First Principle First: The Ancient Mental Strategy
Carnot Chronicle III
It’s time to learn, work and grow..
First principle thinking is the idea that everything you do is underpinned by a fundamental belief, or the first principles. Apart from blindly following directions or sticking to a process, a first principle thinker will constantly be asking about, “What’s best for the company?” and, “Couldn’t we do it this other way instead?” Words from the article published by Catherine Clifford.
The First principle First was coined more than 2,000 years ago by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, and carried on by the big market rulers and innovative startups like Carnot Technologies.
Carnot Technologies is an agri tech-based company, which empowers farmers to make the right decision based on data and statistics; who believes in finding more appropriate approaches by understanding the subject’s fundamental principles, “things better known and clearer to us”. The Principle sounds simple, but if we believe we are completely stuck, then we must find “a very sophisticated solution” to get ourselves unstuck. That right there is what is holding you back.”
In the same way, Carnot believes in the First Principle-First strategy. This principle works out differently in different situations or organizations. Come on!! Let’s see how Carnot achieves the milestone by using the same principles used by Elon Musk, but of course in a different way, or in a #Carnot_way_of_finding_solutions
According to Terence Irwin’s 1989 book “Aristotle’s First Principles, says, the most powerful way to think about the solution has 3 basic steps, which are-
- Identify assumptions
- Breakdown the Problems in smaller version
- Creating new solutions
We will understand all basic steps further in the blog; Firstly, let’s get our focus to what the turbulence faced by Carnot while their flight reaching to the new heights.
The Turbulence!!
At a time when Carnot was in its very early stages of Agri-telematics business, it was facing a problem named, “Trip data compression”.
It all started with the device being named. i.e. Simha Kit which needs to be installed on the tractors, and it has so many charismatic features, one of the best features, is showing the replay of the day. It can show the tractor’s day-to-day activity. For example, if a farmer worked with a tractor in a field for 16 hrs, then it will display the journey of 16 hrs of the tractor on the Simha app. It is useful for the farmer giving his tractor on rent and other farmers who are using the tractor.
Does it sound innovative? Or you can check out your day-to-day activities and plan the next day accordingly.
Understanding the actual problem & identifying assumptions.
Juhi Kulkarni, Engineering Manager, says; The feature of replay in Simha Kit is just like a movie show, sometimes it can have huge data like 1 GB or it can only be sorted in 20 MB data. If we talk about farmers/users they don’t have 4G or 5G network privileges. They browse the replay in almost 2G data. And we are very much aware that it’s not possible to display a 1GB file on a 2G network; the data needs to be compressed. There are many online websites available that compress the data to 30% only and there are many big companies who have their name in compressing the data but Carnot’s target audience is much different from all of these. As per the First Principle First, Carnot team had tried every assumption available out there in the market to find a basic solution to the big headache. But relying on some ancient principle which was discovered 2000 years ago is worth relying? What do you think? Let me take you around the big fact.
From Elon Musk to Netflix, a giant billion dollar company to a small startup, everybody has faith in an ancient mental strategy. For the World’s Richest Man, Elon Musk, first principles thinking means boiling things down to “the most fundamental truths” and then reasoning up from scratch. He installed this approach while working on cutting down the extra expenses for Tesla. And you know what, it worked for Tesla even!!
Breaking down the problems and creating new solutions!!
Carnot First working ethics is to think like First Principle First, so they grabbed their pens and started breaking down the problem in smaller versions on a piece of paper.
They created a list which says, How to effectively find a “a very sophisticated solution”, the points are-
- Starts with the possible outcomes
- Define and trying to explore a completely new path
- Create a new recipe from the fundamental truth of Carnot
- Look into the future and its basic needs.
- Ask the question “What’s the goal?”
Pushkar Limaye, the Co-founder and CTO, has a great experience in Mechanical engineering and Juhi Kulkarni, has her hands in electronic engineering. They both are mastered in their fields, but regarding the compression of data, they didn’t know the ABCs of trip data compression. As there were no solutions available in the market, they tried to find a new recipe from the fundamental truth and the basics of first principle first. After analyzing it, they came up with a thought of creating something of their own. They used to sit together and research for a long period of time and even took some courses from online platforms like YouTube. After a time they realized their basic need is to create an algorithm of their own. Pushkar says, he believes in focusing on the solution and starting everything from the beginning. They built the algorithm from scratch. And you know what, the results were astonishing!!
Let’s talk about the results.
After a hardcore efforts and spending a focused time on creating the new algorithms, a time came when the results were flying high in the sky.
Wohlah!!
The team of Juhi and Pushkar, finishes preparing the algorithms, and they can make a compression of 95%-96% within 2–3 weeks. It’s a huge number!! They first tried it on 100 users. It seems to be successful. And then it is applied to a large number of users. And till now, Carnot didn’t face a problem with compression.
No matter how big the problem is, if you are determined your way to the best possible solutions is open.
Pushkar Limaye, Co-Founder and CTO
Knowledge is not everything, if you are willing to learn or do the hardcore work, then you can achieve anything you want.
Juhi Kulkarni, Engineering Manager
