Purpose, Funding and Relevance when considering new projects or startups

Today I was reading this 10 questions to ask an interviewer to checkpoint my own hiring of candidates. Often I talk to candidates about purpose of my projects and how the project may be relevant for a candidate's experience. In some of the startup projects I had done within my BIG company, I had to think about the elevator steps to climb to ship the v1. In the context the funding in terms of number of heads and how the product ships to customers are important. However for a startup the funding is a more important area. I applied the same lens of purpose, funding, and relevance to the 10 questions from Mashable. And here is the list to consider. Mashable does a nice way of collecting the information from many folks in startup to provide more depth. Thanks Mashable!

Purpose

Get to know the why

What is one thing that must be done?

What is the problem you are trying to solve?

What are your founders' goals?

 

Funding

Get to know the feasibility

How funded are you? What is your runway?

When is your next financing round?

What is your exit strategy?

What is the sales strategy?

 

Relevance

Get to know the fit

How does your product apply to my role?

What is the focus for the next three months?

What is the culture and environment like?

What can I learn? What contribution can I make?

Engage the heart to inspire action

Yesterday I was chatting with a colleague of mine about our new project. We both quickly agreed on the why the project is important and what a difference we can make by delivering on this new project. We also immediately noted that there is some deep disbelief in the organization of 200+ people if we can and will deliver on this project. There are many factors that drive the disbelief: clarity, commitment, collaboration required, meaning, etc. We knew that there is a great opportunity next week to pitch the project to the team at large. And felt that it is important to use that opportunity very well to engage the team.

As we discussed further, we felt it is important to engage the hearts of the team members and not just mind. Often folks come looking for logical answers to satisfy the mind. That is just the first or the second layer. It is the heart that is the inner core that drives our emotional engagement that often drives unconscious behaviors. So it is important for leaders to strike a strong accord with the hearts of others to inspire action.

We both recalled watching Simon Sinek's Ted talk How Great Leaders Inspire Action. Simon says that inspired leaders communicate from the inside out sharing the 1) Why, 2) How, and 3) What, or what Simon calls the 'Golden Circle'. Simon takes a examples from individuals and organizations to illustrate his golden circle concept. For example, Apple used to say "we make computers" which is a 'what' statement. And their 'how' was "we make beautiful computers". However the core driver for this durable mission over many years has been the 'why' which is "Think Different. We challenge the status quo. We make different computers.". And indeed that 'why' has been a solid reason for Apple's transformation in the past 15+ years shifting from the erstwhile "Apple Computers" to "Apple Inc" producing blockbuster products on a repeat cadence. Simon's other examples include the story about Wright Brothers inventive success and Martin Luther King's long marches to more freedom.

It is fascinating to understand the context and how various individuals approach engagement. I strongly believe that we need passion, clarity in purpose, and persistent drive to create fantastic products. I also strongly believe that it is the same passion and purpose that can also engage people to collaborate and hence produce fantastic products. I had seen this work in my teams when I had repeatedly attempted to solidify the mission, create 6-8 word missions for my teams and continuously engage the hearts and minds of my team.

Coming to the story from yesterday. My colleague and I later ventured into our project leader's office and chatted with him more. We were delighted to know that he had conviction, belief and passion for our new problem. We were delighted that he wants to get us all engaged deeply. We shared our inputs about the people situation and indicated that we are glad to help in shaping the speech next week to engage the team at large. Next week will be a blast!

CloudBox can improve flight safety with cloud analytics

Over the past two weeks there has been intense search for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 (#MH370). Every plane is equipped with the black box that often yields clue about what happened inside the flight. Usually after an accident or crash, the experts retrieve this black box and look for clues on what may have gone wrong. Ever since I learnt about this black box stuff, I had been in awe. However with this recent MH370 loss and long search for it, I wonder why are we not using real-time cloud (service) analytics to keep track of planes in flight?

There are likely several challenges with uplinking flight data and doing timely analytics. Over the past decades the cloud services industry has developed amazing computing, data, and communication infrastructure that can be used to solve problems. Let us assume that each plan can be equipped with a cloud box that can capture and feed diagnostics data and appropriate pilot + officer conversation data from the planes in flight to cloud analytics services. Let us look at the data processing capacity required. For now I will ignore the costs for cloud box and associated services. In the end, any cost can be ascribed to increased safety, reduced insurance rates, and worst case become a premium for flight charges across the board.

According to various Internet posts (one example here), there are about 100,000 flights per day.

Assume each diagnostics + conversational sample collected is compressed to 1MB per uplink.

Assume that each sample is uploaded to at least 3 satellites to ensure redundancy at 30-second intervals.

(And perhaps we may need adaptive algorithms to detect change in course, which can trigger faster uplinks at one sample every second.)

At 30-second samples, there are 2880 to be accurate, resulting in about 10 GB of compressed data per day per plane.

For 100K flights, that is about a peta-byte of data coming in per day.

 

 

Provided we have good distribution of satellites and good processing capabilities, there will be sufficient computing and bandwidth to handle such traffic. The data is very suitable for parallel processing which can be done through a variety of mechanisms. It is achievable, cost and fitting economics aside. On the ground existing and new receiver stations can process such data to provide feeds to the control towers and authorities to take action.

 Perhaps the cloud box is already in action for non-civil purposes. If not, new installations will come up in the coming years. Technology can help us tame problems.

 In the future skies, we can expect air travel to be more safer.

Economics of Free Products, OneNote is free.

In the late 1990s, when the Internet exploded there were many free services and products offered (remember webvan offering free delivery for groceries?). It is 15 years in right now. We are back to the brave world of free. Everyday 1000s of folks offer free products or services online. Just today I learnt that Microsoft OneNote will be available for free. Last weekend I was able to get a source repository up and running on bitbucket.org. It is incredible to see so much value in software + services being offered up for free. How in the world are folks going to sustain this model?

Yesterday we had a quick conversation in our hallway about how the twitter phenom had reshaped customer engagement. We observed that some businesses use high end software to receive tweets about their brands and products, filter them, and respond to customer questions. Companies invest in this effort because there is a belief and strong correlation of such engagement leading to satisfied customers who become loyal advocates and who eventually consumer more of the consumer products. And it is likely that a small % of customers eventually end up paying some sizable amounts of money that keeps running the business of producing new value. It takes guts, cash cushion, and sustained efforts to ensure we win in this game.

Back to the OneNote offer, two interesting things are happening. 1) OneNote opens up APIs for others to build applications atop the software/system. This will create information attach to OneNote and enable more storage to be consumed. Harvesting the information to offer value to customers can drive positive customer engagement. Storage sale can help with revenue as well. 2) OneNote broadens the reach amongst all audiences on all platforms establishing a strong onramp for customers to learn about Office and Microsoft products. This is beneficial for Microsoft (to produce more value for users) and to users (they get more value).

Time will tell. For now, I will eagerly use OneNote :)

 

I loved OneNote; and now One Note is free!

Wow! OneNote is one of my favorite pieces of software. It is now free from Microsoft - see http://www.onenote.com for details. And better yet, there are a lot of apps featured as well at http://www.onenote.com/apps.

A minute of pause here: why do I like OneNote? Why would I want to share more information?

I like OneNote, because it is simple and easy to use. It has powerful search functionality. It connects well on the internet and enables shared notebook access. I can house my notebook on the internet and reconnect to it from any machine. BEST of all, I do not have to keep pressing 'save button' anytime. And of course it rarely crashes. OneNote to me is the best piece of software that tells me more about what a 21st century software can be.

Certainly OneNote is not a panacea for all problems I have :) There are many features I desire that it makes it easy for me
a) Scan documents - coming soon. I need to try the Office Lens with OneNote.
b) Write blogs - I have not find the magic connector for me to use OneNote and have a copy of the messages posted as blog to my favorite blog site
c) Auto-compressor - often I get OneNote notebooks from others that are big and long. I would like to see a compressor that do its magic to show me the relevant parts, to reduce the time it takes to wade thru all details
d) Separate note creation from note walk through. Again to consume other's post it is useful to separate what is the input detail from the output detail.
e) Heatmap of the content in OneNote, so I can manage out old notes. Often it is easy to accumulate turds and I do not go back and clean up old notes. Having a heat map can help me to weed thru the old stuff that is not relevant
f) An integrated change log that can show me changes to various Notebooks that I am connected with (one can turn this into a form of feed engine)
etc.

There are plenty of app opportunities atop OneNote. For now it is great that this is free that more users can enjoy. Nice!

Values to guide in Project Leadership

In the past two decades of professional employment in the software industry, I had learnt a lot from working on various projects (mostly software projects in teams). I  hold three values and continued to invest in these: Innovation, Collaboration, and Execution. Besides the project related values, I also hold high regard for some personal values: Integrity, Honesty, and Initiative. Finally, I like people values of: Trust, Respect, and Appreciation. Today I will discuss just the values related to projects.

Briefly the project values are:

•  Innovation - bringing new ideas to life - both on problem solving and process engineering to create product value. Innovation does not mean just a big bang effort like creating the next big electronic gadget or building the next big software development tool, though those are the things that I help with. Also there are numerous occasions where small innovations are very useful as well. 
•  Collaboration - working with people cross boundaries and cross-teams to solve problems. Bringing ideas to life is a big task. Attempting to doing it alone is not easy and sometimes can be just plain boring. Instead working with teams can be fun and rewarding experience. And for this collaboration to work, it is important to listen, communicate, clarify, and engage in joint sessions to solve problems.
•  Execution - is the art and science of completing the project on time and on budget. No idea has value unless it has been shaped and delivered for users to experience it. Execution includes rigorous focus on nuts and bolts details to ensure all parts of the project progress well. The 99% perspiration happens here: budget and tracking schedules, fixing bugs iterations, testing, etc.

Most times, I value the Innovation, Collaboration, and Execution on an even keel. On occasions, I modify the order in which I want to exercise these values depending on the type of project I am working on. Most times it is clarifying the teams I work with. Though some people may find it hard to adjust when we change the project and accordingly I update the values. In those occasions I resort to repeat education within the team about the rationale.

For instance, over the past year, I was doing a startup project to develop a novel set of ideas to market that had the potential to change our business moving forward. The effort required a lot of focus on shaping the new ideas and refining it deeply. For this project the order I used was: Innovation, Collaboration, and Execution. Accordingly, we spent the first part of project schedule prototyping and defining the architecture. I formed teams and updated the teams 4 months later once we learnt more. I also found parts that I can borrow and reuse from elsewhere - hence I applied the collaboration aspects to discuss and leverage others solutions. The team also produced parts that are to be used by others; we delivered collaboratively to others. About half way thru the project I started emphasizing the Execution aspects more. Accordingly I focused the team on reduced times to deploy and test our software, improve customer feedback, fix bugs and reach zero bug bounce, etc. Net-net, the values did not change, the order helped us focus the efforts.

Three years back, I was asked to develop Windows Phone Application Store. There were several app stores in the market by 2010. So novelty was not high, but getting the store services out was definitely very important. And there was strong possibility to create small innovations along the way. The order I used was: Execution, Collaboration, and Innovation. Focusing on execution to build up a high quality app store with rapid progress to get the store for windows phones was critical. Certainly there were many teams to work with to reuse technology from. The team adopted collaboration as next step. Finally we found new ways to do things and new features (ex: build on Windows Azure, optimize app package for faster load, Personalized search for apps, etc.) with our focus on innovation. Net-net, I led three versions of the app store development using the same value priorities and helped us get the app store up and running well.

I had learnt that having a few values that I repeatedly use helps me focus in my work and lead the teams. I appreciate the guidance I received from many leaders I worked with for guiding me to develop and refine my values.

Stock Returns 1928-2013

Today I got to review the historical data for financial returns for various commonly used indices: S&P 500, 3-month bills and 10-year T-bonds. Thanks to data/analysis from @AswathDamodaran, we can easily look at this situation. See data at http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/pc/datasets/histretSP.xls

$100 invested in 1928 in various instruments would have grown as show in the chart below. Everyone ones that the stocks suffered a big setback in 1929-1933 which almost reduced the total stock value to nearly 10% of the original amount. And it took almost till 1936 to get back to original place only to fall again to reach back value in 1944. Starting n 1955, the stocks had a great continuous run up … perhaps tracking the post-world war 2 generation.

Recent performances in S&P 500 are noteworthy and cyclic. The stocks raised to great peaks in 1999, 2008, and are still raising now in 2014. Each time the stocks seem to reach new heights defying expectations from many folks. Plainly looking at the graphs it seems that the cycle frequencies are increasing with the time spent in the downtime also decreasing. Is that an indication of continuous optimism or constant shifting in S&P 500 mix? I do not know. Nonetheless, it is fascinating to see that stock returns significantly outpaced the short and long term bond investing. It almost seems that we are encouraged to take risks! And let us do that with eyes wide open.

Again thanks to Aswath Damodaran for data. I am going to learn more from him in the coming days.

 

Is there an easy meaningful measure for quality of education?

Today I read a fascinating article from Education Next talking about Quality Counts and Chances for Success Indicators (CFSI). The article started out discussing the challenges in measuring success in education, especially being consistent across the United States. With increasing pressure and interest from various groups, no doubt, there is a lot of interest to have a nation wide comparison model. And the CFSI based rankings suggested in the article are reasonable ones.

I particularly like their measures that are not a single number (for example: % high school graduates). Instead they use a basket of 13 indicators ranging from parental income to steady workforce employment. Despite these indicators that bring in regular inputs to the index every year, I was left with this question about what can be meaningful and easy.

First we need to understand that definition of success varies highly. Tech industry is filled with numerous examples of college drop outs who went on to succeed significantly in business (Steve Jobs of Apple, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Jan Koum of WhatsApp). And I know of several top class graduates from top standing universities work hard at making others businesses succeed.

Second we know that there is a lot of diversity from city to city, school to school, let alone state to state. So any measure that uses state wide metrics is challenging to compare directly for ranking purposes. I am naïve to all sorts of interesting statistical methods. Perhaps there is a solution in statistics. Still I am not sure how one can control for regional difference in cost of living, earning levels, etc. As Malcolm Gladwell will explain in David & Goliath: Underdogs, misfits, and the art of battling the giants, there are a few examples where seemingly inadequate education still can produce wonderful people who succeed in life.

Perhaps we will never agree on a single measure. What may be universally true is that an indivudal who strives consistently will go on to succeed in his/her chosen endeavor. As Thomas Edition famously said "Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration".