Archive for August, 2012

Interview with Rajeev Suri

Friday, August 31st, 2012

Here’s a short interview Rajeev Suri did at the NASSCOM Emerge venue in Gurgaon.

The apathy towards a good code

Wednesday, August 29th, 2012

There is a saying in Marwari, my native tongue which translated, “The kid who shouts a lot gets on daddy’s back and maybe a candy later.” Ditto applied to bad code.

If you have written buggy code or code which has been ad-hoc-ly written, it remains in the news all the time. Resources are allocated, people are applauded, attention propagated.

Compare this to a beautiful piece of software, thoughtfully planned, carefully architected, written with a maximum awareness to the future in mind. This disappears like a perfectly oiled gear-wheel which does not make noise. It’s agility in reducing the friction and keeping up with the torque of  larger than it was designed for engine goes un-noticed.

A good code is like a child who does not get daddy’s adequate attention because he is nice, mellow and “works” as expected.

Buffett or Jobs?

Sunday, August 26th, 2012

It took me more than 6-months each to read The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life few years ago, followed by Steve Jobs biography last year. Though, I reached the end of Steve Jobs’s bio, 50% of the book is still unread.

Then last week, I read two great articles, one in Wired magazine critiquing Steve Jobs’s ‘social-etiquettes-are-for-the-weak‘ style, titled, The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale? followed by Fortune magazine’s feature on See’s candies (the iPad version has audio/video of Buffett) which alluded to Warren Buffett’s ‘always-looking-for-a-situation-to-crack-a-joke‘ management style.

Here are two great leaders whose works are impregnated into the minds of the entrepreneurs and are tested during trying times, and then with opposing styles.

I personally get conflicted of which approach is better. Some of the thoughts I keep pondering:

  • Do you hire a missionary or mercenary?
  • Empathy with people or metric-driven connectedness?
  • Products over dead bodies?
  • Micro-management vs. trusting your team?
  • Honest with your opinion or diplomatic?
  • Arrogance vs humility when dealing with employees vs customers?

Over the years, I have learnt that no single approach wins, and more than that it’s a matter of personal style, your own temperament, etc. However, we always look for case-studies in testing times. We learn from others and their mistakes. The challenge is which one to adopt and how do I know a specific behaviour is suited for a personal style.

Time will tell, but the torrent of conflict continues and the quest for wisdom is hungrier than never before.

Off-topic: I seriously feel that Walter Isaacson should do a bio on Buffett.

Attempting to write more

Friday, August 24th, 2012

It has been close to 18 months, heads-down building stuff at BitzerMobile. Close to 100,000 miles travelled in that time frame. Starting to come out now from my hibernation. I was away from the startup fraternity for a long time, disappeared but tweeting occasionally. Writing code takes a toll, you can’t think of doing anything else and sometimes you are shit-scared that you won’t be able to do it. You start feeling “grown-up”. I’m close to that fence. This time I’m running with a last set of features and a last set of check-ins in the next few months, before I start doing things around deeper customer related engagements.

That the code would be taken away, the only literary medium I would have left is writing here and exposing ideas.