And anyone who tells you they know fo sure where that line is...is full of shit. Great to see an entrepreneur admit and elaborate on this topic:

A year later, MakeMyTrip broke even, in 2003 he reluctantly decided to trust VCs again and in 2004– when Internet adoption in India had finally started to grow and much of the Indians who had the money to travel had credit cards, bank cards or access to money transfers—Kalra came back to his original vision of building the Expedia of India. “There’s a fine line between resilient and stubborn,” he says, sitting in his office in Gurgoan surrounded by globes, maps and maps with mashed-up pictures of many of those employees who stayed. “It worked out, so we can say we were resilient. But at the time I worried I was just being stubborn. But I figured you regret the things you don’t do in life, not the things you do.” When I met him the day before, Kalra easily rattled off details of a bowling supercenter that opened up down the road after his AMF days. You can tell it stings a bit, but if we were sitting here having the same conversation about an online travel company that took off after he gave up, it’d be devastating.

Full story

Stay foolish. Stay hungry. -Steve Jobs

Coach of the Year sounds all awesome and stuff, no? Until you read this:

That's right; all four coaches who were honored prior to last year's winner were fired not too long after winning the COY hardware. In order: Mike D'Antoni, Avery Johnson, Sam Mitchell, and now, Scott. In fact, of the 10 men who were COY winners from 1999 through 2008, just one — San Antonio's Gregg Popovich — is still employed by the club he won it with.

I think about this phenomenon often. The idea of hitting success. And soon after hitting a new low. Is it a lack of motivation? Is it giving into pressure? Is it slacking? I'm not sure what's the avg cause of this phenomenon. I just know it exists a lot more than people think. Next time you see someone getting recognized, envy him. But know that he is vulnerable to this post-success bug.

One of the most challenging problems when talking to a new person about your idea and your plans is bringing the person to the same page as you. When you are doing a start-up, you are coming from a perspective. There can be dozens of little calculations in your head through which you came to the perspective you did. Thing is, you've had weeks and months to work out those calculations. The end result of those calculations are the decisions you've made.

Why does it matter how you reached your decision? Why does it matter that you communicate how you reached your decision?

Go back to your high school math class. Remember the time you kept getting a different solution to a problem than what the teacher had on the board? So you go up to the teacher. And what does the teacher ask for? The work! Where is your work? Because your work can help pinpoint exactly where you went wrong.

The same applies to decisions at startups. You cannot be clueless about your decisions...even the good ones! You need some basis for why you made the decision you made. I believe most people have it. But it is not as easy to communicate it to others. Why?

Unlike high school math, it is greatly inefficient and unpractical to actually work out your decisions for your startups on paper. This brings us to a point where we can communicate decisions("I'm gonna start widgets to elementary school children") but the why is harder to communicate. This is because imagine having five bullet points answering why you want to sell to elementary school children. Each bullet can have five more points! For example, one of the points can be the fact that a certain respected journal thinks elementary school kids love widgets. But within that point, you've also taken into account the fact that that journal is better than its competitor; that its projections are usually right because you read a report a month ago; that the author of the report has lots of cred. Those are subpoints that you work out in your mind. But they are difficult and cumbersome to communicate. And yet, if you don't communicate, you will get feedback that assumes you made a knee-jerk decision not taking into account the pros and cons. You, of course, did take into account the pros and cons. In your head. Over weeks and months. 

May be I'm just talking about judgement. 

ps: one thing I do more and more is ask the question "where are you coming from?" a lot before offering feedback. 

I've blogged tonnes about one thing. The idea of me focusing like a paranoid madman on the one thing that might screw up my venture.

I realized a few days ago that at times I started to believe that after the current one thing is nailed, I can go home and enjoy my lunch.

That's complete crap. What actually happens is after the current one thing is nailed, you'll have another one thing. Then another. And then another.

Funny I had this realization a few days ago. And today I got called out on this by a professor who told me that he sensed in me this idea that fixing _____ will fix everything. I do have some of that in my system. It's hard to be obsessed about something and not think it will fix everything. Truth is, it doesn't. When you fix that one thing, the toilet will break. Once you've fixed that, your most important sales guy will leave. When you've found a good replacement for him, he might get the flu and your whole office might be out for a month. It never ends.

Until it does.

Manufacturing industries have forever competed on cost. The operations are designed to optimize efficiency and reduce waste in any kind of operation. Why? Not because it is fun. But because it matters! It matters because everybody else in the industry is doing it! And if you don't, your manufacturing and retail plant will be at a major disadvantage.

The internet for the most part was immune from the laws of supply-chain management. Yes, we have the likes of Amazon and Netflix that have incredibly advanced systems in place to optimize delivery and revenue. But media businesses such as YouTube have largely not had to compete at the level of optimizing revenue and reducing cost. They have mostly competed on building a better brand and getting marketshare.

This might be changing. We saw a little while ago the analyst who sensationalized how YouTube was losing tonnes of money due to bandwidth costs. The numbers were wildly off which I predicted back then(later confirmed by google; youtube's on path to be profitable). But the fact that the market was so number focused about something like the cost of bandwidth was a first of sorts.

Second data point comes today. CurrentTV is laying off a bunch of folks. They are in the business of video production. They are letting go 80 people, primarily media production folks. It doesn't surprise me! A neighboring competitor meanwhile is spending mere dollars to get video produced at scale:

Thousands of other filmmakers and writers around the country are operating with the same loose standards, racing to produce the 4,000 videos and articles that Demand Media publishes every day. The company’s ambitions are so enormous as to be almost surreal: to predict any question anyone might ask and generate an answer that will show up at the top of Google’s search results. 

It is hard to compete by having 80 people on your full-time payroll when others in your industry(such as Demand Media) have designed complicated systems to get media produced at scale and in a super cost-efficient way. 

Stay foolish. Stay hungry. -Steve Jobs

One of my favorite activities on campus is watching student do stuff...especially as it relates to buying/consuming stuff. If I'm buddies with them and I find them doing a transaction, I like to grill them:

- why are you buying this?

- why this brand?

- how'd you hear about this brand?

- do your friends have it?

- why are you buying from here?

Some real life anecdotes of me doing this...

• I ran into a friend over summer. She had a certain something in her hand. I quizzed her about that thing for a couple minutes. Today, that is the primary revenue stream for Blinkness.
• The girl next to me in my sales management class was browsing watches at Zales.com. Few days ago I'd thought of signing up as an affiliate there. I decided against it thinking it doesn't fit my target audience. I couldn't be more wrong going by what I saw my classmate do and the ensuing Q&A(the real value).
• Each morning as I hit campus I see people pickup a copy of the Daily Tar Heel. Each time it makes me think about the future of physical newspapers on campus. I don't think physical campus newspapers are going anywhere in the next 5 years. Kids pick them up to read it on their way to class.