Working with offshore developers

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Over the last 2 months, working with small scale offshore vendors in Asia , I have come to realize that negotiating scope of the project is the most important skill one needs to have as a client.

Vendors in their zeal to win the bid almost always, underestimate the requirement and under bid on the project. They jump into development without completely understanding the requirements and eventually end up delivering sub-par product. Then starts the cycle of what is in-scope and what is not. Soon re-estimations and negotiation for higher amount follows.

In my experience as a client you spend about 40% time explaining the requirements to developers and 60% time in constant negotiations with everyone explaining, that the required functionality of the "one line description of the feature" really is not as simple as they thought. I know the obvious answer is to give a detailed feature description during initial quote request. Well it is easier said than done. For one, you do not know or have time to detail the feature functionality, and secondly, it is not advisable to share so much detail of a project during quote request phase with multiple vendors. And even if you do, the offshore vendors just deal with so many quote requests  a day, that they simply do not have time to go through detailed requirements.

I guess, it is just part of doing business with offshore vendors and one needs to be prepared to engage in long discussions related to scope of the project.

Done with Fall 2010 Semester

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I am finally done with my Fall semester. More than half of the semester(10 weeks), I was in India, taking the course part-time while working full time for Sourcebits. It was hard, but the experience and opportunity of working at Sourcebits(Sourcebits-rated as the #34 fastest growing start-up in the world) was well worth it. The link to live classes is terrible from India. I would not recommend anyone taking the courses remotely from India. The connection kept dropping every few minutes. I had to drop many courses I would have loved to take. 

The final course list included ESD.34 - System Architecture, ESD.933 - Innovation in Service economy, ESD-911 - Independent study on Enterprise Mobile Strategy, ESD.THG - Thesis on Business and Technology strategy for mobile platforms. I returned back to campus at the end of Oct to start making up for the classes and was able to successfully complete the semester with full grades.

I appreciate people who manage full-time job while doing the degree at MIT. It is hard and my experience in Fall semester has earned them new found respect. It needs too much dedication and focus to juggle both. MIT classes are not easy and truly to get something from each class, you need to at least spend 4 hrs per week per class. If given a choice full-time is recommended option not only from the perspective of convenience, but also the richer experience of MIT as a whole. There is just so much energy out here, that you simply cannot appreciate or take advantage from a distance.

EECS course on Mobile development - Spring 2011

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Many incoming students ask me about course selection. I thought I will share the link to a new course I came across on mobile development offered by computer science department. This course involves hands on development, so you will need to have some programming background.

Excerpt from the course url(http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.083/):

Two years ago, it was rare for non-professionals to implement mobile applications. Even a year ago, building a working app was a challenging semester-long project. Today, implementing a mobile app can be a straightforward exercise. The challenge is to have good ideas for what to build. This course deals with how to pick project ideas and rapidly bring them to fruition through the prototype phase, how to function as an effective rapid development team, and how to present your work in a compelling way. You'll also get a hands-on introduction to current MIT research and development around mobile computing.

Android first ... Really?

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Akshay kothari founder of Alphoson Labs(http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/28/2011-android-iphone-apps/) seems to imply that in 2011,  app developers will considering writing apps for Android first. There might be some truth to it, and it could probably happen, but I think the statement is incomplete. To really analyze this, we need to segment app developers and study each segment closely. Only then, we can truly say that a particular segment of app developers might prefer to develop for Android first in future. There are basically serious professional app developers whose lively hood depends on app making money. And then there are hobbyist app developers. The professional app developers are usually a firm of size from 2 – 200 developers are full time into building apps.

See the app market comparision of Apple vs Android app store. Over 70% apps in apple store are paid vs over 60% in Android market place are free. This trend can partially be explained by the fact that most Android developers come from the web/java world bringing with them the free software mindset. I am not against open source, but I think free software movement has gone a little overboard. Historically, advertisement has not made enough money to justify the loss in revenue firms have seen due to free software movement(I am referring to free software and not open software movement).

There is no doubt that it has been difficult to make money on Android market place and if you look at the below chart by the end of September, the number of paid apps fell further to 35% on Android market place.

This mind set of building free apps will continue to make it difficult  to make money on Android as consumers will not pay for it, if there is a good enough alternative available for free. This will make professional developers think twice before developing for Android first. Of course if they have an iPhone version of the  app, they will for sure port it to Android to increase the market  size.

On the other hand the hobbyist developers(who do not completely depend on making money from apps) will prefer to develop for Android first simply because of the market share of Android. There is a little doubt that Android will outsell iPhone in 2011 and it makes sense for hobbyist developers to build for Android first.

ESD.34 System Architecture

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I had long discussions with my colleagues on whether system architecture principles and learnings had any relevance in today's world  with hyper rate of changes in technological innovations, specially in the software industry. To some extent, I concur with my colleagues that the scrupulous methodology preached by system architecture is not very applicable in the world of software product development. Only principles like Minimal Viable Product, Scrum/XP product development methodology, and quick- to-market  seem to be more applicable for software product development. 

The rate of innovation in software field is so fast that by the time you start and complete ESD.34 class, the whole technology innovation cycle has passed you by. Most often, initial needs and product goals are no longer applicable by the time the product has gone through alpha, beta stages. This makes you wonder if everything we learnt in class was applicable to software field or not.

I am of the opinion, that irrespective of the speed at which innovation and product development is happening, fundamentals remain the same. Concepts and principles underlying the system architecture still apply, but speed and manner in which they are applied, changes. ESD.34, as stated by professor Crawley(

MIT Aero/Astro - Prof. Edward F. Crawley - 

http://web.mit.edu/aeroastro/www/people/crawley/bio.html) in the first class, aims to rewire your neurons, make you think differently and transform you into a better architect. To a large extent, ESD.34 course has been successful at doing that. Whether we explicitly go through all the steps of architecture during product development or not, we do in fact follow many principles unconsciously. They become part of your subconscious toolkit and make you a better product manager.

In conclusion, system architecture is an amazing course and everyone should definitely take it. My opinion has been constantly changing over the year since the time I started it in Jan. I just have a few feed backs for improving the course. One, number of assignments should be reduced and secondly, class could be made more interactive and discussion oriented. I believe it sometimes goes overboard with the lecturing style of teaching and number of slides, which end up making you dizzy.

Now that I am done with system architecture class, I feel I am almost at the end of the journey I started at MIT. Few more courses to go and then I am back to the industry.

Spring Courses

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Well Spring semester is about to start and as usual I am overwhelmed with course selection. Following are the courses from Sloan, I am pondering to take. Lets see how it all works out. Between my thesis, courses and job hunting, Spring is already promising to be an adventure.

Interesting Sloan courses

1. Technology Sales and Sales Management
2. Competitive Strategy 
3. Innovation Strategy 
4. Power and Negotiation 
5. Evolution Towards Web 3.0 and the Emergence of Management 3.0  

I might only end up taking 2 courses for credit(well thats all I am allowed to take) and 1 or 2 as listener(time permitting). 

Minimum Viable Product

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This principle didn't make it to my final list of system architecture principles I submitted for ESD.34 class. I thought I might as well post it here as I spent few minutes writing it. I am following Minimal Viable Product strategy for my first iPhone application I am about to deploy.


Tag Lines leading to the Principle:
“Minimum Viable Product or MVP is a strategy used for fast and quantitative market testing of a product or product feature”
“If Apple can launch a smartphone without Find or Cut-and-Paste, what can you cut out of your product requirements?” – Sramana Mitra

Descriptive Version of Principle:
Minimum Viable product has just those features which allows the product to be deployed. It aims at generating the maximum validated learning from every customer with least effort. Such products are often deployed to a subset of users who are early adopters, more forgiving and more likely to give feedback.

Discussion:
MVP is more of a market testing strategy to understand the needs of the consumers and demand of the product before making big monetary and time investments into the product. It is important to understand that MVP is started with a product vision which is maintained through the life cycle of the product, but the features adapt to the feedback of potential customers of the product.
Not adhering to the principles of MVP can lead to development of complex products which loose the primary vision of their existence. And hence do not have customers coming back to them.  According to Tristan, the co-founder of Start-up square a primary reason of shutting down of his website was not following the principles of MVP. As he points out  - “startupSQUARE is trying to be:

• A place to find co-founders and advisors for startups (a discovery engine)
• A place to brainstorm ideas (ideation)
• A place to find the best resources for your startup

Any one of these topics is enough for several websites. By trying to tackle them all at once, we bypassed our Minimum Viable Product by several orders of magnitude and in doing so, we didn’t focus on enough basic value to keep our users coming back.”

Prescriptive Version of Principle:
Maintain a vision for your product and understand what core problem it solves. Release the product early to a subset of customers and learn from the feedback they give. Keep the product sleek and do not deviate from its vision.

[1] http://venturehacks.com/articles/minimum-viable-product-examples
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product
[3] http://blog.startupsquare.com/tag/minimum-viable-product/

My First iPhone App

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I am almost ready to release my first iPhone app. Its a simple vocabulary builder for GRE and GMAT, I developed to test the waters. Hoping to not run into troubles with Apple's approval process. Will post the link here once it is live on app store. In the meantime, I am attaching the screenshots below.

Working with Designers

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Entrepreneurship is a journey and so is every aspect of it, right from the time you start thinking about the idea, to designing and finally to development and deployment. During my experience, one thing keeps coming back to me; there is no golden rule for success but nonetheless every experience teaches you new things.  In this blog of mine, I try to speak about the challenges I face as an engineer trying to manage the artistic side of product development, that is the UI design. 

Art is different from engineering and so are artists from engineers. I recently had experience working with a remote designer from Vietnam for one of my website designs. The more creative a person is, the more eccentric and whimsical he is.So far he has done a great job and I am looking forward to deploying an awesome website in few days.

During this process I learnt a few lessons which I would love to share. 

1) Design is a very creative process and trying to manage it using typical project management methodology/process is almost impossible. You need to be more patient in terms of deadlines and always be ready to cut them some slack. In an artistic process, you might not get the right thoughts instantaneously, but you have to let yourself the time to understand and visualize them. Putting unneeded stress on the designer will chip him away from these thoughts.

2)Designers are sensitive about feedback. It might be just one page for you, but it takes a lot of time to think and put forward a sensible design and color scheme. Be creative and prompt about your feedback. 

3)Every designer has his own unique way of looking into things. They tend to love their thoughts and colors more than anyone else's. 

4) Art is driven by passion. Its not the money but your appreciation which counts a ton. Always be prompt about the designs you like and put forth your thoughts. Don't be harsh in your words, because no design can be judged as good / bad. Every piece has its own beauty. 

Innovation Strategy

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I am planning to take 15.910 Innovation Strategy course in the coming semester and in an effort to justify myself on why I am taking it, I decided to write a blog.

Innovation @scale - How do you manage innovation process in a large company? Entrepreneurs like being nimble and do not truly understand the complexities of innovation as their firm grows. When you are 50, 100 or maybe even 200 employees, all you do is innovation(unless you are running an off-shore service company). But as you grow bigger, hands on approach of entrepreneur is simply not enough. What you really need is a true process to manage innovation at scale.

Well that's the focus of the Innovation Strategy course I am planning to take this Spring. I will continue writing about this course as I make progress. If any of you are planning to take this course please let me know.

Thesis

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Good summary of my thesis topic :)

Back to Cambridge

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After a long and adventurous 4 months at Sourcebits, it is finally time to go back to school. I feel sad leaving such a wonderful place on a 5 week break, but I guess it is time to finally focus on finishing my semester(hopefully successfully). I am starting on Oct 25th early morning from Bangalore and reaching Newark(NJ) on Oct 25th afternoon. I will reach Cambridge Oct 26th morning and I have few meetings lined up with my thesis advisor and professor Ross from CISR labs(cisr.mit.edu).

Sourcebits is truly the most innovative and happening place in the mobile domain. I can truly say that I learnt more at Sourcebits in last 4 months than I did in my entire 8 years at Verizon.

I am looking forward to taking the Advance Strategic Management class by professor Cusumano and also conducting research with CISR.

Random thoughts on Entrepreneurship

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I was having a lively discussion with my closest friend (A Yahoo Engineer and Cornell Alumni) about entrepreneurship and some of the points she raised seemed interesting. I thought I will blog about it, hoping at the very least it might be helpful to others. Not to say that I do not think about starting something of my own someday. But I guess for now Sourcebits and MIT are keeping me sufficiently busy.

Entrepreneurship is about the journey and not just the goal. You start a company, because you truly believe in your idea and you are passionate about it. Starting a business with the sole aim of making money very rarely gets you anywhere. If the idea and the product solves a pain point and is executed with sufficient engineering precision and has good user experience design, it will definitely make you large sums of money  and if not, it will at the very least give you a lifetime experience J.

Once an Entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur! They are excited by the project and desire to execute it.

You will never see a true entrepreneur asking questions like “Is my idea good enough to start my own company?”  If you see yourself asking that question, you are definitely not ready. No idea starts making money immediately. Trick lies in waiting till the right time for it to make some. If you do not believe in what you are starting, how will you wait for that moment?  

Entrepreneurs very rarely fit into the corporate world. Even if they go back to the corporate they will keep getting tempted to entrepreneurship.

You cannot plan everything before starting. As long as you have a good idea, and you have spent reasonable time in planning its execution, you should jump into it. If you try to plan for everything, you will never get started.

No matter how good the idea is, it will go through enormous change by the time it is executed. You need to be savvy enough to be not rigid about the changes.

Only feedback which matters is from your lead users/customers. Stop taking too much feedback. Everyone has opinions and not everyone is right or has the vision to understand your idea. What matters is do you truly believe in it and have spent enough time with the idea, that it is not a pipe dream.

I will add few a more thoughts later, need to catch some sleep now...Also need to catch up on Thesis.

Yoav's Space: Round-the-world airline tickets

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Yoav's Space: Round-the-world airline tickets

This blog is just a bookmark for myself. I hope I can do this someday :)

Thesis Outline

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I finally got my thesis outline approved. I am excited to start the research on thesis. 

I am researching on "Emerging Trends in Mobile Platform Strategies"

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.  History of Smartphones

a.  Evolution of mobile hardware

b.  Evolution of Mobile OS

2.  Current Smart Phones Eco-system

a.  OS Players

b.  Device Manufacturers

c.  Wireless carriers

d.  App stores

e.  Application developers

3.  Mobile platform strategies

4.  Battles of the Smartphones and OS War

5.  Recommendations & Future Research

Software Service Firm - Virtual Office

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I have been thinking and researching for quite sometime, whether a software service company can completely be run as a virtual office. I recently found an article (http://batchblue.com/bluepaper-virtualoffice.html) which has a case study of how a software product company is completely virtual. Some of the ideas presented in it, can very well be applied to service company as well.

The biggest challenge in a service company is engineering operations. Technology is the easy part, but the orchestration of everything working seamlessly is a mammoth undertaking. I think the culture of the company plays an important role. Again culture is a loaded term, so I will try to be more specific. Every software organization has to make a choice on whether it wants to run the company with engineering precision or run it as an innovation center. These choices are to a large extent mutually exclusive(debatable.. look at Japanese innovation model).

If you are running an organization with engineering precision, you are focussed on words like productivity, optimization. You track employee's work schedule, productive time. It is a cost play, where you are reducing your cost to increase your bottom line. This model is followed by a lot of service companies successfully in India. Product companies are more innovation focused and hence need to allow slack in the system to attract the free running rock stars.

Coming back to my original point, if a service company has a culture of engineering precision(probably the best option), then running it using virtual office might not be an efficient choice. The very concept of remote working introduces too much slack into the system which will overwhelm any service company with the culture of engineering precision.

I am still exploring various techniques and research material, specifically enterprise 2.0 literature to figure out if a service company can be run efficiently with a virtual office and I will continue to post  my research as I progress.

My summer at Sourcebits

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Sourcebits was founded by Rohit in 2006, as product company building Flex and iPhone applications. Luck = opportunity meets the preparedness, Sourcebits built a right product at the right time. Night Stand was such a phenomenal success, it opened world of opportunities for Rohit. Not to take away the credit from his vision or hard work, but the success of Sourcebits was just magical to say the least.

The company has reached 200+ developers and expanding fast. When I first decided to join Sourcebits over other offers I had, I was not very sure of its growth trajectory. It seemed like a big risk at the time, but I am glad I took the leap of faith and leaving an opportunity to work with India's fastest growing mobile company was difficult to walk away from. Leaving aside the great experiences I had in India, the Sourcebits opened up wonderful opportunities for me.

I started of as a VP - IT and with time role clarity resulted in me finally settling down as VP - Engineering. Sourcebits has Service, Product and Game division. I run the the delivery team for the Service Division. As is common with any startup which experiences an exponential growth, it is not always prepared to handle the complexities of scalability. Scaling an organization for expanded operations is a complex undertaking and I have seen very few entrepreneurs have had the vision. I would not claim Sourcebits was any different, but I do have to agree that they realized the issue earlier the most. Bringing in senior management, be it VP, CTO, Delivery Heads and creating a organizational structure was a first step in the right direction.

To attain scalability for any organization, specially the service organization, it has to invest in People, Systems, Process. Hiring the senior team took care of one aspect of People, but culture or DNA of an organization takes time.

Rohit has also given me a free hand in deploying IT systems to handle the scale problem. We are building some amazing systems using open source tools. The last aspect, process is a change management challenge. I think it is going in the right direction.

Overall, I would rate joining Sourcebits as one of the best decisions I took apart from deciding to go back to school for MIT. I think this company has great future, if it can successfully navigate the Chasm(from the book "Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers"). 

15.358 The Business of Software and Digital Platforms Spring 2010

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 The Business of Software course thought by professor Cusumano, was one of my favorite classes at MIT. The seminar styled class takes a deep dive on a separate topic each week. Each class has a lecture by professor Cusumano, followed by a student presentation on the topic, then sometimes a guest lecture from industry leaders and ending with a short lecture by co-professor Imran Sayeed. 

Overall, the course was very interesting as we explored various topics like SaaS, Cloud computing, Mobile Video, Mobile platforms, Social networks etc. Each topic was relevant to current times and as stated above was covered from multiple perspective. The class was very interactive. Only drawback was, we always ran out of time. I guess I cannot complain too much as these are very interesting topics and they are bound incite deep passion and hence the discussions. I think first few classes could be trimmed for future semesters as the discussion about products vs. services does not seem to add much value.

The course load involved 1 class presentation, 2 reaction papers and one final paper. Reaction papers are individual assignments and rest in a group of 2 - 4 students. Each submission is evaluated by Cusumano, Imran and the TA. You will find that not everyone will like your point of view in the reaction paper. Do not forget the 40% for the class participation as common with every Sloan course.

You are not allowed to sit in as a listener, so SDM students will have to burn one Sloan credit for taking the course. I think it is a very valuable course taught by one of the leading experts in the industry, so if you are interested in software, this is a must course.

Back to Blogging

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Its been a while, since I blogged. Have made a pact, that I will be more regular :). The new job and relocating to India kept me very busy. Having the best summer of my life so far. Apart from meeting amazing people to writing articles for magazines, life is good.

I do plan to continue writing reviews about my courses I took in Spring 2010. I do miss the MIT ambiance a lot, so hoping to be back some day. For now happy with my job.

I will also write more about my experiences in India and specially with my new job. Its an amazing gig and I do plan to stick around for some time.

Entrepreneurship Lab (E-Lab) course review

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E-Lab was the most fun course I took at MIT this semester. Working with a team from diverse cultural and educational backgrounds was the best part of the course for me. Each team member brought a unique perspective to the problem and collective debating and eventual consensus was a great learning experience.  After taking feedback from past students and exchanging few emails with Ken Morse(former Director of E-Center), I decided to take this course. So without further adieu let me get to the point.

Overall, I rate this course “A-“. This is just my personal experience, so please take it with a grain of salt.  The course was thought by Professor Alan MacCormack (http://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/detail.php?in_spseqno=sp0025344&co_list=F). Before coming to MIT, he was a professor at HBS for over 10 years. He has authored many case studies related to technology companies and has extensive background in Technology and Operations Management. He is very passionate about the course and is one of the nicest professors I worked with this semester. Many of the theoretical leanings from the course were directly applicable during the project. I would have liked more classes, specifically on startup finance and sales. Maybe one class on each of the entrepreneurship topics could have been very helpful.  Overall I will rate him “A” based on how he handled the course.

The project I picked was with a local Boston based startup (2006), which competed with Google Analytics and Omniture with their own web-analytics product.  Competing against Google should have raised warning bells :), but this was the only software product company which was picked by E-Lab team and I had to join one of the teams. There were over 20 projects and only 7 teams and hence the problem.  In the end it was not so bad, because it was interesting to work with founders who were so passionate and confident about their product and undeterred by Google’s dominance in the market. It was also interesting to watch their struggle to differentiate a product in a highly commoditized market. Some of the ideas our team gave were implemented immediately and it was an amazing experience. In my opinion, I don’t think it matters which project you pick, as long as you have a great team to work with.

The team you pick is super important. Unless you know them from other classes, it will be random based on their resumes and the project you pick, which are posted few days earlier. I highly recommend working with people you have not already worked with, else you miss the fun. My team included a PhD, a Visiting student, an MBA and myself. We had varied cultural and professional background which I believe was the best part of this course. You will find an equal distribution of MBA (Sloan), HBS and non-MBA students taking the course and that by itself provides a rich platform for learning. I was the only SDM student taking the course. 99 out of 100 times, you are likely to meet great team members and you will enjoy working with them. As the semester progresses, you will spend many long hours debating on everything, but best part of the learning at Sloan comes from discussions and I am glad I had a great team to both learn from and contribute to.

Food was provided in every class; a new cuisine every time, which was really fun. But the sad part was we had only 7 or 8 classes during the whole semester. TA was very helpful and overall you get enough guidance to make progress. You are required to do primary research in terms of interviews (Cold calling and surveys) and both qualitative and quantitative analysis. It took me a few weeks, to convince myself to go for cold calling. All in all it was fun.

To summarize (in random order)

• 1.       Selecting a good project is important, but overall it does not matter because you will get the same experience, no matter which project you choose.
• 2.       Select a team with diverse background to get maximum experience out of the course.
• 3.       Be prepared for cold calling and lot of quantitative analysis from surveys.
• 4.       Do not jump into interviews and surveys. Spend time understanding the product and do a market and competitive analysis.
• 5.       You will have 2, one hour team meetings with the professor during the semester.
• 6.       One lunch with the professor in a group of 4 to 6 students, which is a good experience
• 7.       You will help with the CEO reception. You help with inviting guests and carrying name tags to the CEO receptionJ. Good part is you get name tags as “HOST”, so it becomes easier to network with over 200 VCs and CEOs at the reception.
• 8.       You have 4 presentations overall. Last presentation is 90 minutes long with Alan and another E-center professor.
• 9.       Try to work with a team with atleast one HBS student, and one non-MBA to maximize your learning.
• 10.   Course is not as rigorous as it is led to believe. It is manageable if you are smart about time management and have good team dynamics.
• 11.   It is not important to be a lead in the team. Our team was lead by the youngest person in the group, who is a non-MBA and has no industry experience. This was his first management course, but he did an awesome job. It does not matter who is leading the team, just enjoy the experience.
• 12.   Big part of the class experience is networking with fellow students. I did a terrible job at this, and it took me some time to realize and correct it. In the end it does not matter which project you did, just the relationships you built and experience you had.
• 13.   Do a lot of quantitative analysis. Our team got a terrible feedback for not doing enough of it.
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Done with Spring Semester

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Finally successfully completed the spring semester! It was an amazing experience. I am still getting used to the idea of not thinking about the projects, assignments, papers etc. Last few weeks were so stressful that I can hardly recall how they went by.  Now that I have some time on my hand before I start my summer job, I will be blogging about various experiences I had, and few tips for future SDM students.

This semester I took

•          i.            Business Strategy and Role of IT
•        ii.            The Business of Software and Digital Platforms
•       iii.            Entrepreneurship Lab
•      iv.            Organizing for Innovative Product Development
•        v.            An independent Study for 6 credits.

I know too much softwareJ. I will blog about my experience with each course and few tips how to get maximum experience from them. I hope it might be useful to someone in future.

Overall I was happy with my course selection. The only regret was I could not get into one of the Harvard courses (Lottery) which I was looking forward to take for a long time.  I am going to try again in Fall or next spring, if I can get into it.

For Fall, I bid for G-Lab, Advanced Strategy Management and Technology Sales class @Sloan. I am so looking forward to the G-Lab class, specifically if I can get a project in India or Australia.

SDM on Twitter

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Samuel Chow, SDM'05 has started an MIT SDM Twitter List.  Thanks for taking the initiative Sam!. Follow it at http://twitter.com/#list/Cybersam/mitsdm.

I was contemplating about doing some kind of inbound marketing for SDM for couple of weeks, but never got around to it. Listening to some of the lectures of co-founders Brian and Dharmesh from Hubspot, I am convinced that SDM can greatly benefit if all the past and current students are more active on Social Media talking about the program. 

We should all blog about the program and integrate tweet into our blogs so that it is tweeted to our followers and friends on facebook, twitter etc… I am including links below on how to integrate twitter with blog and how to integrate twitter with facebook.

http://www.allblogtools.com/tricks-and-hacks/how-to-add-retweet-button-to-blogger-blogspot/

http://www.ajvaynerchuk.com/how-to-link-twitter-to-facebook-a-twitter-tutorial-3/

What a week!

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The week started with a phone call early Monday morning(early by MIT standards :)) from Sears HR who wanted to congratulate me for getting selected into their Technology leadership program internship. It was a pleasant news. Then I dragged myself to finally submit the business of software reaction paper 1 by the night. When I finally got to read the email sent by Sears, and found out the package, I was very excited with the offer. 

Tuesday, I had a meeting with Venture Capital for presenting my business idea. Although the meeting was disappointing, but it gave me a chance to meet the VC for the first time in my life. I submitted the Business Strategy assignment and also completed the E-Lab presentation PPT by the end of the day.

Wednesday started with the professor Cusumano basically telling our team, that the presentation we prepared for Friday was crap. While my team was scrambling to make the changes suggested, I was preparing for the E-Lab presentation. E-Lab presentation went decently well, with my team giving me a B+ for my presentation skills. It was my first presentation at MIT, so I was happy with that rating :). I was able to confidently answer all the questions. For some reason, I am not that confident on the stage, as I thought I was... maybe it was just MIT phobia :).

Thursday morning Business strategy class had Sear's CIO as the guest lecture. It was a very inspiring presentation. It was interesting to see how a company as bureaucratic as Sears is going through a transformation. I later had a 30 mins meeting with the CIO at 2:00 PM. I had mixed feelings about the meeting. It reminded me of the documentary of Winston Churchill and how he lost the election immediately after winning the world war II. 

Thursday evening professor Cusumano blasted our final version of the Friday's presentation. We slogged into the night, trying to make changes and finally at 11:00 PM our presentation was approved.

Friday...in  the Business of Software class; every one loved our presentation.The professor sent us an email praising  our work.

With that, my most hectic week at MIT finally ended... to celebrate my successful triumph during this week, I took a trip to Ithaca and drove for 12 hrs (6 hrs each way) and loved it.

My Poor Car in Boston Snow

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I finally moved to Boston on Jan 1st. It was a long 4 hours drive from NY, full of thoughts. I was excited about attending MIT(My Dream for 15 years) and about taking courses at HBS, but I was also little scared of not earning any more paychecks for next 16 months(It is going to be the first time since 2000)  :). 

This is my first visit to Boston during winter. I have been in New York for last 16 months, but the wind chills in Boston is a different challenge. I was stuck on Harvard Square subway station for a shuttle bus to Alewife (the section was closed for some reason) for about 30 mins in cold wind. It was the worst snow experience I had in a long time and I am glad I was dressed warm. As you can see above, my car was not so lucky :). 

My classes are starting from Monday, exited!!!...........More after the Monday classes...

Happy New year to everyone!