Great Coaches There are great leaders and there are great coaches. Bill Campbell (to the right in the picture above) is one of Silicon Valley’s most well known coaches, having mentored the Google founders Larry and Sergie, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Apple’s Steve Jobs. He was CEO of Intuit for half a decade before going to be the Chairman of the Board. I have not had the fortune to interact with…
Lean Startup and Platform Experiments I recently started working at Intuit, running market experiments as a part of the QuickBooks team. Here’s another post that’s a part of the ongoing lean startup series . Chicken and Egg Problems One of the challenges with building platform products or marketplaces is the classic ‘ghost town’ or ‘chicken and egg’ problem. It’s what happened to early Google Wave…
Over the last couple of years, I’ve blogged about my lean startup experiments (a popular post that made page one of HN). I’ve spoken at conferences about applying lean to building mobile apps . And, I was a mentor at Lean Startup Machine . Along the way, I’ve applied lean at my last startup across ideas incubated using an internal Y-Combinator incubation format. I’ve collaborated with other…
If you are considering trekking from McLeod Ganj up to [Triund], this travelogue should serve as a quick and dirty rough guide. TLDR? Read this first The trek from McLeod Ganj up to Triund (2875m/9432ft), base camp of Mt Dhauladhar is a popular trek in the Himalayas. Trekkers are rewarded with stunning views of snow capped mountains. If you are a rookie trekker, take a guide along for the 18 km…
A decade back, college kids used to get taught assembly, C/C++ and Java. Javascript has taken over as the assembly language of the web . And, the place of C/C++/Java in the educational institutions is now dominated by Python . I was honored to go from being a speaker at last year’s PyCon to being a part of the program committee for the 2014 PyCon which concluded in the last week of September. The…
Why People Buy Things You can spend a ton of time making your site easier for your customers to understand what you do . Or you can spend a ton of time understanding your customers. And then customers will buy things from you because you understand what they do . Why People Buy Things From You was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on June 06, 2014.
This is an amazing story worth sharing again, and again. In May 2009, an entrepreneur shared this on an online forum that he was active on. Wouldn’t it be cool if i just set a status for my iPhone, similar to how you can set a status on yahoo messenger or skype. So i spent a couple of months and developed a little tool - it can let you set a status like “On the flight to munich, send email instead…
Here’s a colorful look back at the PMO India site over the years, with archives from the Wayback Machine. Vajpayee PMO site in May 2000. Not terrible for a site from the `90s, but still all over the place. Note the prominent poll on match fixing! Vajpayee PMO site in June 2003. Polls on cricket continue. His poems are still prominently featured. Manmohan PMO site in Mar 2005. Just the profile…
Recently, Adam Penenberg made a great post about large companies and why the MVP matters to them. There’s several things that I strongly agree with, but one stands out in particular. Large companies are still largely stepped in a culture that’s risk averse. They have large teams dedicated to building out and fine tuning processes within the organization for strategic planning and execution. As…
So, my colleague and good friend Raj prodded me towards this post. He asked us to come up with a list few memorable blog posts that we’d all liked. What constitutes a blog post was left fairly open, and could include opinion pieces from all types of media. The List I spent all of 10 minutes pulling this together. (And then longer finding the right links online.) “Super Successful Companies” 1 by…
Contents The Lean Startup Movement Practicing Lean LSM Bangalore Mentors How LSM works Hackathons Validation Board What takeaways can you expect? Say Hello Slides UPDATE: This post has been updated to include my slides further down at the end. Lean Startup Machine is coming to Bangalore, India. LSM has held 150 workshops in 50 cities, across six continents, for over 25,000 aspiring entrepreneurs…
I’d blogged recently about how we’ve adopted a new approach to how we’re running meetings at Levitum. A simpler, clear schedule for our meetings If you’d like to know more about how why we’d scheduled our meetings this way, I’d encourage you to read the original post . Open Knowledge Sharing - The Knot We’ve begun to host the Knot on Thursday mornings at 9AM IST | 8:30PM PDT. One of the things…
Contents The Grease What makes an effective meeting Establish the purpose Invite less people Use the best tools Keep conversations effective How We Run Meetings Through The Week Our Schedule Monday - The Sunny Beginning Tuesday - The Compass Wednesday - The Caliper Thursday - The Knot Friday - The Truth At Levitum , we are currently experimenting with a clean, new approach to how we’re running…
Contents Audrey Hepburn’s Favorite Poem The Full Poem Gregory Peck reads Unending Love Audrey the Humanitarian Ma Belle Tagore wrote Audrey Hepburn's favorite poem Audrey Hepburn’s Favorite Poem As Google celebrates Audrey Hepburn’s 1 birthday with this lovely doodle 2 , it’s worth re-reading one of her favorite poems by Rabindranath Tagore 3 , Unending Love. It’s a lovely little piece where…
Contents Personas and Segmentation Open Discovery Probe Quantify Jumping Into Validation Closure Pitfalls & Tips Using Turk Disruption UPDATE Read the follow on post on Why Lean Startup Is Hard In Practice , that’s part of an ongoing series on this blog. In a recent post , I covered off learnings from an MVP we built out for charades online 1 . The post was quite popular, and made it to page one…
Contents Then and Now Why you should read this Ah, Food! Getting Started My exercise routine. Food Intake The Hockey Stick Effect Slowing Down A Typical Day Losing 10 Kilos When Things Went Wrong Happiness Then and Now About a decade back, when I lived in Menlo Park, California, I weighed 84 kg (185 pounds). That’s not as light as I’d ever been soon after my scrawny teenage years, but it’s as…
UPDATE Read the follow on post on lean startup customer development interview questions , that’s part of an ongoing series on this blog. Rovio tried 51 games before hitting upon Angry Birds . We tend to hear a lot more about the chart busting numbers of Angry Birds than the struggles of the previous 51 games. In my opinion, their success was the journey of the 52 experiments, and not just the…
Wonder what the most popular Amul Ads of 2013 were? Well, here’s a quick round up of the top 5. Record number of users of the Amul App in 2013 These stats were collated from users of the Amul Cartoon Ads Mobile App , which can be downloaded for iOS here . If you’d like to contribute towards building the Android app, give me a shout in the comments. Quiz Time! Guess what each ads is about in the…
I attended DroidSync , an event organized in Mumbai by my friend Prajyot Mainkar of Androcid for app developers and entrepreneurs. I presented a session in the Business Track about applying Lean Startup principles to Mobile App Development. Read on for a quick abstract, and my slides futher below. Your New App Idea is One in a Million You’ve got this great new idea, but your idea literally is one…
When I watch Roger Federer serve, his fluid brilliance is incredibly captivating. Balanced and relaxed start position. Check. Graceful rocking motion. Check. Rapid arm pronation. Check. Explosion at contact. Check. It’s poetry in motion. If you’d watch me serve a year back, my inconsistency was jarring. My toss would floats up to a different place every time, as if carried by a sudden gust of…