17th September, 2017 — Chronicle 2
The week went by very quickly, highlights of this week included saying NO to a very good employment opportunity in Blockchain Tech- wanted to stick to taking a break and research more on the side hustle (One liner about side hustle — Help small manufacturers and Importers in India sell more #B2B commerce). Learned some new stuff with Android (I am slowly … getting better with Java), bought some Bitcoin when it touched $3100 and connected with a old friend. Here we go with the 7 bullets :
- Love thy customer- A lot of startup advice out there says- Fall in love with the problem, I think thats just the conjecture of the main point- learn to love the customers for whom you are solving the problem. You will be interfacing with these folks multiple times every day(at least initially). This is especially true for B2B startups and sometimes this can be big deal breaker, Imagine a company providing credit to Indian SMEs- These guys don’t use email , WhatsApp is the all in one app and are technologically challenged , speak in a certain tone which will not be acceptable in a corporate environment, take a long time to trust you etc etc , are you ready to put with this. Unless the answer is yes and you ready to play by their rules- at least initially don’t get into the business of solving their problems. TLDR takeaway — When starting a business start with the people not the problem, problem may evolve but people you serve will remain the same.
2. 2nd order consequences- Benedict Evans is one of the most influential tech writers today, he recently wrote a piece about how the secondary and tertiary effects of having self driving cars will also have a HUGE impact on the world. This is got me thinking how we often look at new disruptive tech like -VR, Quantum computers, Cryptocurrency from a very skewed vantage point- noticing just one great thing about them. We often miss the fallout of the “one great thing” and sometimes these fallouts are pretty damn huge. Reading the following link will clarify what I want to convey:
3. A.I Primer- AI, machine learning and deep learning have become the most hyped technologies in the last couple of years. For all those you want to get know what these technologies are capable of , the following primer by A16Z serves as a lucid intro to the above mentioned:
4. Dev Bullet of the week-Things all developers should know- The following github repo has the list of many nifty things which a lot of developers ignore and defer learning thanks to the Stackoverflow first approach in dev these days. These nifty things not only save dev time but also help developers get deliberate practice(get better at their craft). Find the repo here-
5. 1% Better (Power of compounding)- I feel compounding is one most badly understood concepts for people who have decent exposure to mathematical background- eg. most engineers. People almost always overestimate what they can achieve in 1 year and underestimate what can be achieved in 10 years (Compounding is the reason). The following post by James Clear highlights how we can gain tremendously by even when making very very slow progress every day.
6. Patterns in our head- I want to share an old 20 min talk by Paul Bucheit (Early google employee and the developer of gmail), Paul discusses about how small changes in life help us achieve big results- akin to steering the rudder on a great ship by a few inches, over period of time changes the course of the ship by hundreds of miles, watch it here -
7. Workout bullet of the week- Recently I have hit a plateau when it comes to Squatting in the gym. Will be trying out the following method to increase my squat this week -
