Skip to main content

Entrepreneurs are just entrepreneurs-Not Pirates or Jedis

By C Chaitanya
This week I read a really nice article Yoda visits Rodinhood and it had very good advice to entrepreneurs. Other than the advice what stuck me was the way now-a-days bloggers were comparing entrepreneurs to a lot of things.
First it was Mike Arrington comparing entrepreneurs to pirates (http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/31/are-you-a-pirate/) and now Rodinhood comparing them to Jedis.

This got me thinking a little bit and I have to say I side with Mike on this if I have to choose one. Obviously I cannot choose both as that would mean Jedis are pirates(or pirates are jedis). Gasp!. :).

Actually, I have to say I generally don't agree that entrepreneurs are pirates, as entrepreneurs create value and pirates steal value. But just for fun lets look at the similarities.

Entrepreneurs and Pirates are in it for the money and adventure. They go looking for both. They are proactive. Jedis are in it to maintain the balance of the Force. They do not go looking for anything. Only when some imbalance is created, they act. So, they are reactive.

Entrepreneurs and Pirates take risks. Jedis in general avoid risks.

Lets illustrate this with an example:

"Its raining heavily. You see a lonely lady in her 20s, very beautiful and wearing a lot of gold, waiting for a bus as there are no taxis around. Suddenly a gang of ruffians come and start pestering the lady.What do you do?"

If you are a :

Pirate: You join the gang, take the gold and use the lady then cheat the gang and go away with all the gold.

Entrepreneur: You will start thinking. Why is the lady waiting alone. What market can I create. Maybe we should have a "Call a cab facility" in this city. Or, just like 108 is there for medical emergencies, maybe we should have 109 for these kinds of emergencies. etc etc. Whether you help the lady or not will depend on the kind of person you are and will not define you as an entrepreneur.

Jedi: Beat up the bad guys. Teach them a good lesson. Wait till the bus comes. Put the lady on the bus.And then go home.

Who we are is defined by the choices we make. Not the work we do. So, though its cool to be termed as a Jedi or Pirate, the fact of the matter is I am just an entrepreneur :), and thats enough.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Cloud Telephony-History and state of the art

By C Chaitanya
Well, its been 11 years since Twilio launched their voice API in November 2008. I would say that was a major turning point in the cloud telephony industry. Before that, for people to build telephony applications, you either had to depend on proprietary platforms like Avaya dialog designer or build on arcane technologies like VXML which again was supported at varying degrees by the incumbents. Enter Twilio with their voice API and the industry changed for the better. Since it's been almost 11 years now I thought now might be a good time to do a comprehensive review of the cloud telephony industry as a whole in general and in India in particular. The Beginning Twilio was undoubtedly the startup which ushered in the era of cloud telephony. They started in November 2008. At that time in India, we at Ozonetel had launched a hosted VXML platform. There were no takers. After all who coded in VXML :) So when Twilio launched and we saw them take off, we immediately realized tha...
Read more

Google business messages and chat agents-A match made in heaven

By C Chaitanya
Google has launched Google business messages without much fanfare. It's just a small button that pops up when someone searches for your business on Google. But from the conversation industry perspective this is HUGE .   Do you know that the small call button drives millions of calls i n a year for pizza joints and other retailers in the US. Businesses spend more than a trillion dollars supporting billions of customer service calls each year. Now imagine how many chat conversations the "Message" button can drive.  Think of how customers interact with business. 1. Search on Google. 2. Click on web site link. 3. Web site shows chat pop up and tries to force the user to chat.(Annoying. I know :)) 4. User clicks on chat and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. This flow can now be completely changed. The new flow can be: 1. Search on Google. 2. User clicks on Message and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. What if you could design a customer experience that helps...
Read more

Telugu ASR speech data collection

By C Chaitanya
Image Source: IIIT-H Developing an indigenous ASR for Indian languages has been a goal for us since a long time. In that regard we have been experimenting a lot, trying out various neural network architectures.  While doing these experiments we found that there was no good dataset for Indian languages. While discussing with IIIT professors we got to know that the government of India was also exploring options to generate a good dataset. We immediately offered our help and our platform for this endeavor. So, as a starting step we have come up with a few campaigns to encourage users to donate speech data. We wanted to make it fun, so our first few campaigns are along the lines of JAMs(Just a Minute speech topics) etc. A topic will be provided and you need to speak for a minute on that topic. We have started this campaign for college students to start with. Of course anyone can participate and contribute their data. The more the merrier :) We will adding a lot more innovative ways ut...
Read more