Skip to main content

Entrepreneurs are just entrepreneurs-Not Pirates or Jedis

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.

Popular posts from this blog

Integrating Arborjs with Angular to create a live calls dashboard

Arborjs  is a cool graph visualization library. Angular  is one of the best JavaScript frameworks and we have been using Angular in a lot of our front end development. When you handle millions of calls, proper visualization becomes very important. Without proper visualization, you can get lost in the mountains of data. So we spend a lot of time to come up with good visualizations to represent the data. Since we loved the cool way in which Arbor represented graph data, we could not wait to hook it up with Angular. Because of Angular's two way data binding, when you hook up Angularjs with Arbor.js you can get a dynamically updated visualization of graph data with cool animations. To give back to the community, we have put up the code online at Github . Basically we have created an Angularjs directive for Arborjs. Please feel free to fork the code and add extensions and use it for your own visualizations. The code is self explanatory with comments inline. Best way to ...

First Post

In this blog, I will be talking about my experiences in trying to build a cloud telephony platform , KooKoo . Along the way I will also be talking about different design choices I made, good programming practices and the IVR domain in general. For technoratti: NNFJW8EW86C3

KooKoo Contact Center integration with WhatsApp

WhatsApp announced the launch of their business API yesterday. This is a big deal. A lot of businesses have been asking for WhatsApp integration and now its a possibility. Twilio has already launched an integration . Won't be long before we see a lot more integrations pop up. The most obvious use case is for support chat bots, alerts and reminders. But we at Ozonetel believe one other use case will become the dominant use case, WhatsApp as a support channel with human agents. We believe WhatsApp will become a dominant channel in contact centers world wide. There are multiple reasons for this: WhatsApp is ubiquitous. Everyone has the app. WhatsApp interface is well known to all customers. It is feature rich. You can share audio, video, location etc in the app itself. You can integrate bots for repetitive tasks. Being the leaders in cloud contact center solutions, we at Ozonetel knew that we had to integrate with the WhatsApp channel as early as possible....