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Entrepreneurial Hubs around US

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 20:58:00 -0800

Ted Zoller shares his research on different entrepreneurial hubs around US and evaluates Social structures that fuel entrepreneurship in these regions (Research is 37min into the lecture).

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Message worth spreading: Don't text while driving

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:16:10 -0800

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Product Marketing & Product Management -- A panel discussion at Stanford GSB

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:18:00 -0800

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A Better Mouse Trap

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:25:00 -0700

If I make a better mouse trap, they would come.. This is a sure way to fail for any entrepreneur and it is funny how many times we see people get stuck in exactly the same mouse trap. Here is an excellent article by Robert M. Metcalfe, the founder of 3Com, on the importance of Sales in bringing innovation to life.

Zen and the Art of Selling On the same note, I am pleased to have passed first round of the MIT MBA Sales Competition, and will be representing Duke in Boston on November 5th, 2011.

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Optimize for the journey, not the destination

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 16:34:00 -0700

Excellent advice from Omar Hamoui:

- optimize for the journey, not the destination
It’s hard to understand this without going through it, but it’s extremely important not to optimize for or aggrandize an exit, or any particular goal represented by a single point in time. The thing is, whatever that goal is, it will be a temporary and fleeting moment, and it simply starts another journey."

Churnlabs Blog

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Russia -- The past and the present

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 22:35:00 -0700

Few interesting videos that I found while researching on Russia:

Engineering an Empire: Russia

Comannding Heights from PBS talks about evolution of communism and later the rise of oligarchs:

The World History of Organized Crime: Russia

Bill Browder, MBA '89, founder and CEO, talks about Hermitage Capital Management's investments in Russia and the fall out from the widespread corruption that still pervades Russia's economy.

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Are we there yet?

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 12:00:00 -0700

I am believer in the journey rather than the destination. Nevertheless, the happiness of accomplishement has its own charm. The MBA journey has been rock and roll so far, from Shanghai to London and from Dubai to New Delhi, and the next stop is going to be beautiful St. Petersburg, Russia. Past month has been full of interesting events -- Finishing term end deliverables, including the Strategy Report (Research In Motion), giving final exams on Strategy & Finance, ramping up internship work with Toniic--an Angel impact investing network--on Regional and Sector Analysis of Africa for Impact Investments and finally selecting the electives for term 6.

As I sit down this weekend to look at my todo-list today, I am afraid to say that it has failed to get any shorter. We already have a quiz due for CCL class, a warchest of readings from two core courses for the next term--Managerial Accounting and Operations, final edits of the Toniic report, a writeup for another business case competition that I have decided to participate in and finally, extra readings for the Entrepreneurship Workshop organized by P4E.

Unlike previous batch, our batch has shown much more interest in concentrations (the law of nature--each new generation gets more and more ambitious). As I mentioned above, we are required to pick our courses for the term (list attached). The list is impressive, and if I had enough time, I would have taken most of them, if not all. Given the limit of 4, it is a challenge to drop courses from my top picks. I always wanted to do Strategy Concentration, but the way the courses are laid out, I am afraid I would have to drop the concentration Idea.

So far my book bag includes Negotiations (A very highly rated class at Duke from Rosette Ashleigh), Entrepreneurial Strategy by Ashish Arora, Product Management by Andres Musalem and Corporate Restructuring by Vish Vishwanathan. My selection in a way is a good mix since it includes a course each from General Management, Strategy, Marketing and Finance. Given that I am a masochist, I also plan to audit two more courses, most likely Venture Capital/Private Equity and Entreprenuership and New Venture Management.

Photo courtesy Ed Yourdon, Flickr.

T6_CC_&_WE_2011_Elective_Pairings_6.9.11.pdf Download this file

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Salman Khan on Colbert

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 12:37:00 -0700

via feedproxy.google.com

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Shades of Earth

Tue, 31 May 2011 19:11:05 -0700

The Arctic Light from TSO Photography on Vimeo.

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Term 2 wrap-up

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 00:29:00 -0800

Finals week is here. With one final done, and one more to go, Term 2 is almost wrapping up, bringing me 33% closer to the MBA. I feel more settled with the class pace now, getting better at juggling between work, school and family. Although, I must say that my extra-curricular activities such as supporting local non-profits have suffered due to the extra work load. Nevertheless, there are other extra-curricular activities I have picked up at school. I am trying to bootstrap Social Entrepreneurship and Non-Profits club at the Cross-continent program and at the same time co-chair the Bootstrap Initiative, a functional branch of Entrepreneurship Club of CCMBA. Starting new fun activities with your peers at school has always been a good selling point for the top MBA programs and Fuqua is no different. The only caveat with Cross-continent MBA is that, it becomes more challenging to organize such events in the distance portion of the program. Well, who said running a multi-national would be an easy task anyways. Real world experience with real people around the world!

I thoroughly enjoyed the classes this term. Decision Models by Prof. Peter Regan and Managerial Economics by Prof. Leslie Marx were phenomenal. The 4 term long courses viz. Global Markets and Institutions and Culture, Civilization and Leadership made little progress, as the work load there is quite minimal as opposed to the two main ones. I like the way Fuqua MBA program is structured that all the classes are interlinked with each other and build on one another. For example, we heavily used the auction related material that we learned in Managerial Economics in the Global Markets and Institutions class, while the Decision Modeling concepts learned in Decision Models were applied to Managerial Economics case studies. I am too excited about the tools I have learned in this term and can’t wait to apply them back at work. Currently, I am exploring different units inside Nokia Siemens Networks where I could apply my new learned skills.

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Banking -- Is transformation imminent in the West?

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 00:45:02 -0700

Michael Geoghegan, HSBC Group's chief executive, presents his views on the emerging markets such as Asia, Middle East and Latin Americas in his talk at RSA. Half way through his talk, he also highlights the state of the affairs in the West with regards to the capital markets and suggests what role should the West play in the continuously changing eco-system. With the backdrop of slow growth and development in the West and in contrast, the east and the south charging forward with impressive GDP growth numbers, he argues that the West should take much more participative role in the world markets, rather than keeping itself on the sidelines and delineating itself from the growth prospects happening elsewhere.

The conversation ends up in a somewhat loaded question to the outgoing chief as to whether HSBC would move its HQ to Hong Kong, if the Unilateral Banking reforms were to enforce banks such as Barclays and HSBC to split up into small groups. Capital markets around the world in 34 minutes via RSA.org. Between the first term in Shanghai, China and our next term in London, the talk very much sums up the kind of issues that we are tackling in our Cross-continent program.

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Don Valentine, Sequoia Capital: "Target Big Markets"

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 04:18:52 -0700

Since founding Sequoia Capital in 1972, Don Valentine has financed many of the companies (Apple, Oracle, Electronic Arts, NVIDIA, Cisco, Google, YouTube, etc.) that have been Silicon Valley's biggest technology and business success stories. In this View From The Top talk given at Stanford Graduate School of Business, he describes some of the insights that allowed him to lead Sequoia through almost four decades of disruptive changes, creating several new industries along the way. Don mentions that all along the lifespan of Sequoia, their main Strategy has been to focus on the size of the market and magnitude of the problem that the entrepreneur is trying to solve. They look at the system view of the market, targeting multiple companies in the space that make up the ecosystem. The video is worth watching, as Don walks through the examples of Apple, Cisco, Sony, Xerox and Zappos giving great insights on starting new ventures. Notable Quotes / Advice:

Most important thing to learn is: how to ask a question. Constantly work on perfecting the questioning skills.

Learn the art of story telling. Can you write your business plan on the back of your business card?

As to failures, he admits that their failures have been more related to the failure of recognizing the market, and not the failure of technology that was at the core of the startup. As a VC, they do have lot of failures which they follow up with extensive postmortems studying what questions they failed to ask in the deliberation phase, and what answers they failed to understand. via YouTube - Don Valentine, Sequoia Capital: "Target Big Markets", via GigaOm.

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London countdown begins

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 20:17:00 -0700

While watching the Shanghai skyline fade away in the rear view mirror and tires still spitting smoke from the burnouts, the race to London-Term 2--has already begun. Program office was not shy of sending out material for next term before the official end of term1. It is a funny feeling. Yesterday, my wife came to me saying --"Honey, your schedule shows a break from 12 to 15th October". I couldn't stop myself from laughing, ironically. The definition of term break is used quite loosely in this case. Well, if you can finish the truck load of reading in less than a week, then yes you have 3 days break. Or else, you better start reading the material.

The picture shows the reading material that came in the mail last week, while we were still struggling with our finals for term1. Now that everything related to term1 is done with, the grades have started to show up. Managerial Effectiveness already has the grades out, which I think I pretty much nailed it. Not to mention, it was one of my favorite and most practical course in the first term. On the other hand, I am not too excited to hear about accounting even though final was not that bad for me as the mid-term. Let's see when Miss Katherine drops the bomb. With almost a week to the flight to Heathrow, I need to get geared up for the new Residency Blast.

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Server Migration

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 17:31:01 -0700

I just moved to a new hosting provider, hence you don't see the old posts. I do have backup of old wordpress blog, which I am still trying to figure out the best way to reload in the new database. With term 2 reading assignments stacking up, trying to break my head with database issues is just a waste of time at this moment. Hopefully, if I can catchup with my reading, I can spend some time on the recovery.

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