Author: SK

“A business exists to create customers” – Peter Drucker.

As a startup founder you need to work on a business plan only if it is absolutely necessary and helpful to get funding. Rather most investors would want to see traction. Unless you are a proven entrepreneur with multiple successful exits, the days of getting funding with just an idea is over long, long time back. Bootstrap your startup, get traction and then think about spending time to write a business plan when you are forced to do so. Until then, spend all your time getting customers to use your product.

Prominent VC Dave McClure has said recently that “Don’t write business plan, rather build a functional product that people are using” (here). If you don’t believe in his words, here is another proof from more than 40 years. Intel’s Moore jotted down first business plan so small you would think it is a tweet. Check out the image below.

Coffee and reading.

• Why Smart People Struggle with Strategy (HBR)
• Will Quantum Mechanics Swallow Relativity? (Nautilus)
• Department of Defense Head Ashton Carter Enlists Silicon Valley to Transform the Military (wired)
• The single biggest way shoppers are manipulated by retailers (BusinessInsider)
• What’s Worked in Computer Science. 1999 vs 2015 (Danluu)
  • Interesting read if you are computer systems nerd or just want to know what we were thinking in 1999 and how it panned out fifteen years later.
• Why Your Big Data Needs Good Algorithms (Datamation)
• When was the modern science invented (newhumanist)
• The Samoan Pipeline: How does a tiny island, 5,000 miles from the U.S. mainland, produce so many professional football players? (californiasunday)

• Will REI’s Closure on Thanksgiving and Black Friday Pay Dividends?  (nbcnews)
  • I don’t usually shop at REI but this year they earned my respect with this decision to close their shop on Black Friday and paying their customers to spend time with family. Applause. Finally a corporation realized retail workers also human beings that deserve to spend time with their families. Way to go REI.
• Dell-EMC Deal Facing Issues On Multiple Fronts (TechCrunch)
• Inside the Sony Hack (Slate)
  • What it was like to be a rank-and-file Sony employee as the unprecedented cyberattack tore the company apart.
• Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google created more than $440B value over 2015 (VisualCapitalist)
• The Asteroid Huntersb (PopularMechanics)
  • It’s highly unlikely that a gigantic space rock will crash through our atmosphere and destroy civilization as we know it. But it’s not impossible either. Which is why a small but growing community of scientists and astronomers are scrambling to spot and destroy dangerous asteroids long before they hit us
• Yahoo’s CEO is running out of time to turn things around (MercuryNews)
• One of the Largest Hacks Yet Exposes Data on Hundreds of Thousands of Kids (MotherBoard)

Morning coffee and readings:

• How The Golden State Warriors Are Breaking The NBA (Link)
  • Nate Silver: European sports tend to be more capitalist by nature, while their American counterparts tend to be more socialist.
  • Possible exception is Steph Curry!!!
• Thanksgiving Flight Patterns (NYT-Upshot)
• The Keys to Scaling Yourself as a Technology Leader (Firstround.com)
• Curt Monash’s blog about Xplain.io’s (a company I helped jumpstart and also served as VP of Product Management/marketing until we sold it to Cloudera) technology after it was released as “Cloudera Navigator Optimizer” (DBMS2).
• Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin Succeeds in Landing Spent Rocket Back on Earth (WSJ)
• A Car Dealers Won’t Sell: It’s Electric (NYT)
• Most of What You Learned in Econ 101 Is Wrong (Bloomberg)

Scrum is a rage these days with startups and big companies alike. Everyone wants to do “Scrum” or Agile development. They hire scrum purist and want to follow scrum guidelines to the core. Not a good way to start off, especially if you were following no methodology or traditional methodology such as waterfall. I’m not a scrum master by any stretch, but has seen many methodologies come in to prominence and fade once a newer methodology pops up.

If we understand that any project management methodology is just a guideline to develop, deliver and maintain a project successfully then we will realize the commonality and slight differences between them. We will at peace with any newer methodologies that are bound to arise. So what is so special about scrum. I say, not much. Basic premise behind scrum is “take a big problem, break it into smaller tasks that can be accomplished in two/three weeks, deliver/test and iterate”. Yes, it is that simple.

Checkout my presentation on this very subject:

• Google buys Diane Greene’s startup Bebop, makes her the head of its whole cloud business (VentureBeat)
• If you are interested in distribution computing/HPC this is a great read from Adaptive Computing.
  • Job Schedulers and Malleable/Evolving Jobs (Adaptive Computing)
• Uber Is Not the Future of Work. Gig-enabling apps are a distraction from the uncertainties that affect far more people: Will workers get paid enough and are their jobs safe? (The Atlantic)
• Microsoft to release Quantum Computing Simulator to the public, letting you explore the future on your laptop (Link)
• Snake venom may help save lives in the operating theatre (Economist)
• The email habits of Tim Cook, Bill Gates, and 11 other successful people (Business Insider)
• PETA, Ferguson, jihad, Doctor Who, rape, and kitten pics: the toxoplasma of online rage (new statesman)
  • A study of how anger on the internt is born, lives and regenerates.

• Netflix open sourced its internal cloud management platform “Spinnaker” that can manage Amazon, Google and Azure (Link)
• Startup board meetings that suck – by Fred Destin (Link)
• If you are Mac user this might be interesting to browse for few min to understand the features Apple is bringing to Keynote, Pages and Numbers. I use these programs from time to time, but invariably resort to MS Office 15 for anything I need to share with external parties. Worth reading though (Ars Technica)
• Coffee drinkers rejoice.
  • How coffee can help you live longer? (Time)

• Not that it has anything to do with Technology or business, but can’t help wonder the state of mind for the “Satis” mentioned in this article.
  • Sati choice for Maharaj Ranjit’s Ranis
• Lies, damned lies and running a business (Financial Times)
• Trying to understand Hadoop? Start from here: 16 resources to learn Hadoop (Link)