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.