Life in Balance: Amit Chaudhary’s Blog
• • • • •

Highlights from The Way I Work: Paul English, Co-founder Kayak

• Up everyday at 6:00, Email & then Yoga. Has a meditation room.

• We work really hard for 40 to 45 hours a week, but we believe in people having strong personal lives. Over the past six years, there have been maybe five times I’ve spoken with Steve before 8 a.m., after 5 p.m., or on the weekend.

• Always drives kid to school.

• We have offices in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California. We started with the first two because my co-founder, Steve Hafner, lives in Connecticut, I live in Boston, and neither one of us wanted to move.

• We have an open office environment. our general philosophy is that an open environment facilitates intellectual intensity. Most engineers are introverted. Here, when people overhear a discussion, we encourage them to walk over and say, “There’s another way to do that.”

• The engineers and I handle customer support. If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and fix the code. Then we don’t have those questions anymore.

• Real time datamining and support information. We have four monitors in the office where you can see real-time streaming information about the site — how many visitors, how many click throughs. It also displays the last customer e-mail that came in and the photo of the employee who answered it. So you’re walking by and you see, “Oh, Dan just answered a question.” We developed our own customer support software. One of the things it does is randomly select an employee response to a customer and send that response out to the entire company and to all of our investors each day. It keeps us on our toes.

• I keep noon to 2 p.m. open, because I like going out to lunch. It’s also a time for me to socialize. We have a very active work force.

• I do all of the firing. At times, I’ve fired maybe one out of every three people I’ve hired. That might make people think I’m bad at hiring, but I think I’m quite good at hiring. The only way 100 people can ever build a larger company than one that has more than 8,000 people — that’s what Expedia has — is by hiring Olympic-quality, unbelievable all stars of technology.

• Every Tuesday night, I have an open dinner at my house. Anywhere between four and 15 of my relatives will show up for dinner. I’m not a great cook, but it’s fun to have people over.

• I read for an hour every night before going to bed. I love reading books by Indian authors. I’ll also read books about global health and Africa, as well as a murder mystery now and then. But I don’t like business books. There are so many things in life that are more interesting than business.

Economist has an article on Evan Williams, Founder and Creator of Blogger, Odeo and Twitter: The accidental innovator

Some snippets with minor grammer changes for continuity:

Ideas:

First insight, that genuinely new ideas are, well, accidentally stumbled upon rather than sought out; second, that new ideas are by definition hard to explain to others, because words can express only what is already known;

Controlled Passion:

Mr Williams’s passion is solving new problems. In theory he could have done this at Google with his “20% time” on the side, but in practice he found it tedious to pitch ideas to the Google bureaucracy. Left and right brains clashed in other ways.

Radical Constraints:

One mental trick is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things.

Loves Frustration:

For the same reason, Mr Williams loves frustration. Blogger revealed itself when he was frustrated with something bigger: collaboration software.

Jeff Jones wrote in Feature/Function Innovation: Inventing Left-Hand Columns

Real innovation is what I refer to as “inventing left-hand columns.” What I mean by this is that once users hear what is now possible, they not only realize they must have it … they now consider it a requirement.

…

Buyers use this matrix to evaluate market offerings … thus the more unique features, you offer the more the X’s appear in your in your column … and this is a good thing.

New left-hand columns cause users to start asking everyone else for such capabilities.

In my experience and observation, it almost always is not a good strategy to focus on features. This is specially accurate for startups. Features in search of a product is a case often encountered in the Technology field.

When a startup or team focus on features, the customer anyways buys from their original vendor or the number one vendor,  all they do is request your features from them. And a claim of the feature as upcoming, even a year or two from now is enough to halt evaluating the startup’s products.

It has happened many times including Microsoft Active Directory with Administration Delegation (I was with Entevo then)

The key then is to solve an actual customer pain or provide a functionality never available before.

SiliconValley.com has an article on a bootstrapped startup, which shows the otherside of creating a startup, hardwork and a tough climb: Tech startup life still tough years after dot-com bubble burst

She and her boyfriend, Wan Hsi Yuan, 27, run the business, 8coupons.com, from their 500-square-foot studio apartment, meaning headquarters is, effectively, their couch. The business, which text messages discounts to users’ mobile phones, keeps Yuan and Ung, who is 28, up until 3 a.m. most nights. Then, Ung said, she sometimes finds herself lying awake, worrying.

“I need to watch a little National Geographic special on the rain forest or something before I go to sleep,” she said.

…

Welcome startup life in 2007.

…

“The Aeron chair is out, the Starbucks latte is in,” Shipley said.

…

“We don’t go out anymore,” Yuan said. “For the past two years, all we do is work.”

…

At home, they sleep in a queen bed and their workspace/living area is roughly the size of a king bed. They have Internet-only cable; their flat-screen TV shows their Web site, and Yuan works from the couch on an arrangement of pillows they call “his shrine,” typing braces on both wrists, a serving tray with a wireless keyboard on a pillow on his lap.

…

At the startup camp, a partner at a venture capital firm ran through a PowerPoint slideshow on what VCs are looking for: Companies doing things competitors can’t with technology that’s either patented or incredibly challenging to create.

As he went on, it was clear 8coupons lacked nearly every attribute he listed, but Ung and Yuan shrugged that off.

Ironically enough, it is people who work long hours specially need Ergonomic Furniture like Aeron or Soma Biocomfort chair to avoid long term pain.

I noticed a trend among Colleagues and Friends who have been or are doing Part-time aka Executive MBAs, after working as an engineer for a number of years. Atleast one I know, who left work for a fulltime MBA course which costs more, directly in fees ($100,000 is typical.) and in loss of income.
The whole path should take 3-5 years including the GMAT preparation and the courses typically cost U$50,000-80,000 in fees, plus maybe U$10,000 in expenses and lots of study and hardwork in the middle.
I tried a reverse path to see if some current CEO have reached through that path and I found one, interestingly, he runs a people search company.

Jaideep Singh is CEO of Spock, a People search website & company. From Linkedin Profile, I would get the following which kind of shows the path, my friends might go through.

• Engineer & Manager at WindRiver systems for around 8 years, from 1994 to 2002
• Did his MBA at Wharton (I would guess the program they have in San Francisco, see link below) from 2000-2002.
• Changed to Product Management and Business Development at WindRiver from 2002 to 2006 as well as consulted with Clearstone Venture Partners as Investment Professional
• Did a stint as EIR(Entrepreneur In Residence) for six months from late 2005, again at Clearstone Venture Partners
• Started Spock in 2006 as Co-Founder and CEO.

Definitely a pretty good career path so far. I would calculate, nine years from decision (say 1997 to 2006) to CEO.
If you are in the San Jose aka San Francisco Bay Area aka Silicon Valley, some Executive MBA options are

• Wharton in San Francisco
• Haas School, Berkeley
• Leavey School, Santa Clara

PS: Marc Andreessen, Founder of Netscape mentions Sales and Finance among skills to maximize your potential in his career guide.

If you never got around to starting a company earlier in your life like right out of college or withing a few years after that, I do believe you missed the best time to do it. But there are a few advantages on doing it later in life, say in yours 30s or 40s.

• You would ideally have enough saving to create it with you own funding. No need for the typical $5000 per founder put in by a startup school like Y Combinator or TechStars.

• You probably have expertise in the area you have been working. You can tell if and what channel is needed, what expertise is needed at different stages, how long and what kind of effort does it take to get a project done.

• You already have or can get the connections needed for mentoring and guidance. These are people who worked with you, who you meet at a conference or some friend mentioned they know him or her. If it is none of the earlier, you can just Cold Call or Email them, Nivi actually asked people to do it on his blog.

More reading on Age and Entrepreneurship:

Valleywag: Is 30 too old to start a company? Valleywag does a quick survey on the software and internet superhits:

The most spectacular successes are launched by founders still in their twenties. The peak age: 26.

Paul Graham: Why to not not to start a Startup

Talks about reasons and phases as to when to not start a startup and on starting on right out of College.

A VC: The Mid Life Entrepreneur Crisis:

Nine of our eleven entrepreneurs are in their 30s. One is in his 20s, and one is in his 50s.

My earlier blog entries on the topic:

Startup Thoughts 1: What to look for in a Startup co-founder

Startup Thoughts 2: Lessons from when I was exploring creating a startup