.

here are a few new ones:

1. www.bing.com : This is a newly lauched search engine by Microsoft, the other big daddy. They call this the ‘decision engine’.
2. www.kosmix.com :  This is one of the engines that i liked and thought would be usefull, it not only gives links to websites that includes relevant topics but also gives results in various sections, such as, At a Glance where you get a brief para on the relevant topic, Video, Images, Blogs and Q&A’s on the revelant topics are also shown in sections which can really be helpfull in trying to accurately find what you are looking for.
3. www.cuil.com : This one also gives relevant links & brief paras on whatever topic you are looking for.
4. http://pdf-search-engine.com: This one is in the niche of finding relevant pdf files for your search query.
5. www.wolframalpha.com: This one I found of little use until now, but is a niche search engine claiming to be a scientific search engine, but many of the results to my query were not found, but if you enter a mathematical query it gives you the result. It has the potential, but has to go a long way i feel.

To conclude i think many of these search engines at present fill a niche that google has left out and they certainly are a good alternative for google in some cases & will be good competition. Hopefully we will see some quality features in the coming future from these companies in a bid to woo the users.

10 Freedoms of Entrepreneurship

I have always thought the PoCC (Pune Open coffee Club) meet that happens once a month generally on saturday in Pune is of great help to the first generation entrepreneur like me on various levels like, for starters:

• it expands the knowledge of a person in different verticals of running a business by talks from experts in various functions of running a business like marketing, finance, technology etc….
• you are in the company of fine like minded people who are ever ready to help, guide, consult & advise you in any problems you may be having

In this article I will highlight the main points of PoCC held this past friday where a session was held with Manish Gupta, entrepreneur coach & consultant from Chrysalis, who coaches and consults many entreprenuers in India and big brands across the world, this talk was specially helpful to first time entrepreneurs and people thinking of making the plunge,

The talk started with the ‘Bare Minimum’ qualities that an entrepreneur or wanna-be entrepreneur should have, qualities that were highlighted were:

• Passion: Manish absolutely stressed that without Passion in his/her work there is no chance of any entrepreneur ever succeding & I totally agree with him, you have to be passionate about your work! passion comes when there is a burning desire to do the thing that you dearly love, so you should be doing what you love and you should have a burning desire in you to achieve your tasks
• Ability to Take Risks/No Fear of Failure: It is a cliched statement to say entrepreneurs should have the ablility to take risks, but it is very difficult to do, risks we are talking about are not only of money and material things, one thing which came out in the discussion was that some people don’t make the jump because of the fear of failure, this is due largely to the perception that if the venture fails what will people think about you, people will also label you and look at you as a failure, so basically you are risking you prestige and self esteem and social image. If you are like these, enterpreneurship is not for you, instead if anything, you should be able to turn this fear of failure into an advantage and use it to motivate yourself no matter what your father, mother, wife, family, friends say! you should have the mental toughness not to give up after all everyone faces fear at some point of time, important thing is you should have the ability to turn it around.
• Pride: Whatever you do you should have pride, you have pride in your team, your performance, pride in your self, whether you succeed or fail, so what! as long as you know you have tried your ultimate best, there is no need to feel guilty, you should be proud that you have done it.

Due to time constriants this discussion could not go further and Manish ended the evening by talking about ‘Ten Freedoms of Entrepreneurship’ for which conciously or unconciously people choose this path, but overtime forget it themsleves and burden themselves with unwanted issues,

Ten Freedoms Of Entrepreneurship:

1. Ideals: Freedom to continually become the person who exemplifies your deepest values & highest ideals
2. Free Time: Freedom of time, where you decide how to utilize your time to boost your effiency and productivity, freedom to plan, take, & enjoy increased amounts of meaningful & rejuvenating free time. Interestingly Manish mentions four types of Days: first is a Holiday, where you spend time with your family & friends or in social commitments, second is a Focus Day, When there is actually money generating activity,  third is a Buffer Day, which is used to prepare  for Focus Day & fourth day is a Free Day, which is a day for yourself, you can do whatever you like & relaxes you.
3. Energy: Freedom from energy draining activities, relationships, situations & obligations
4. Strategy: Freedom to think, plan, discuss & make progress in strategic exponential manner
5. Relationship: Freedom to attract & develop the most creative, supportive, profitable relationships
6. Money: Freedom to make increased amounts of money doing only activities that you excel & love
7. Attention: Freedom to give your best attention, energies, resources & ability on your most important commitments
8. Value: Freedom to create increased value for more & more individuals without the dangers of commodization
9. Success: Freedom from guilt about increased ambition, success, wealth in your life. like I said earlier take pride in whatever you are and whatever you do
10. Future: Freedom to imagine, to commit and actualize a continually bigger personal future.

If you are an entrepreneur or thinking of being one and live in Pune its a very good idea to join PoCC  http://punestartups.ning.com

mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/punestartups

Finally, I would request my readers to please give me feedback on my blog,  please don’t hesitate to drop comments and suggestions, your advice is very valuable to me.