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Founders At Work

TheoLeave a comment

I finished reading Founders At Work by Jessica Livingston a few days ago. What a great read. For those who have ever thought of starting their own tech company or enjoy hearing about how great things come out of startups, this is a must read.

The book gives such deep insight into the inner workings of the minds behind of these companies. I’m inspired by what some of these people have built and in many cases, without any outside investment. It’s interesting to see that most of the founders had no idea what they were getting themselves into when they started. The startup mind set is so different from Corporate America’s. These founders had passion for technology and their products. It’s very refreshing to see how you can create a company without money being the main focus. Passion drives great companies.

I can’t really think of any job better than waking up in the morning and being able to say, “Today, I’m going to go build something that’s going to change the world.”

Founders At Work

Effective Meetings

TheoLeave a comment

After working for less than 2 years out of college, I’ve already been in more ineffective meetings than I care to count. So here’s a couple of guidelines I’ve come up with. Keep in mind, these meetings are focused around technical issues. Technical meetings are focused on coming up with a solution and are centered around the idea of Getting Things Done. I’m sure marketing meetings require a different set of guidelines since creativity requires a blank canvas.

  • Have an agenda — What is the purpose of the meeting? What does each individual want to get out of the meeting? Stick to this agenda. Don’t get side tracked. That’s what the end of meetings are for. If you didn’t walk out of a meeting with new knowledge or any actionable items, you failed.
  • Don’t go to listen — If you don’t have something to contribute, don’t waste your time going. This kills your productive for the day. You’re stuck in a meeting while you could have been building the Next Big Thing. Sure, sometimes it’s nice to stay in the loop about something but that’s what lunch, instant message, e-mail, the water cooler is for.
  • Don’t invite friends — Only the people who are critical to the meeting of being a success should attend. I used to want to be apart of every meeting everywhere and I felt left out if I wasn’t invited. But now, I feel lucky when I’ve left out.
  • Don’t have meetings to have meetings — Don’t schedule meetings just to have a meeting. There are certain things that can just be discussed by stopping by and saying “hey you got a sec?” A 20-slide PowerPoint isn’t required for everything in life, even if you were taught differently in college.
  • Have a DD – Having a designated driver is probably the most important thing. You need someone handle the check and balancing of meetings. Without a DD, there’s going to be that awkward pause some time during the meeting where no one knows what to talk about next. And then someone says “So, uhh…”

I made this list up while watching the Office so don’t listen to me. My inspiration comes from Michael Scott.

“That’s what she said.”

Effective Meetings

5 Things I Wish I Didn’t Learn in College

Theo, 1 Comment

Here’s a really good post on things we probably should have been taught in college.

I agree most of the items but would have placed them in different order.

I figured I’ll try to come up with a list of my own.

Here’s my list of 5 things I wish I didn’t learn in college.

  1. Useless knowledge
    How many courses did I have to take because it was simply required for graduation? As a computer science major, why do I have to take American History 101? Why am I wasting tuition money on a course that I have no interest in? I’m all for developing “well-rounded” individuals but why can’t university allow the individuals decide where they want to be well-rounded in? Just because I’m a computer science major doesn’t mean I have other interests. I had interests in psychology, film, and I’m sorry to say, math. Let me choose to take courses that interest me.
  2. Short-term regurgitation
    This is probably a by-product of the first thing I wish I didn’t learn. The fact that I had to take these mind-numbing classes that were of no interest to me, I quickly learned to memorize what I didn’t to and spit it out come test time. The fundamental problem with this is that it is blind-knowledge. I don’t know why, I just know who, what, when, how.
  3. Time Mismanagement
    I always found it funny when job interviews asked me, how do you manage your time at college? Or how do you organize your schedule if you know you have a lot of things coming up? To be honest, I didn’t learn how to management my time. I learned how to stay up late, being useless and watching Late Night with Conan O’Brien. I learned how to wait until the last minute and get things done in the nick of time. I didn’t have a day planner. I didn’t use Outlook Calendar. How many hours did I waste surfing Facebook, playing computer games, watching TV instead of getting to bed for that 8am class or studying for that test, or writing that 30 page paper. Sure I got through it, but I’m sure the quality of the work would have been so much better if I had utilized my time better.
  4. Working on a Team
    Yes, I know. This was on the other list. I put this here because my college experience with team work was generally crappy. College gave me the false impression that all group work would be like this: One or two people doing all the work, everyone else mooching off the work. There is no accountability. Professors turn a blind eye to it. The most professors can offer is “work it out among yourselves.” In college, there are your “haves” and your “have-nots”. The “haves” have the drive, determination, and interest in doing well in the courses and contributing to the team. The “have-nots” simple don’t have any interest in doing the work or contributing anything worthwhile. It turns out in the real world people take a vested interest in the work they are apart of. This isn’t true everywhere but at least you have some control over it. You can surround yourself with passionate people and, even for the dispassionate people, at least there is real accountability. Losing a job is much more of a severe consequence that a poor letter grade.
  5. Lecture Learning
    This is more of a criticism of how a lot of courses are taught. Usually there’s a single professor standing up in the front of a class with a PowerPoint presentation with about 70 slides of material. For the next hour and a half, the processor proceeds to talk through the slides. You walk out of that room feeling mind-numbing bored and sleepy. This is a terrible way to learn. It’s only one-way. There is no creativity. There’s no exploration of concepts. It’s just facts. It is because it is. There’s no room to ask “why?” or question the why. On a small scale it promotes conformism. Conform to think the same way as the previous class. New ideas are inspired by taking a step outside of conformism. With lecture-style learning, the only reason why I would pick up a book is to read about something I missed when the professor went over it in his/her slides. If the learning was more dialogue between the professor and the students, students have a vested interest in thinking about the concepts deeper than face value. They would pick up the book to not only learn more about the concepts but to come up with their own beliefs and thoughts that they can contribute to the dialogue.
5 Things I Wish I Didn’t Learn in College

Taking steps…

TheoLeave a comment

I just started my new job at kajeet, a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) targeted as “tweens“.

I’m really enjoying it. Minus the commute but it’s all good. It’s an exciting time for the company and I’m really glad I get to be a part of it.

One of my life goals was to join a startup so I already feel like I’m making process in doing what I want. And that’s important.

It took me awhile to figure out what I wanted to do after college. I had general ideas and thoughts as to things that I would like to do. But sitting down and really coming up with actionable things helped me figure out where I wanted to go from here. I went through a period where I felt like I was in a void, floating about, not really feeling all that accomplished. The best way I can describe it is that I felt uninspired. Don’t let yourself feel this way. It’s a sucky way to live life. If you don’t already know what you want to do or what inspires you, find it quick. If you are already trying, try harder. The faster you figure it out, the more you will enjoy life. Once you figure out what gets you, figure out how you can latched onto that and progress toward it. The earlier you begin taking skips towards the inspiration, passion, whatever you want to call it, the sooner you will find yourself happy. HAPPY. Not just content.

Taking steps…

First post in 2007

TheoLeave a comment

Yes, I know. I’m a little late on the wishing of Happy New Years. Nevertheless, Happy New Years everyone! I hope everyone had a fun/safe holidays and new years.

The family trip up to Canada was awesome. I got to see the cousins and catch up on good times. It’s really cool to see how all of our lives are coming together. People graduating university, getting jobs, taking those next steps in life. I finally really noticed I see how hard my parents (really just mom) work to keep in touch with relatives even though we live so far away from any family. We better keep that kind of communication going.

Christmas was blast. Two most memorable moments:

  1. My 10 year old cousin spazing out, screaming “OOOH SANTA, I LOVE YOU!! SANTA! SANTA!!” when Santa Claus comes through the front door.
  2. All the young adults busting out doing hardcore math while everyone else is opening up presents. (I’ll post the math problem later)

New years was cool. I went out to dinner with a friend and we hung out all night. This New Years definitely sneaked up on me. My mind was on so many different things I didn’t even realize it was New Years Eve until people started asking what I was going to do that day.

Oh, well..it’s just another day, right?

First post in 2007

Christmas time!

TheoLeave a comment

I’m glad it’s Christmas time again because that means I get some time off to go up to Canada to see family. Oh, and getting presents…that’s sweet, too. I must say, working in McLean at this time of year is not fun. The traffic is ridiculous with all the people trying to get in and out of Tysons Corner Mall. Tomorrow, I get to avoid most of it, but I’ll be fighting the crowd traffic inside the mall with my side-kick Sura.

Yeah, that’s right. I’m not done with the shopping of the presents. I think the past couple of years, I’m used up all of my good ideas for presents. In trying to figure out why I’m having so much trouble thinking/finding presents for the people I usually get presents for, I came to the following possible reasons:

  1. I am losing touch of knowing the people that matter to me, their wants and needs
  2. Industry isn’t being innovative enough to come up with the products worth getting anyone
  3. Everyone already has what they want/need.

I feel that in the past couple months, I’ve been in a sort of a funky state-of-mind, disassociated from family and friends. I don’t know if this was because of work or not but when I realized this, I didn’t like it. Which brings me to my New Years resolution is to renew past relationships and refresh current relationships. I don’t usually do New Years resolutions, but I figure now is a good time as any to set those things called ‘goals’ in my life.

Looking around the mall, I don’t see a lot of “Oh, My God I Gotta Have That!” things I want for myself or anyone else. Even with the explosive popularity of the iPod, I really just saw a CD player that could hold more songs than before. I guess it has to do with the way I listen to music. I always just play my music collection with Shuffle/Repeat on. I like not knowing what song is coming up next 🙂

I think today’s technology has got to a point where it allows us to do things we do everyday faster than yesterday. Moving forward, I’d be more interested in using technology to define a whole new way to do something. It’s not a matter of making something faster, it should more efficient. These two concepts are not one in the same. Building off of the iPod example, Apple didn’t define a new way to listen or organize music. We still use headphones/earplugs to listen and organizing music under genres and albums/tracks was not novel to iPod. ID3 allows us to easily describe our music and media players like WinAMP are able to organize it. Sure, I can do things faster on an iPod than I could on a CD player such as look for a specific song. In this case, technology introduced a fad. It doesn’t take away from the fact that the mp3 players like the iPod are great products. But other than the visually-appealing ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’, there isn’t a feature in the iPod that differentiates it from anything else we’ve had in the past 10 years.

What would turn the mp3 player into a “Oh, My God I Gotta Have That!” thing for me is the ability to add social learning to it. Let’s call this new product the ZweeVoo. As an owner of the spankin’ new ZweeVoo, I can say I want to chill out. The ZweeVoo will start playing music it thinks is ‘chill’ music and if I don’t like it, I skip it and the ZweeVoo knows that the song is probably not what I want to be listening to when I’m chill mood. Repeat this for when I’m feeling happy, sad, mad, frustrated, sleepy, indifferent, etc. The more I use my ZweeVoo the more it knows about it’s owner and the type of music to play when I tell it how I’m feeling at the time. I think this would be an awesome feature to have. Something like pandora.com for the portable music player focused around user state-of-mind or emotional state versus user preferences.

As for the last reason why I’m having trouble finding presents for people, I made that one up because I thought a list of only two reasons was lame and I needed a third. Everyone wants and needs at least something. Once they get it, there’s will always be a new thing to want. Probably a ZweeVoo.

Christmas time!